There is some sort of perverse pleasure in knowing that it’s basically impossible to send a piece of hate mail through the Internet without its being touched by a gay program. — Eric Allman, about Sendmail.

So, I was once asked, ok more than once, is there much of a gay presence in the world of geekdom? Well, there is not much of one, but there is one. Today, on IRC someone pasted a pretty funny quote made by Eric Allman, the author of Sendmail (an important Intenet mail routing program) about his gay identity. It is *hilarious.*

It reminded me of the queer theory (Judith Butler, 1997) I used in a small discussion of the nature of FOSS licensing, although I could not call the GPL queer ( queer in relation to copyright, that is) as I orginally wanted to; but after more thinking, the GPL is much more like a gay license because it attempt to normalize itself by integrating free speech discourse. This is what I wrote in my dissertation (due in 3 days) about it, minus any reference to queer or gay:

[..]
Even when developers don’t explicitly address normative IP law during discussion, the copyleft and related FOSS licensing inherently invokes and calls attention to its opposite, the law of copyright and IP law. Queer, linguistic, and anthropological theory has demonstrated that any naturalized proposition (like hetreosexuality) or social fact both presupposes and ultimately propagates what it excludes (Butler 1997; Derrida; Graeber 2001, 2004). David Graeber sees a creative potential in all social concepts and artifacts, a