Following the announcement by GitHub that they are working to replace master branches with main or similar (as covered by ZDNet), I admit I had mix...
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How changing
mastertomainlegitimize the movement agains racism when there is not racism in the usage ofmasterterm?"Master-slave" terminology refers slavery for sure, however that isn't the case with
masterbranch.The term came from bitkeeper, they used the term master/slave, see also:
mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-de...
To you. to many others.
But to many other people when you say master, they say slave.
And yes, naming is hard. Renaming is sometimes harder. But it may be the right thing to do. And remember, nobody is forcing you to. This is happening by choice, not by a malevolent master. You can choose not to participate. That's OK too.
Because they live in America, a country that still has living citizens who's grandparents were born into slavery - and who remember hearing stories of slavery from their grandparents when they were children.
I'm from the UK but I live in the USA now. Until I moved here I had never understood how recent and raw the wounds of slavery were.
... may be a cheap PR stunt, given the far more serious social justice problems that GitHub has. See point 6 in my post.
Yes there's going to be a level of PR about it, but given the climate and current active global movement on this, there's the fear from some organisations that they may seen to be ignoring the issues for things they have control over, and that make people uncomfortable. The cynic on me also believes there's a solid fear of missing out from marketing departments on this.
Because of where I live, and that I have deliberately spent 90% of my career in smaller organisations, I don't have a network of black developer friends with whom I can discuss whether this is an issue with. I know there's small pockets of racists in the development community, but I know the majority of the community wants to be inclusive.
The current global protests are highlighting and reigniting the negative connotations of various words, and that is going to make people feel uncomfortable. If renaming something will help remove the discomfort of some of those people, then we are being more inclusive.
Regarding the tweet in your post for point 6 - yes doing so id going to cause discomfort too. It's impossible to keep everyone happy all of the time. But if/when all of this settles down, those who were offended or uncomfortable at renaming the branches away from
masterwill likely no longer care. The movement, however, may have stoked a fire in those who found themselves offended or uncomfortable with the terminologymaster.This is just a small change in a very long game.
No worries, that would be too small and too localized of a sample anyway.
I've looked at the comments here and on Twitter. All back developers I've seen either didn't give a damn on the alleged connotations of the word "master",
or...
... what if on the contrary, this whole discussion is unnecessary and actually makes black developers more uncomfortable than the word itself (which AFAICT wasn't a problem before)?
....should have read the rest of the thread twitter.com/Speedkicks/status/1272...
I have. I'm quoting that tweet as an argument that some black developers have been made uncomfortable by the change.
In the end, there will be some minor pains that everyone has to get over if they are using the service provided eventually it will blow over and that is fine. Personally I think it is a little bit of an over reaction to the current climate, we are not going to rename Masters degrees, or so many other things so it just feels weird to single out this context of the word.