If you type slurs into GitHub code search, you'll get over 10,000 results for many of them. Some of these are bad word filters, of course, but many are not.
Are any of them open source projects that anyone has ever heard of? I don't see any.
Edit: why did you delete the links to the searches? It looked like literally 99% bad word lists, and a couple of random repos that probably only the comiter cared about. One of them was a dump of metadata from pirated files off The Pirate Bay.
I deleted them because occasionally I've seen accounts get hellbanned for using slurs, even when simply discussing the words. Figured I'd play it safe.
This is definitely a concern. What does it tell us, I wonder?
I'm certainly not saying that there are no individual bigots in the OSS world. With thousands (millions?) of people you'll get all points of view, beneficial and toxic.
A simple 'grep' of GitHub reveals a lot of crap, but are these influential projects? Do these projects have multiple committers who have signed off with pride that "my project contains 'n-----' in the code comments"? Do these projects have lots of users?
It would be interesting to plot the occurrence of racial slurs against the number of participants in a project (controlling for offensive term filters or corpuses of 'real' language). My hunch is that the vast majority of these terms occur in one-time undergraduate projects or forgotten hobbyist repos.
What I mean is, anybody can create a GitHub project for any reason and post anything they want to their repo.
I don't consider a Freshman anonymously posting some obnoxious text on GitHub to be a part of the "Official Open Source Community (tm)" any more than a two year old finger painting is a professional artist.
If such a person turned up at PyCon or RubyConf and starting dropping n-bombs in public conversations, they would get a very fast education in what is acceptable public discourse in an open source community.
theorique is perfectly willing to have a reasonable discussion about it. Chasing after them to take back the 'any' in the first sentence of the first post isn't going to accomplish a lot.
Edit: why did you delete the links to the searches? It looked like literally 99% bad word lists, and a couple of random repos that probably only the comiter cared about. One of them was a dump of metadata from pirated files off The Pirate Bay.