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When Software Offends
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."
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.
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.