Comments on Childish Behavior, page 1 of 8

I might be worried if this was a trend (and denoun...

Jack Diederich · 2011-07-02T02:13:19.529000

I might be worried if this was a trend (and denounce it loudly) instead of a one off, but it ain't. The Python community has enough positive momentum and grace that it can handle listing the occasional package name that some people find offensive.

The individual people that make up the Python community are leading in open source by doing outreach to under served potential contributors (see: pyladies, core mentor list, sprint funding). Positive contributions come by way of example, not by way of punishment.

Let's not screw it up by giving a heckler's veto to those that take offense at the world as it is. In that world My PyCon 2011 talk would have resulted in banishment because I was talking about monkey patching and mentioned the "unicodenazi" module on a slide (it complains when you do unicode wrong). If that kind of accidental slight is punishable we will have far fewer contributors and far more complainers.

Not only is it juvenile, it is offensive and troub...

Amanda C. · 2011-07-02T03:17:58.428000

Not only is it juvenile, it is offensive and troubling that someone would title any project "upskirt". The title conjures images of personal privacy violations and sexual assault (albeit non-violent, though that shouldn't diminish it's impact). Furthermore, it makes light of a fairly gender-specific issue, causing me to raise an eyebrow about the creator's attitude towards women in general.

Perhaps I don't know enough about programming and software culture to "get it." As the partner of someone who is very active in the Python community, I've heard so much about what is being done to make the Python community more open and welcoming to women; You can imagine how surprised and appalled I was upon reading this. I find it hard to believe that anyone would consider it "censorship" to disallow the use of sexually perverse language that implies any form of sexual exploitation. To allow it seems deleterious to any outreach efforts.

Bravo, Mr. Chairman. I feel that the board was co...

glyph · 2011-07-02T03:24:12.470000

Bravo, Mr. Chairman.

I feel that the board was correct in allowing the package to remain (it shouldn't be the PSF's mandate to censor these things), but you are equally correct to call it out. I suspect that the author of the package in question was simply inconsiderate. I hope that they'll consider changing its name. But, I think it should remain within their rights not to, and if they don't, at least this will serve as a signal to the community at large that just because we might tolerate this kind of thing, we don't endorse it.

If a trend were to develop, it might be worth considering adding ESRB-style ratings to PyPI, but I certainly hope it won't come to that.

-glyph

@Amanda: We are troubled too, which is why I have...

Steve · 2011-07-02T03:32:16.625000

@Amanda:

We are troubled too, which is why I have taken the time to raise this issue on my blog. I hope that nothing you read here implies any support of the naming choices described.

The issues are complex. We cannot become the moral police for the whole open source community, and do not see any clear line of general agreement about exactly what is and is not acceptable. Any attempt to censor content of this kind ultimately becomes a slippery slope.

As Guido said during the Board's discussion:

"I used to get requests from people to change Python's name, either for being 'not serious enough to let my manager approve its use' (by folks
who at least did get that it was a Monty Python reference, although they apparently did not get Monty Python) or because snakes were considered offensive in their culture.

"Let's follow the spirit of free speech: like Voltaire, we can disagree strongly with what they are saying and still defend their right to say it.'

So that's our stance, and I hope it doesn't alienate you from the Python community: it's precisely because we care about such things that this wasn't just swept under the carpet. I can't see anything stopping the projects from changing their names ...

The Ruby binding is called RedCarptet, which is an...

Anonymous · 2011-07-02T04:18:52.437000

The Ruby binding is called RedCarptet, which is another racy reference.

I don't see why the couldn't have called it something a bit more descriptive, like "fastmarkdown" or "fmarkdown" for short.

Thanks for speaking up and addressing this ridicul...

Selena Deckelmann · 2011-07-02T04:42:14.977000

Thanks for speaking up and addressing this ridiculous behavior.

It would be delightful if the links to those two projects 404'd because the names changed in the next few days.

Though I think the name is odd just an FYI a femal...

Good Earth Girl · 2011-07-02T04:42:32.511000

Though I think the name is odd just an FYI a female developer initially created libupskirt which was forked to the Upskirt library which is used by GitHub as it's Markdown parser.

@Dj Gilcrease I do remember seeing that, and findi...

Steve · 2011-07-02T04:52:24.672000

@Dj Gilcrease I do remember seeing that, and finding it somewhat odd. But ultimately I don't really care whether it's men or women creating the hostile environment, and there was no need for the libupskirt name/theme/meme to be adopted by later contributors.

It seems to me that "we disapprove, but it is...

Anonymous · 2011-07-02T08:44:02.513000

It seems to me that "we disapprove, but it isn't our place to blacklist it" is the right stance for the PSF and PyPI to take, but people should certainly be encouraged to ask the *developers* to consider changing the name of their package to something less deliberately offensive.

Have the courage of your convictions and remove it...

Anonymous · 2011-07-02T09:41:01.562000

Have the courage of your convictions and remove it. You are not the "moral police" of the open source community, but you certainly could be the moral guardians of pypi. "Censorship" is not necessarily the evil some people assume it to be.