In yet another case of starting research for one blog post and ending with another topic completely...

When I first started this post, I was thinking that I'd talk about some of the message boards that I commonly look for content for Slashdong on. Places where developers post small utilities they've come up with that integrate with whatever it is they do in the bedroom, or in front of the computer, or possibly in the bedroom in front of the computer at the same time if you're into that.

Here's a quick list:

• Bound Anna Software Forums
• Milovana Hardware & Teledildonics Forums
• Smartstim
• Fetlife Fucking Machines & High Tech Sex
• Fetlife High Tech BDSM
• Fetlife Remote Control Devices Group

I realized that there's a site I look at way more often for software these days: Github. Granted, Github doesn't really get you built software, but I'm also just used to building everything myself these days when I'm not pulling it from whatever package system I'm using. So I decided to see what github has in the way of sex software available to the public.

Now I've always called my personal github account the World's Only NSFW github account, mainly because I'm pretty sure there aren't many other people putting up code and specs for Arduino Dildos and emacs teledildonics modes on what these days might as well be your resume in the valley. But I figured there had to be at least one or two open source sex software projects on there other than mine.

First search: Sex. That... doesn't get me much. There's like 3 of my own projects, a LOT of spam accounts (apparently spammers creating spam accounts and repos is a big problem on github now. They've made it as a service.), but only a few things of interest:

• Lots of sex offender apps
• Interesting simulation of More Sex is Better for Spread of AIDS article on Hacker News
• Some metrics projects
• Social Software for Sex Activism
• A very, very silly perl app

So, not a good keyword. Tried some others:

• Masturbation - Nope, just references to wanky code.
• Fucking - In the scope of coding, this is RARELY used for its literal meaning. Especially by me.
• BDSM - God damnit, people.
• S{cripting,ystem,tack} Management (SM) Framework
• Bash Deployment & System Manager
• Better Database Schema Manager
• Adult - Now we're getting somewhere
• Lots of Plex porn viewing bundles
• Someone's Fetlife competitor that didn't make it so they open sourced it
• A student's natural language processing course project doing adult site classification

Maybe people just don't throw this stuff on github. Fine. Let's go back a bit and try the ol' behemoth of open source, Sourceforge. Once again, starting with good ol' Sex:

• Pigeon Planner comes up first and while it may have absolutely nothing to do with this article, the fact that it even fucking EXISTS makes my year.
• Ok. Back to seriousness. There's a porn movie downloader
• Lots of spam

Not much else otherwise, so we try the other terms...

• Masturbation
• Apparently this query broke sourceforge completely (probably actually bad timing but still). Things like this are why I no longer use sourceforge.
• Adult
• Orphne
  • A full web browser specifically for adult content. I might come back to this at some point.
• Lots of porn downloaders
• BDSM
• Bowling Data/Statistics Management - Ok that's pretty fucking good.
• No Means No - Holy shit an actual open source sex board game! Jackpot!

Huh, so, not really finding much anywhere. Heading back to the original idea of the post... I know there's more specialty adult software out there than this, especially in the BDSM realm. Where is all of it?

It appears to be in the forums themselves. In the multiple forums I went through today, both listed above and otherwise, every author was developing software by themselves, and just uploading zips as attachments to forum posts. Not only that, sometimes they even followed up posts with code embedded in messages.

Why? Probably a few reasons:

• A lot of this software seems VB or Delphi based. Not languages we see on open source distro sites often. It's just not in the community.
• Signing up to an open source software site is a great way to get known. A lot of the authors may not want that.
• Most of this stuff may be done by hobbyist programmers who are just using the software/computer as a means to an end, not as the social/communication mechanism a lot of us have turned it/crutched it into.

It'd be great to see more of this kind of software in open source culture, as it represents a human interest that goes beyond our "let's do math/index data/etc... faster" expectations. Not to mention, there's always the chance of losing message boards, and backing up code via board attachments is far more difficult than shuttling repos around.

But I'm not sure the two communities have a ton of overlap, at least, not yet. We're at least starting to see fetish projects give back to the community on the architecture side, as Fetlife's Open Source Project Page shows. But this is still server utilities, which while far more useful, are already out there in this way. What it'll take to actually get sex/fetish software into the community, I have no idea, but it's certainly something to think about.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some pigeons to organize.