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.

Come to think of it though, some of the words he's used in the past on the mailing list are probably considered "-ism" type 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.