
Debian's Anti-Harassment Team Is Removing a Package Over Its Name - Valmar
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Debian-AH-Archive-Removal
======
porpoisely
I'm a long time debian user and supporter and this is ridiculous. They are
going insane over weboob an acronym for "Web Outside Of Browsers"? If people
don't like it, then tell them not to use it.

And what's with the "our values" nonsense that so much of the tech leadership
and business leadership have been using to justify censorship and their
authoritarian behavior?

If they are going to remove weboob, then they should also remove man/pages,
mongodb, git, gimp, strip, tail, head, gnome, etc. You can view anything as
being offensive if you choose to.

So if debian somehow becomes a naughty word in our culture, will debian just
shut down or change their name?

Also, does debian's "values" apply only to english? What if the names is
innocuous in english but highly offensive in other languages? Will they remove
it from the package list or demand the name be changed?

What is going on here? It's like someone released poison and the few people
running things have turned into hypersensitive clowns.

~~~
Volundr
It's a bit disingenuous to claim that weboobs is some kind of an accidental
acronym. The logo combined with a brief glance at the page is plenty to make
it clear it's very intentional.

A quick look at
[http://weboob.org/applications/](http://weboob.org/applications/): handjoob
wetboob boobsize

Look, I enjoy a good dick and boob joke, but some people (people, not just
women) get understandably uncomfortable with people start sniggering about
body parts. Hence I don't do it in public. It's called basic manners.

None of your other examples set out to be interpreted that way, and most of
them are a hell of a stretch. Weboobs very clearly set out to make as many
immature jokes as it could.

~~~
porpoisely
If you feel uncomfortable then that's your problem, not everyone else's. And
as I said, you are free not to use it.

Also, "immature jokes" has been the backbones of technology and the hacking
community. It's called having a sense of humor.

If people are so offended, then why not go create your own distribution with
only "non-offensive" software instead of poisoning software that exists.
That's what made tech and the open source and hacking community so wonderful.
Not everyone has to be boring cookie cutter puritans. Rather than doing that,
the puritans are trying to enforce their authoritarian vision on everything.

Most of the debian and open source and tech community doesn't care about
weboob or the hypersensitive agenda. Why should the community be affected by a
tiny handful of puritans?

~~~
Volundr
> If you feel uncomfortable then that's your problem, not everyone else's. And
> as I said, you are free not to use it.

That's a lazy argument, and you know it.

"If your offended by me watching porn in my office, that's your problem not
mine, feel free not to come in."

Or just consider if that package was called the n-word. Would you be upset
with Debian for not choosing to distribute that?

> Also, "immature jokes" has been the backbones of technology and the hacking
> community. It's called having a sense of humor.

Slavery was the backbone of the American cotton industry. We seem to be under
the impression that was a bad thing.

Look, we all know that a line exists. You can argue about where is should be,
but trying to argue there isn't one is just lazy, and refusing the actually
engage in thought.

This boils down to one simple thing: Debian chose not to distribute some guys
boob joke. Seriously, that's what your mad about? Flip it around, and show me
someone coming into the project demanding the name be changed, and I'm on your
side. But just because you told a fart joke doesn't mean I have to repeat it.

>If people are so offended, then why not go create your own distribution with
only "non-offensive" software instead of poisoning software that exists.

Feel free to create your own distribution that does. We already have a
distribution that cares about this kind of thing. It's called Debian.

> Most of the debian and open source and tech community doesn't care about
> weboob or the hypersensitive agenda.

Citation needed.

------
sudhirj
The name alone is likely not a problem, and it’s unlikely that other
Scunthorpe names will cause problems purely on the name.

The authors of the project made the logo misyoginost (the OO) are two globes
representing breasts, and there’s reports of other juvenile work in the same
vein. That’s enough to cross the line.

There was a JS testing framework called Testacular, which was also fine until
attracted more male genetalia references in the libraries extracted and the
documentation, at which point it wasn’t fine anymore. Called Karma now.

Just a name can be can be unintentional, a language fub or acceptably silly
and whimsical. But creating and attracting artwork, words, references and
trolls makes things toxic.

There is a line, and it is the anti harassment team’s job to draw it.

