For people who don't see what's wrong here. The issue is not about whether the word 'retard' is or is not offensive to anyone. You need to consider that GitHub currently hosts a large percentage of the web's open source repositories. This is censorship plain and simple, something that IMO has no place in open source. The issue is that there are plenty of things some people might find offensive on GitHub but you dont…
1. This isn't censorship of the type that is illegal or not allowed. It is a private company deciding a word was inappropriate. 2. It seems like most in this comment thread agree that this action, as a singular act, is a good thing. The word was offensive. Github asked the repo to change it. They did. The end. 3. As for the larger context, the problem with the frequent use of slippery slope arguments and cries of "ce…
It is a private company, alright, but it is also becoming a critical company for the internet as a whole. Which points to an important question our society will have to face more and more often with increasing centralization and globalization: When does a company become essential infrastructure and be judged (morally, by law, by the executive) different to any other private entity.
During the financial crisis we have seen that large parts of the banking sector were deemed "to big to fail" and kept on life support by the government. Facebook has grown large enough than any changes in their TOS and privacy policy are closely watched and often criticized by a multitude of public parties and the press (at least in Germany).
I've only recently realized how far we have come in terms of better development standards when I tried find the official repository for ncurses (which is a GNU project, by the way). There is none. The current development code is hosted via ftp as a set of tarball snapshots [1]. As far as I can tell, no development history beside the change notes of each snapshot before May 2015 is publicly accessible. Issue tracking seems to be handled over the mailing list [2]. And I asked myself, why can't this project be hosted on GitHub?
The answer depends on how reliable GitHub turns out - or continues - to be. If we can't hold GitHub to a higher standard than just "they are a private company, they may do whatever they want", then ncurses should host its own issue tracker and git repository. But if we judge GitHub as an infrastructure, then sure, host this core GNU project via a private company.
> 2. It seems like most in this comment thread agree that this action, as a singular act, is a good thing. The word was offensive. Github asked the repo to change it. They did. The end.
Note that how to deal with swear words or offensive words in general is very culture specific. In the society I live in I seldom encounter cussing or "inappropriate behaviour", but when I do, they are next to never beeped over or blurred out. Rather, when in bad faith, they serve to disqualify the speaker. (And when they are used in good faith they benefit artistic freedom.)
This is not to say "our" way of dealing with questionable or offensive behaviour is the "right" one. Rather, if we hold GitHub to internet infrastructure standards, then they have to find some middle ground between corporate America puritanism and the diverse culture that surrounds it. It's not an easy task, see for example Facebook's debate on nudity vs. breast feeding, but otherwise every entry on GitHub will be as boring as Oracle documentation - no more "Hurr durr I'ma sheep" releases for you.
[1] ftp://invisible-island.net/ncurses/current/ [2] The issue at question being that no ncurses release compiles with the current GCC: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-ncurses/2015-06/msg00...