GitHub is an exceptionally popular open-source community where any developer can find code for pretty much anything. But there’s a problem—some of that code contains extremely offensive racist, sexist, and homophobic, language.
A word of caution before you proceed, because these search results are very NSFW.
You don’t have to look hard for to find hundreds of results for controversial terms of every stripe. Simply inputting racial slurs, misogynistic words turns up code in several languages—Java, HTML, Python, Ruby, and so on—casually riddled with things like bitch, slut, whore, and worse.
It’s a black eye for the broad community of open source programmers, a group that—despite GitHub’s slogan of “Social Coding (for all)”—already grapples with lack of diversity. It’s a hugely alienating revelation about a community that can’t afford to push women and minorities away any further.
It’s all the more disturbing because this blatant prejudice hides behind the alturism of code sharing. Showing how someone how to write a project? How nice. Dropping bigotry into those explanations? That’s a huge problem.
We reached out to GitHub to talk about what’s going on here, and we’ll update when we’ve heard back. Regardless of how they’re handling this blight, GitHub is just 145 employees, and the site itself hosts more than 5 million repositories of code. Abusers should be banned. But the larger responsibility lies with the developer community itself, which should be self-policing. [Tom Morris via DailyDot]
