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

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. Source: http://gizmodo.com/5980842/there-is-blatant-racist-and-sexist-language-in-github-code http://gizmodo.com/5980842/there-is-blatant-racist-and-sexis... GitHub is a platform geeks and techies love because it not only lets you manage projects but allows you to share your code and your projects with the outside world. This kind of transparency obviously has its perks as well as its downsides—among the biggest is the fact that now we can see who's coding what. And we can see exactly how mundane racism, misogyny, homophobia, and other kinds of prejudice are in the coding world on a granular level. GitHub sits in the center of an Open Source community that has been dealing with heated ongoing controversy over its lack of diversity. In November, BritRuby, a Manchester conference of Ruby on Rails coders, was canceled after outrage broke out online at its all-male lineup of panelists. Ruby coder Sean Handley took to GitHub to criticize the online community for bringing down the well -intentioned conference with "careless words." "Turns out, a lot of the prominent Rubyists are white guys and all of the ones who said they'd like to come were, indeed, white guys," he stated. "Making an issue out of that is, frankly, misguided." Is it an overreaction to make an issue, likewise, out of the words being used by GitHub coders? Perhaps. But if anything, Morris argues that the issue strikes at the heart of nerd culture itself: The reason we’re seeing such vicious anti-equality bullshit in the geek community over the BritRuby situation and other conference type stuff is because the very existence of societal inequalities (against women, racial minorities, gender/sexual minorities) threatens the whole idea that hackers got where they are because they are super-fucking-smart.… A lot of what we call luck boils down to us being in groups that don’t face discrimination and other problems. Source: http://www.dailydot.com/society/github-code-search-racism-sexism-bigotry/ http://www.dailydot.com/society/github-code-search-racism-se...