Their “dominance” is the choice of the distributions. Gnome is opinionated, and I respect that they follow their vision. To me this is free software working as intended, people are free to fork Gnome if they want something that the devs don’t want. And apparently, many distributions think Gnome should be the default. Maybe it shouldn’t, but that’s up to the distros to decide.
Getting paid in money is one motivation for people, but not the only one. Some people do things because they want to, regardless of payment. And some of them want to give what they made as a gift to anyone. The flip side is that no one can force them to do anything, it’s all voluntary.
The author of JSLint wrote:
"So I added one more line to my license, was that, “the Software shall
be used for Good, not Evil.” And thought: I’ve done my job!
/…/
Also about once a year, I get a letter from a lawyer, every year a
different lawyer, at a company. I don’t want to embarrass the company by
saying their name, so I’ll just say their initials, “IBM,” saying that
they want to use something that I wrote, 'cause I put this on everything
I write now. They want to use something that I wrote and something that
they wrote and they’re pretty sure they weren’t gonna use it for evil,
but they couldn’t say for sure about their customers. So, could I give
them a special license for that?
So, of course!
So I wrote back—this happened literally two weeks ago—I said, “I give permission to IBM, its customers, partners, and minions, to use JSLint for evil.” "
I guess it becomes a matter of strategy. Maybe progressive women aren’t the ones who need to hear it the most, and they may feel offended at the suggestion that other women could be part of reinforcing the patriarchy. It mirrors the way men are asked to shut down other mens sexist remarks and actions. I’m sure such behavior is prevalent, but I never witness it. So the question to me is, how do we communicate this whole thing to women as a group? The ones willing to listen aren’t the ones who need to hear it, and the ones who need to hear it are probably not willing to listen.
Yes, that’s a good point. And maybe sort of the reason I’m interested in these topics, is trying to figure out how to influence the social circles around me.
I agree that those are sane approaches. I do think that there can be immediate unintended consequences. If someone didn’t pay for a meal, there’s propably less chance of a second date. Etc.
I imagine women went through similar consequences while entering traditionally masculine jobs and behavior.
What I’m getting at is that I think that we often think that this pressure is all in our minds, and to some extent that’s true, but there are many stories of men opening up and being vulnerable and then their partners lose attraction. That’s a hard sell to young men. “Yes, you will be alone forever, but it’s necessary because in a couple of generations from now things might be better.”
By refusing to take part in the hierarchy of dominance you will eventually be subject to a more general and, frankly, human set of standards.
You mention some examples, like defending your partner from a mugger, calling out your boss when treated unfairly, paying for meals, etc.
Let’s say a man stopped doing those things, what do you think the immediate and short term consequences would be?
plain TeX is a joy to use, but you must really understand boxes and glue etc on a deep level. LaTeX makes that easier, but at the cost of extreme complexity internally (compare the output routines for example.)