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Raleigh, NC
Ruth Suehle is the community leadership manager for Red Hat's Open Source and Standards team. She's co-author of Raspberry Pi Hacks (O'Reilly, December 2013) and a senior editor at GeekMom, a site for those who find their joy in both geekery and parenting. She's a maker at heart who is often behind a sewing machine creating costumes, rolling fondant for an excessively large cake, or looking for the next great DIY project.
Authored Comments
To answer your questions in order...
1: STEM education is important for obvious reasons to open source as in software. It's also important to the greater sense of open source as we discuss it on this site. Lego toys clearly are supportive of that aspect of education when it comes to things like the FLL and robotic lines like Mindstorms.
2: I linked to several responses from Lego, which have been changing depending on the day you call.
3: Many style guides, including Associated Press choose not to observe what some call "vanity" capitalization or punctuation, e.g., the all-caps LEGO or the exclamation point that Yahoo! uses.
Russ, you'll note I said that I didn't have a problem with the Friends line when it launched. I'm pretty sure my son would love a set. You'll also note that I briefly chronicled the history of building sets targeted to girls, so I'm aware that it's been done before. My problem is with how Lego treated girls with the /magazine/--removing them from the boy/regular magazine and giving them a separate one that targets them as pretty consumers, not builders.