~~~
chomp
More than that, there are some pretty bad insults, here's one that was
removed:

[https://git.weboob.org/weboob/devel/merge_requests/228](https://git.weboob.org/weboob/devel/merge_requests/228)

They then added it back with a different insult:

[https://git.weboob.org/weboob/devel/merge_requests/232/diffs...](https://git.weboob.org/weboob/devel/merge_requests/232/diffs#diff-9)

I mean I can understand the sentiment some might have that overzealous
political correctness is taking over. I might be on that side of the fence if
this was just purely about the name. But this is on a whole different level.
Debian doesn't need to ship this if they don't want to. I personally wouldn't
want to make a distro that provides my users software to install that insults
them (and not a joking insult, this is just straight up poor taste). It just
looks tacky, isn't necessary, and (this is biggest issue) is very insulting to
certain groups of people.

~~~
sudhirj
Yeah, my bar is already pretty low. Random insults directed at me are fine,
but I’m not going to ask my team to even evaluate this as viable software,
because both the women and men will probably be uncomfortable with this.
That’s a sad state for a technical project to be in.

------
s9w
Well I'm the usually the one being radically free-speech, etc. And I guess
mostly here too.

But: This project seems _really_ immature. Not that it should be banned for it
in this case or any other. But you can't deny the intention behind it. And
more: The photo you see on the projects website? You can find the un-edited
original of it on the web. And the middle paper doesn't have the logos spirals
on it... Which, again, is fine. But the naming is 100% intentional.

------
bigbugbag
Wow! so the asshole detector detected assholes in the seat of the decision
makers at debian.

It's sad when debian is not a welcoming place anymore and makes stupid
decisions like this that make it look bad.

Great a package that happens to be really useful and innovative is now
removed. Thanks to this much needed move women are now massively using debian
right away because they do not feel threatened anymore by this package name,
specifically among all those non english speaking people like France where
this software is from.

On the other hand this move may make debian looks bad and unwelcoming.

~~~
bigbugbag
Forgot to add source for the "asshole detector reference:
[http://laurent.bachelier.name/2013/12/weboob-the-asshole-
det...](http://laurent.bachelier.name/2013/12/weboob-the-asshole-detector/)

------
jaytaylor
Do any Debian package names refer to anything which sounds violent? If so, all
offenders should be eradicated!

And how about that "fsck" thing, that seems like a thinly veiled swear word,
too. I know I'm cursing if I have to invoke it ;)

Removal for an acronym ending in "boob" seems really over the top to me.
Though in this apparently hyper-vigilant time in which we live, perhaps I'm
not allowed an opinion since I am a male with only breasts and not boobs.

~~~
onion2k
_Though in this apparently hyper-vigilant time in which we live, perhaps I 'm
not allowed an opinion since I am a male with only breasts and not boobs._

Of course you're allowed an opinion. Other people are allowed opinions too
though, and if you're not going to respect what other people think (even when
you disagree) then no one has any reason to listen to you.

------
yaris
First immediate association with this was some forum bots which cannot
understand context and check posts for obscene words using a simple regexp,
having huge rate of false alarms as the result.

~~~
akadruid1
Surely Scunthorpe bots would raise alarms for git and gimp? They are full word
matches, and in my culture the words are more offensive than boob.

~~~
et2o
I think it's more the gratuitous insertion of sex into an area that has
nothing inherently to do with sex, not that the word is itself offensive.

------
bigbugbag
Just found out that the devs are aware of the situation and posted about it
last august in one of the most prominent french linux website.

they basically say that since 2010 they've been trolled on regular basis about
the name of their software that happens to be a coincidence. These trollings
gave them the inspiration to push further with visual elements and other part
of the naming scheme used for other components.

The regular attacks from social justice warrior seeing in weboob a cisgender
patriarcal homophobic masculinism are causing incomprehension among the female
devs contributing to weboob and among the women gravitating around this
project. Mostly it seems these attacks are coming from men who want to impose
their view on women about what's right and wrong.

He ends the post by saying that he was supposed to give a talk with his
girlfriend data scientist about the conjoint use of weboob and machine
learning to scrape dating websites at pyconFR titled "find love with weboob
<3", though the talk was well recevied, he was asked to provide a different
title to the talk due to chances that people misinterpret it and complain
based on the code of conduct of PyconFR.

[https://linuxfr.org/users/moules/journaux/le-comble-du-
ridic...](https://linuxfr.org/users/moules/journaux/le-comble-du-ridicule)

------
packetpirate
Unfortunate acronym, but this is so asinine. Did the people who reported this
have nothing better to do?

------
growt
I guess liboobs is next?

