Political correctness aside, names like 'pantyshot' and 'upskirt' do pose a practical problem: search results about these terms have the risk of being NSFW, and might be even blocked by your company's firewall.
The main reason I don't like the name upskirt is that it led to me wasting precious brain-seconds trying to work out in what sense it was a pun on 'Markdown,' after the fashion of 'Discount,' and so on.
Obviously it turns out that it isn't a pun at all. I had assumed that the pun would excuse the sexist connotations of upskirt, that it would be an amusing bait-and-switch manoeuvre, that the author wanted to be able to say, "Hey, you thought I was being misogynistic, but in fact the error was yours when you failed to recognise my magnificently subtle wordplay, you philistine! Sexist? Me? How dare you leap to such conclusions!"
In fact all they wanted to do was evoke images of sexual assault. How disappointing.
EDIT: An interesting thought: would upskirt be an acceptable name for a portscanner/banner-scraper? I think perhaps it would, but it would open the doors to a whole area of extremely distasteful names for pentesting tools in general.
If you want to have your packages used in a buttoned-up corporate environment, you had better use more professional names.
If you want your community to be acceptable for such an environment (ie, you want to see that awesome technology stack in the company rather than the latest blandware), you should put pressure on your community to be at least marginally acceptable.
I don't disagree with the conclusions reached by the article nor the Cheesebox board. I disagree with their arguments though.
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Misogynistic isn't defined as "sexuality at a woman's expense". It isn't defined as anything that makes one feel discomforted.
It is hatred and dislike onto women. Even if something is inappropriate or childish or disgusting or any number of epithets that you can tack onto it, it is not automatically misogynistic simply because it relates to women.
Using heighten terminology out of place cheapens the terminology and makes it lose the caustic impact that rightly should have.
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Secondly, inappropriate sexuality is not juvenile. Inappropriate sexuality is often illegal, and I wouldn't characterize that as being something expected from children.
I suspect people want to call it juvenile in order to have a way to publicly shame those who practice it.
In their (and perhaps your too) zeal to censure others, you've created an odd situation wherein:
1. The situation is called misogynist---aka evil.
2. The situation is called childish.
So misogynistic is childish now? Or is it the reverse: are children misogynistic then grow out of it?
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See this is why I don't agree with the arguments as used. They're the arguments of a firebrand or a demagogue---not a logician.
In a P and Q situation, the appopriate thing to do is what I did: ask for precision. Does P imply Q? Does Q imply P? What is the relationship between the two.
This is especially relevant when P and Q have diverging connotations. Usually one would expect not to say something is both misogynistic and childish. The meanings are not completely orthogonal.
It seemed like the author was just trying to please people while being apathetic to the whole thing. This isn't an issue of censorship, people who want the library and all references of it online to be removed are trying to censor the author. If you own a repo and choose not to host someone's project because of an offensive name, that's fair. It's not stopping the project from being hosted elsewhere. Plenty of programming forums will ask a user to change his name if it's reported as offensive, it's the same thing. It's not stopping him form still participating in the community nor is it censorship because if he chooses to post the same thing under the same name somewhere else he's welcome to.
If they want to continue hosting the project under the original name, fine, if they want to ask him to change the name, fine, but hiding behind "free speech" is ridiculous.
That reminds me: I'm not sure if it's still the case, but I recall that the image decoding library written for Mozilla was called "libpr0n". Pretty high profile, and I imagine many people might consider it inappropriate.
This is discussion is interesting. Are there any women that care to comment? It seems that, as of now, the commentary is coming from men deciding how women should feel.
If I were to come across this library as something that I wanted to use, it would probably merit a sigh or a shake of my head. I'd also be more likely to dismiss the whole library as a joke since the name seemed to be a (not very wise) joke, and I would look for something of better quality.
I wouldn't hold it against the host of the library, though, unless they were actively promoting it or something. There will always be bad apples in every community. As long as they're on the fringe I don't think the community as a whole should be judged by them.
I will never understand why some people have such a need to control the language of others. When that need starts being given serious consideration organization - regardless of the "think of the X" logic being thrown around - it's a really bad sign.
So many open source developers code stuff for fun and calling their projects something like "fucking simple fuzzer".
When I write something for fun I want to name it something fun and I don't care what other thinks, whether they can find it in their Google or not, the point was writing the code and if I can't give a lovely name to my own projects what's it good for? If you find it offensive for you taste don't use it. An open source repository that tries to police this kind of stuff is just ridiculous unless there is a legal issue.
Who finds "upskirt" offensive? It's childish, yeah, offensive, I don't think so. If a woman decides to not work on open source projects because she finds that a library named "upskirt", that's her problem.
I think it is attitudes like this that stop women and others from participating. I am against censoring but I am for self-policing and being sensitive to others. So it is not about someone coming and bashing you on the head, it is about you hopefull realizing that you are hurting the community and just change the name of the project voluntarily.
If you were a nerd in high-school (I know I was) remember how it felt sometimes if you tried to fit in with the jocks because perhaps you wanted to give some sport a try, but everyone kept making fun of skinny-know-it-all-glasses-wearing-nerd jokes around you? They would think it is fun, and not offensive, but you as a skinny-glasses-wearing-nerd would feel singled out and rejected.
>If you were a nerd in high-school (I know I was) remember how it felt sometimes if you tried to fit in with the jocks because perhaps you wanted to give some sport a try, but everyone kept making fun of skinny-know-it-all-wearing-glasses-wearing-nerd jokes around you? They would think it is fun, and not offensive, but you as a skinny-glasses-wearing-nerd would feel singled out and rejected.
This comparison should be drawn more often, it is extremely germane to this discussion.
I don't think that detracts from the argument. The fact that she is a woman doesn't change the perception of how other women would view that name.
Now the way I understand it, it was probably a cultural difference, or perhaps an honest mistake. Someone who speaks English as a second language might just not realize that the word has a different connotation.
If you read the OP, you'd see that there's a strong implication that the original author of libupskirt did not understand the connotations of upskirt when she agreed to the name
"My personal distate for these particular names is heightened because it appears that the original libupskirt author's acceptance on trust of a foreign-language name for her library has caused her considerable discomfort and possibly harassment. She apparently no longer wishes to work on open source."
>If a woman decides to not work on open source projects because she finds that a library named "upskirt", that's her problem.
Assuming that woman was competent, then it's my problem, your problem, and the problem of all users of OSS, direct or otherwise, which includes everyone on earth.
I, a man, would very likely avoid any project using this library. So it's more than "her problem". A name like this is especially degrading to a single group. If I named a library a racial slur, I wouldn't expect people to be happy about it. And I wouldn't expect only people of the "offended" group to complain. It's an affront to the dignity of the F/OSS community to put up with this.
> Who finds "upskirt" offensive? It's childish, yeah, offensive, I don't think so. If a woman decides to not work on open source projects because she finds that a library named "upskirt", that's her problem.
Yup, isn't that the whole idea of open source? - I do something and make it available, if you wanna use it it's your issue, not mine, I have no obligation to you. If I want to name it whatever, that's none of your business, you can use someone else's code if you don't like what it is called.
True. And that's what the PSF said when they refused to censor the name.
But using the offensively-named software or not using are not the only options. Another option is for the author to use a non-offensive name. Then EVERYONE wins. Fortunately, that is what happened in this case.
