Is it unethical for Github to take it down? Not at all.
But should they? I don't know, I don't think I would have. It's kind of scary to use cloud services where it's hard to tell if your content might be judged in violation of some rule and might suddenly disappear as a result. If the offensiveness were more extreme (say, a repo dedicated to making fun of the mentally disabled), then yes, remove it... but the actual case here looks pretty benign to me. A poor choice of words, but with no intended malice. Coming down hard in this case looks arbitrary and unexpected, and arbitrary and unexpected rule enforcement is scary.
Certainly, though, it's Github's choice what kind of rules they want to enforce and whether or not they care if this scares users.
Why should one group of people acquiesce to another group of people's demands just because they claim offensiveness.
Should everyone live to the strictest thinkable standards because somewhere out there is a semi-large group of people who find your behavior offensive?
Such semi-large groups might be religions for example that take various kinds of behaviors you take for granted as offensive.
It's not that you have to. It's a social grace to not offend people. If you really want to, you are allowed to. But when society says to fuck off -- well, you got what you paid for.
People getting offended is not the issue. If everyone chose to never offend anybody else, my mother would never know that she makes bad pasta and we'd all have to eat bad pasta 3 times a week.
You want to draw the line at marginalizing a group of people or trivializing something serious like racism. But you want to make sure you are doing it in a way that isn't inhibiting legitimate thoughts, studies, projects, etc. from making it into the public sphere.
Every time you censor speech you stifle legitimate dialog because people will be uncertain whether their thoughts are legitimate or just offensive.
Millions of people find all kinds of things offensive. One half of the political spectrum finds the other offensive. That doesn't mean we just ban everything.
Or they could go "It's open source, go submit a pull request". You know, the human approach instead of the PC Police approach where they appeal to authority and have a faceless one Demand the PC filter to be applied.
I agree with what you're getting at, but at the same time it's reasonable to say that a non-trivial number of people are offended by the term.. So even while most people don't take offense, I don't think it's wrong to describe the word as offensive.
Your first three questions/answers, summarized, is that "Github ethically and legally removed an offensive word"
Should they? Yes.
I feel slippery slope arguments get brought up way too much sometimes. Every issue is turning into a binary all-or-nothing ordeal, with no room for nuance or context.
As long as what Github did is 1. ethical (removing a generally accepted as offensive word), 2. legal, then I see no problem with it.
If, IF Github starts making more arbitrary calls, then I think its the time to be angry or worried.
I'm not making any slippery slope argument. I'm saying that if it's hard to predict what minor infractions might result in 24-hour ultimatums, then that's going to make users uncomfortable, and that a lot of users wouldn't have predicted that this particular case would lead to a 24-hour ultimatum.
If the ultimatum were, say, 30 days, then I think it's in the realm that I consider sensible. That's long enough to get back from vacation without finding all your stuff is gone. The file had been there over a year, so surely it wasn't that urgent.
Maybe they could have sent an auto-generated pull request to make things easier.
It was worse than a 24 hours ultimatum. The original got the notice and apparently never replied (due to abandonment?) which caused GH to disable the repo AND THE FORKS. The Fork owners were NOT notified. In fact, the problem was only resolved when a fork owner contacted GH and got the repo enabled 3 days later.
It would also be ethical and legal to comb through their hosted content to remove any other words, but I'd argue it's a ret...er...wasteful use of their resources.
Also, I must have missed the memo when 'retarded' became "generally accepted as an offensive word". Are "stupid" "moronic" and "idiotic" also offensive? I guess I need to keep up with the times--as soon as I think I've figured out the list of everything that could possibly offend someone, we come up with something else.
Merely clarifying parent's post on what is construed as offensive (when it is directed at someone, especially to incite a reaction).
As I've mentioned in my other comments, I get that the author is just having fun... But:
- not everyone will see it that way
- it will reflect poorly on the author and GitHub
So, in short, just be careful of what you put out in public. If we can all agree on a code of conduct (and maintaining civility), then we shouldn't be having this conversation ever again :)
You are quick to summarize how Github is justified in doing this in an utterly benign case and yet are talking about nuance. I don't see any nuance here at all.
1. This itself was an arbitrary call.
2. So the issue needs to escalate to a certain arbitrary number in order for you to be worried? One person's repo getting fucked over is not enough, you want it to happen to 20?
I think the slippery slope argument is justified here. Things like "offensive" and "arbitrary calls" are fairly subjective. Of course GitHub can do what they want, but it is quite noteworthy to point out that they are policing offensive words now. They have a lot of work to do[0].
That word is not generally accepted as offensive. If you believe that, you live in an echo box dominated by politically correct SJWs. You also completely forget the world isn't limited to the US and other cultures consider the equivalent of the word entirely differently.
'The Dummy guide to ...' can be more offensive than 'The retards guide to ...'.
It depends. Maybe to you and maybe to me (it isn;t). But we are both english speakers. Github has a global presence. What if I am a french speaker and I want to say something is delayed or running a little slow?
Does Github have the right to take it down? Yes.
Is it unethical for Github to take it down? Not at all.
But should they? I don't know, I don't think I would have. It's kind of scary to use cloud services where it's hard to tell if your content might be judged in violation of some rule and might suddenly disappear as a result. If the offensiveness were more extreme (say, a repo dedicated to making fun of the mentally disabled), then yes, remove it... but the actual case here looks pretty benign to me. A poor choice of words, but with no intended malice. Coming down hard in this case looks arbitrary and unexpected, and arbitrary and unexpected rule enforcement is scary.
Certainly, though, it's Github's choice what kind of rules they want to enforce and whether or not they care if this scares users.