I suppose it was bound to happen. Some might wonder why it had not happened already before. The Free Open Source Software ("FOSS") movement is all about empowerment.

So it's only natural that the cutting edge of social media development gets embraced by pornographers.

The Fetchgals module for Drupal...

is a public domain webspider used to download or display free images gathered from adult entertainment TGP sites (Thumbnail Gallery Posts). This module provides a user interface for the fetchgals package and automates the entire process. It also allows you to display the content gained right there on your own Drupal site.

Who says masturbating men should be left out of the open source revolution?

Still, there is a question of ethics, morality and legality. Bert Boerland, one of the Drupal community's more active developers, wonders:

I think this will raise some elbowseyebrows in the Drupal community. But it wont be banned or removed I hope. We dont have a policy on what modules are allowed on drupal.org apart from the fact that they have to be licenced under the GPL. I think in due time we might want to ad some rules; not discrimination against race, people, religion etc would be the first one I think. What if there would be a purewhite.module? Or a swastika.module? This would be legal in the USA where drupal.org is currenlty hosted but would be prohibited in Germany for example. And there might be cases that are the other way around.

Laissez-faire

attitudes towards pornography are quite widespread, especially in more liberal and libertarian societies, but in other cultures, it's a capital offense. (Personally I'm ambivalent: I believe pornography is destructive on balance, but attempting to ban it would be even worse.)

But what happens when international development communities run up against the laws and social mores of individual nations?

In comments, Max Bell writes:

Having volunteered some time with DeanSpace, and just as a general perception, I tend to think of Drupal as being left-leaning and actually very family friendly (and I can probably count myself as nearly family-hostile) -- but I also really LIKE my perception. When I read about this module, I, too, had a "well, there goes the neighborhood" reaction that probably really wasn't warrented.

But in all, I welcome anyone who wants to use Drupal.

Anyone.

And myself, I would as soon see Drupal remain open to anyone.

So far, the module has gotten little attention, and the very brief discussion among Drupal infrastructure managers led to a probably most-sensible hands-off attitude, declaring the idea of censoring Drupal modules for declared functionality (as opposed to content) as "absolutely ridiculous." After all, setting up some sort of tribunal to police the politics and perversities of a free, worldwide community would quite possibly undermine the personal empowerment ideals that FOSS embodies.

But given the big money men spend on porn, and the wild proliferation of websites eager to facilitate such gratifications, my guess is that we can only expect to see more of this kind of thing in open source communities. After all, online communities are populated by people.

Flickr photo: Live Nude Sign, uploaded by * BB *.

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[Contributing Editor Laura Scott also blogs at pingVision, rare pattern and scattered sunshine.]