~~~
hwj
What about coq?
[https://packages.debian.org/stable/math/coq](https://packages.debian.org/stable/math/coq)

------
berbec
Oh God. Is the ebook converter that can take the proprietary LIT formate done
for too? It's call clit.

[http://www.convertlit.com/index.php](http://www.convertlit.com/index.php)

------
cesarb
Reminds me of the "hot-babe" package from 2004:
[https://lwn.net/Articles/113644/](https://lwn.net/Articles/113644/)

------
teddyh
As I understand the actual reason, it’s mainly about the package being over-
sexualized when the package itself has nothing to do with sexiness:

[https://lists.debian.org/debian-
devel/2018/07/msg00428.html](https://lists.debian.org/debian-
devel/2018/07/msg00428.html)

------
bigbugbag
My main concern is that this might be only a beginning as said in phoronix
forums:

    
    
      > 12-20-2018, 03:16 AM
      >
      >... and to be a bit more serious: This is only the testrun. 
      > You will see them removing packages because of "non-
      > compliant" political views of developers.

------
dvfjsdhgfv
It's the first time I've heard about Weboob, and it looks like a genuinely
useful package, I'm definitely trying it out.

As for the name, I can see the tool is created mainly by French people.
Frankly, having some Americans ask them to change the name would have to sound
bizarre to them.

~~~
Symbiote
Given the logo, (removed) homophobic comments[1] and error message, the
blogpost on the topic[2], a developer's idea of a "welcoming and inclusive
environment" [3], and the range of icons used in the tool [4], I think it's
pretty clear that the developers _do_ understand, and don't wish to change
anything.

This comment[5] from a Debian developer seems an excellent summary of the
issue:

 _" It's fine to show a woman in underwear if you try to sell women's
underwear […]. It's not ok to show a woman in underwear if you try to sell a
chair (and the scantily clad woman is just decoration / an object to draw
attention to the ad) […]_

 _" It's IMO fine to talk about and show breasts in a game which teaches the
names of body parts to children; or in an app that helps women to detect early
warnings signs of breast cancer; or (Ian's example) in software controlling
sex toys; etc. Because there they are simply on-topic._

 _" And it's IMO not ok to use the boobs theme for a web scraper or other
software unrelated to boobs themselves, where its only function is to make a
small group of users giggle while objectifying, offending or boring the rest
of the world."_

[1]
[https://git.weboob.org/weboob/devel/merge_requests/228/diffs](https://git.weboob.org/weboob/devel/merge_requests/228/diffs)

[2] [http://laurent.bachelier.name/2013/12/weboob-the-asshole-
det...](http://laurent.bachelier.name/2013/12/weboob-the-asshole-detector/)

[3]
[https://git.weboob.org/laurentb/devel/commit/e4ed7bf8e384f4a...](https://git.weboob.org/laurentb/devel/commit/e4ed7bf8e384f4a0a0b07ed4c8d7a0a1e9f7d1a1)

[4] [http://weboob.org/modules](http://weboob.org/modules)

[5] [https://lists.debian.org/debian-
devel/2018/07/msg00428.html](https://lists.debian.org/debian-
devel/2018/07/msg00428.html)

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
Yes, it's clearly a cultural difference. I'll give you an example. In the
nineties I bought a French software magazine with a CD with apps (I don't
remember the name, it could be L'Ordinateur). Apart from demos, trials,
shareware etc. I found a separate folder on the CD called "Charmes". I look
inside - et voila! - I see the directory full of naked women. In a computer
magazine! A major one! I can't think it could happen in the USA (or most other
European countries for that matter). So I don't see any possibility of mutual
understanding here.

~~~
conradfr
I remember those times. Sometimes you had to pay to view them. I remember one
case where I discovered it was regular picture files with just the extension
changed, so I wrote a GUI to automatically rename all the files to *.jpg.

I also remember having freewares of mine put on those CDs, which was
rewarding.

------
damm
Yet the decision was made by men; doesn't seem very inclusive does it?

Maybe Debian should remove itself.

