I'm honestly getting quite sick of these kinds of things in open-source.

Names like 'upskirt' and 'pantyshot'[0] are inappropriate names that are offensive and unwelcoming to a particular gender, but when we reach the point where we are complaining about a wholly gender neutral name that only offends people offended by the word "sex" we're reaching the point of inanity, especially when the package in question is a black box where you give it a first name and it tells you the likelihood that the name is male or female. If someone is offended by that name, then they should also be offended by the entire raison d'etre of the package in question since it further reinforces the notion of a gender binary.

Gender identity exists on a spectrum, so getting offended by the name of an open source project that guesses gender identity based on a name but not being offended by the fact that the project reinforces the gender binary is supremely ironic.

As an open source developer, these kinds of discussions bother me immensely because it elevates some topic of discussion as being more important than the code and technical decisions. Any discussion that is not about code, technical decisions, API design, algorithms, abstraction boundaries, accurate documentation, etc. can generally be categorized as bikeshedding. I don't value bikeshedding. I don't want open source to be welcoming of bikeshedding where bikeshedding discussions of any kind are given the time of day.

A certain amount of discussion around of appropriate naming is warranted, but there is a line that you cross where making software welcoming to easily offended people starts making the process fraught for people just trying to make technical decisions because they now have overly sensitive people in their midsts that they must cater for. Making technical discussions fraught hurts open source a lot more than the gain you get from being welcoming to people who are easily offended.

The Ben Noordhuis debacle [3] springs to mind. libuv is a project where Ben is the #1 committer to the project with 1071 commits (35.6% of the total) and his commits are likely to be the overwhelming majority of new features and non-trivial code changes. Ben's sin was simply one of not allowing commits with no technical value. If the change had come in as part of a larger pull request where actual code was changed, I'm sure there would have been no controversy at all. Instead Alex Gaynor did a drive-by single commit to libuv (his only commit to date) and the whole thing blew up and Ben was made out to be the bad guy by many people who probably never made a commit to libuv and probably never will.

This resignation letter from a Debian TC member[1] is what I think of every time we leave room for discussion about anything but technical issues. Open source used to be about code first and foremost and we all lose when (code < people's feelings) evaluates to true.

I'm honestly at the point where I apply the follow heuristic to the opinions of people when it comes to bikeshedding about open source:

function validOpinion(person, opinion) {
if (hasPublishedOpenSourceCode(person)) {
return opinion;
} else {
throw new Error('Invalid opinion');
}
}

If you don't publish open source code, your opinion does not matter.

[0] http://www.zdnet.com/blog/violetblue/when-software-offends-t...

[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/11/msg00071.html

[2] http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=137392506516022&w=2

[3] https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29538...