When Software Offends 467
ndogg writes "The open source Python projects Pantyshot and Upskirt have caused quite a stir within the Python community, and catalyzed the leaving of one of their developers (a woman whose native language is not English.) The original developer, Frank Smit, has renamed Pantyshot to Misaka, but that too has suspect etymology, as Violet Blue points out."
Re:How about "when software is named by assholes" (Score:2, Interesting)
Interesting question: how has their[1] view of women been shaped by women's disgust and rejection of them? What THEY think of women...how about what women think of THEM? (there's that scary "them" again...why do we always use this word when we talk about people we don't understand and have no desire to understand?) A little understanding goes a long way. The desire to label men as objects, to say they are nothing more than pantyskirt perverts, dehumanizes men and makes them into complete monsters, undeserving of any sympathy or human dignity.
[1] The modern system of sex and gender would not be possible without a disposition to interpret the difference between genders as the difference between self and Other ... having a sexual object of the opposite gender is taken to be the normal and paradigmatic form of an interest in the Other or, more generally, others. Since over 50% of people are women, their views must be taken as mainstream now.
Pretty tasteless, but I can think of worse (Score:2, Interesting)
Why would you name a parser like that? I mean, I'm all for freedom of speech, and that has to include potentially offensive speech, but why choose that? It's dumb. And I don't mean just the "potentially offensive" angle, but from a technical standpoint too. Talk about poisoning the Google searches! When people go looking for it, the legitimate software library you worked so hard to code is going to be buried way at the end of a long list of ... other stuff. Simultaneously I'm not keen on how easily offended some people are. It's not that bad. I can think of far worse choices.
Suggestion: rename it to "upkilt". That would solve the problem in true Pythonesque style.
This seems to happen from time to time. (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember about 7-8 years ago, when someone coded up an emulator for the Neo-Geo Pocket Color. The supposed full name of the product (which none of the developers ever used) was "Rather A Pokemon Emulator?" and the logo was a Pikachu poorly Photoshopped for, shall we say, reasons of endowment. I don't recall if the software was open-source or not, but the naming controversy doesn't sound too different from this.
Free speech allows you to name your project whatever you want, no matter how tasteless. Free association, however, allows people to decide not to use your project based on its name. Open-source even lets someone fork it, changing little if anything but the name, and snag the userbase out from under a puerile manchild.