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Comment by violini | Hacker News Reader

If this really is about racism, as some people are suggesting, it makes me wonder how equitably such TOS-rules would be applied in other cases.

For example, if Linus Torvalds turned out to be a racist or sexist or homosexist or transexist, would his Linux repository (https://github.com/torvalds/linux) be hammered? Would he be removed from the Linux project somehow?

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Or if one of thousands contributors happened to be?

We already had developer (of Drupal[1]) cancelled over their private BDSM kink (that isn't even illegal, which racism is), what stops some random moderator for deciding he's the saviour of the world and banning random repos just because a contributor might've been questionable?

* [1] https://www.theregister.com/2017/03/29/drupal_dev_banished/

GitHub can ban your account if you violated their TOS, but I don't think they can/will ban the repo if one of the contributor might be questionable, you can fake commit history anyway. Perhaps they may ask the contributors to change git history if the contributor for a commit is really freaking them out for some reason? I have no idea.

What country is racism illegal?

I think in some european countries it is, but don't quote me on that.

I suspect BDSM is explicitly illegal in more countries than racism is (unless we define racism narrowly, perhaps).

Here are some depending on whether they define the repo as hate speech: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_by_country

Probably. Just checkout how much fallout RMS generates when sharing his opinion outside software domain. It will be always weird, to kick original autor from project, but it happens from time to time.

I just wanted to mention that the GH repo is just a mirror of the official one.

GitHub is just a mirror of linux; it is not the primary VCS for it.

The true test would be if propagating a culture of hatred against men, heterosexuals or white people would be penalized equally.

github linux repo is a mirror

I think that it would depend:

1. If Linus did a hard-right turn and was doing the right-wing news tour doing transphobic shit, MS and GitHub wouldn't bat an eye

2. If Linus kept a repo of anti-trans poetry or some shit on his GitHub, then yeah he'd quite possibly get booted off

This isn't about GitHub being against what they think "AUTOMATIC1111" as a person believes, this is just about what they had on GitHub, and whether GH considered it against their TOS.

Now there's a thought. Maybe what finally resolves the gender imbalance in tech will be the reveal of Linus' secret stash of radfem verse.

A penguin draped in suffragette colours becomes the new mascot. Women across the globe join the open source movement in droves. JK Rowling writes a bestselling guide to Linux kernel development.

Hopefully - in the very unlikely case Torvalds or anybody else was deliberately uploading content of that sort.

This doesn't seem a remotely comparable case though (deliberate uploading of offensive content in the delisted repo vs - say - unwoke opinion/comments, or whatever the example of LT is supposed to evoke), if the reasons mooted in other comments are correct.

Do you not think a piece of software can be acceptable independently of whether or not its creator is racist?

Yes. But individual acceptance or use is very different from the ethical and legal obligations of major corporations.

And in this case, we aren't just talking about the creator, the allegations are about the actual content being hosted.

Creator? Sure. The user account maintaining and updating it? No. Racism is just one thing, there is a ton of other undesirable beahviors like cp, fascism, swatting, participating or supporting acts of violence against strangers without provocation, participating in a spam/phish/malware campaign, backdooring code the list goes on. You are still free to host your own git repo on your own servers.

The dude was pretty racist, good work by GH employees: https://web.archive.org/web/20221013110023/https://github.co...

Good point, I agree it's not comparable to what has been alleged in this case.

I used Linus just as an example of a very high-profile and widely beloved open source leader, to contrast this relatively unknown developer.

Though, now I think on it, some of the words he used in the past on the mailing list are considered "-ism" level offensive by some people today: "dumb", "retarded", etc.

Hopefully no cancellations incoming for these historical word-mishaps.

Really? "dumb" and "retarded" are considered "-ism" level offensive? What about retroactive abortion and the like? Is it so easy to trigger cancellation nowadays?

Yes, saying the latter word on reddit will get your account permanently banned site-wide...

That is indeed true. One of my alts there (like out of 25 at the moment, subject matter per acct) got permabanned sitewide for calling into question the business name and property ownership for a mental health nonprofit that has "ARC" in its name.

The "ARC" acronym stands for 'Association for Retarded Citizens', back when "retarded" was a clinical definition. It's now defunct. But those names still live on in property deeds and corporation names. https://thearc.org/about-us/history/ has the history of this name.

But Reddit.. egads, I have no clue what they're trying to accomplish. Maybe they're trying to clean themselves up from anything that even smells bad. If you want to speak about 'questionable topics', you have to use onomatopoeia to even talk about it (like, wee-tod-did , seggsual, unalive). I'm personally thinking of just abandoning reddit over their slow-boiling the frog, if you will.

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