Ethical Code – Let's Clean Up GitHub

http://ethicalco.de/events/cleanupgh/

by RossPenman • 12 years ago

19 29 12 years ago

ethicalco.de

walshemj2• 12 years ago

Given whats been happening what github needs is a major clear-out at the top and some proper adult supervision.

rjknight• 12 years ago

What has been happening?

nefasti• 12 years ago

Only one side speaking. I would wait for both parties to speak before drawing my conclusions.

walshemj2• 12 years ago

Really I have a lot of experience in hr/ir it's a complete CF

jaredsohn• 12 years ago

This post is about open source rather than github the company. It just so happens that a lot of open source can be found on github and the site makes it easy to search across projects.

neurobro• 12 years ago

Somebody, give that scrollbar a sandwich.

jonnybgood2• 12 years ago

Okay, that’s great and all, but who decides what is right and what is wrong?
We the people.

No, it's the brigade that decides.

So, a GitHub Ethical Brigade who will harass repos because an individual in the brigade decided to take offense?

sigzero• 12 years ago

Doesn't the repo owner still have to accept the change? And what if the owner ignores it?

jonnybgood2• 12 years ago

It's harassment, regardless.

BESebastian5• 12 years ago

Won't somebody think of the racists and homophobes!

opless5• 12 years ago

Yes, let's bully another group of people in the name of "oppressed minorities" because two lefts make a right, two wrongs must make one. Right? Right?

opless5• 12 years ago

Let's not pander to the radical "politically correct" folk.

"people publicly posting code with comments that could make so many people feel awful, unwanted, and excluded"

Really? REALLY?

Let's call this for what it really is shall we?

A group of vigilantes being dicks to people who they feel are being dicks, because of something as intangible as "hurt feelings".

Oh please, are they feeling privileged enough? In my day bullies left bruises and broke bones, not offended and hurt feelings.

I'm offended at your offence to being offended by the word "fuck" in a comment someone else wrote. If you really want to do something, write some code. Make some art. Build something. Don't bully some other guy/girl/furry/etc into sanitising their code for the newspeak of the day.

Will Wheatons law applies here - "DON'T BE A DICK"

k1kingy• 12 years ago

I'm offended at your offence to being offended by the word "fuck" in a comment someone else wrote.

I think you missed the entire point of this article. While I agree with you that it shouldn't be up to a group of people to decide what should and shouldn't be allowed, the entire idea of this campaign isn't to rid github of swearwords.

What they're wanting to achieve is to clean up the blatant/pointless derogatory terms. I mean why does someone think a commit message "What kind of massive faggot tries to use gayQuery with node" is acceptable.

dictum2• 12 years ago

The problem with iniciatives like these is that they make it hard for me to know that someone is the kind of person who would write "faggot" and "gayQuery" unironically.

When toxic or just obnoxious people are instructed to hide behind crisp language, you only find out about their toxicity or obnoxiousness in person.

opless5• 12 years ago

No, I think you missed my point.

We now how a set of people who think they're judge, jury and executioner on terms they don't think other people shouldn't use.

Not only that, they are hiding behind the political correctness flag. Let's call it for what it is shall we? Bullying. Plain and simple.

crassus• 12 years ago

Ok, you win. You're holier than me. I must confess, I never thought of searching people's repos for crimethink comments and variable names. Take me to the inquisitor. I'd take it as a mark of pride to be assaulted by this group of idiots.

BESebastian5• 12 years ago

Just for clarification, are you stating that you're proud to be a bigot?

Because your comment kinda comes off like that.

opless5• 12 years ago

No, I think it comes off as sarcasm.

ggreer• 12 years ago

I personally don't care if some repos with one watcher are full of idiocy, but I think opening pull requests is the wrong way to go about this. The old advice is, "Praise in public, criticize in private." If someone doesn't understand that they're offending others, a short e-mail will probably solve the problem. Pull requests and public "discussion" will just feed trolls.

dictum2• 12 years ago

It's good that people will use their freedom of speech to voice their dissatisfaction with what other people wrote.

I just hope those who join this project don't eventually make it a them vs. us thing: "look at these disgusting dudebros who refuse to change these words!"

DanBC• 12 years ago

What's the book where one character is dating an artist and she decides that binary - the phalic 1 and the yonic 0 - is symbolic of the patriarchy and so she has a team re-write software to invert the digits?

I think it was Neal Stephenson?

Because while I am in favour of carefuy chosing your language when picking names for stuff and leaving messages I worry that this kind of thing in the wrong hands can go too far.

I'm not sure what the research says about effective methods of asking people to make a change. I'm going to need something substantial to persuade me that this is a good method.

dmishe• 12 years ago

Imagine all of this energy directed to actually fixing bugs in popular libs, huh.

a_bonobo• 12 years ago

I think this is a good thing - searching for the n-word on Github reveals a lot of static swear-word lists for filters (which are OK) [1] but also lots of rather strange choices for tests (what's up with weboob's test.py?). We as a community of open source developers have to stop and think about how the outside world perceives us.

There's already lots and lots of negative flak in regards to sexism about Silicon Valley and IT-culture, which doesn't help when the "normal" non-IT population already sees IT-people as a bunch of hateful nerds with absolutely zero social skills.

This is a good action in that it's an open signal to change things - it might not achieve much, but it's a signal.

[1] https://github.com/search?l=python&p=1&q=nigger&ref=searchre... link from http://tommorris.org/posts/8053

Ethical Code – Let's Clean Up GitHub

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