14 DAY TRIAL // The discussions surrounding the adoption of systemd by Debian have been published, commented, and criticized for many months, and someone has made a Barbie parody using the book "Barbie I Can Be A Computer Engineer." Yes, that exists and it just happened.
Mattel, the company that makes the Barbie dolls, also publishes various books with Barbie as the main character, aimed at small kids.
One of those books is called "Barbie I Can Be A Computer Engineer" and it’s caused quite a stir after someone noticed that it wasn't exactly about a girl who wanted to be a computer engineer, but more about a girl who needed the help of boys to do things right and took credit for work that wasn’t hers.
Suffice to say that the blowback for this particular book and line of dolls has been pretty harsh. In any case, the original author of the article has also published excerpts from the book.
Now, someone took those images and used them to construct a short history of the systemd and Debian discussions that took place in the past few months.
Before instinctively getting upset at the systemd mention, please remember that this is a parody
The discussions inside the Debian project have been tense, people have left the Technical Committee, and it's still a disputed subject, but the main idea is that they have remained civil.
The same can't be said about the community, which has been brutal sometimes. Developers have been threatened and cursed at, so basically everything wrong with the human nature surfaced and showed everyone the ugly side of open source.
Now, Neil McGovern, a developer for the Debian project, has built a nice story about systemd and Debian with the images from "Barbie I Can Be A Computer Engineer" book by inserting some comments. Needless to say, it seems to go ridiculously well.
"Some people may have seen recently that the Barbie series has a rather sexist book out about Barbie the Computer Engineer. Fortunately, there’s a way to improve this by making your own version. Thus, I made a short version about Barbie the Debian Developer and init system packager. For those who don’t know me, this is satirical. Any resemblance to people is purely coincidental," writes Neil on his blog.
Now that Mattel has made a big deal out of it and pulled the book from stores, users have saved the images, which will forever live in the cloud. You can even create your own story with them. In any case, you should check Neil's blog for the entire storyboard.
