GitHub Graciously Helps Female Programmers Cower In Fear

Github is providing a space where women can store code they're working on and get feedback from select peers before releasing it publicly and they're being vilified for it? This is absurd, I've done exactly this with every piece of code I've ever released and I know many other devs who do the same, most OSS projects do so at some point in their lifetimes.<p>Github providing a private repo for free simply lowers the bar to getting started a little further and that can only be a good thing. Against the principles of open source? What the hell does that even mean.

For any male software developers who may be feeling left out, bitbucket provides unlimited private repositories for free.<p>The headline strikes me as inflammatory. The move by GitHub is a bit like slapping a tar baby in the current sociopolitical environment, and is most likely going to lead to GitHub offering a limited number of private repos to all accounts.<p>Which would be a net win, unless it affects GitHub's financial viability, which I doubt it would.

Hurray, yet another snarky headline that borders on the edge of slander.<p>Can we, like, have a <i>conversation</i> about issues like this instead of leaping for the linguistic equivalent of a bunker buster? There are real people behind Github trying to do good, verbally lynching them does no one any good.<p>I'm so very sick and tired of how this community cannot disagree with one another without practically eviscerating each others' entrails.

Offering women free public repositories will expose more women to the open-source community. The idea is, of course, that they will slowly become more comfortable with the community and begin to open their work.<p>This could go either way, but I suspect this idea is correct. IMO, this was a good move by GitHub.

Why not just offer one free private repository per account to everybody?<p>It would 'solve' the same problem this attempts to, without the attached stigma, <i>plus</i> it would keep a lot of people from moving to bitbucket just to have a private repo.

I don't understand this - doesn't github already provide unlimited <i>public</i> repos? Can't someone (female or male or anything else) create a new, anonymous, account for stuff they are shy about sharing with the world? Then no one can know it is them, or what the account owner's gender is, etc.?<p>And if at some point they feel more comfortable, they can rewrite git history and change the authors in their commits, and push that to their official repo if they so choose?

So if I am a woman I am supposed to be free from harsh criticism? Isn't this the OPPOSITE of feminism???

I already use bitbucket for that. But if I felt compelled to use this feature on GitHub, without paying their monthly fee, there's not much preventing me from pretending to be female.

The underlying premise of the article (about women wanting to hide their code in fear) is pure garbage.<p>TG;DR (Total garbage; didn't read)