OSCON's 20th anniversary and more

Posted Aug 8, 2018 10:57 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
Parent article: OSCON's 20th anniversary and more

including scrubbing the code of credentials, trademark mentions, and profane or rude comments

I'm fairly sure that no sane court would consider a comment in a codebase to be passing off your product as the thing mentioned: indeed where comments regarding interoperability concerns are needed, scrubbing the name of the thing mentioned is just pointlessly destructive. (And if profane comments are bad in open source, virtually every free software product out there is in a world of trouble!)

This stuff has nothing to do with necessary things to do before open sourcing and everything to do with (in the first case) corporate paranoia and (in the second case) avoiding the possibilities of bad PR if someone digs through the codebase with morals from the Victorian age, no doubt while using all the words complained about themself on a daily basis. (Though scrubbing credentials out of the codebase seems like a worthwhile thing to do anyway.)