GitHub will no longer use the term 'master' as default branch because of negative association : technology

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 years ago (2 children)

I honestly hate how america centric internet has become. Seems like every context is considered from american culture even though there are 7 billion more people on the planet.

The rest of the world doesn't really care about your internal politics. Don't change international standards because of some cultural issues in your home.

Also human trafficking is real world slavery that enslaves more people in a single year than in entire history of american slavery. How about we start from there and get rid of the word traffic?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago (2 children)

I honestly hate how america centric internet has become. Seems like every context is considered from american culture even though there are 7 billion more people on the planet.

nah, you're just browsing the wrongs parts of the internet if you've gotten such impression :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Show me the right parts!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

they're not in english :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

That might not matter. Language is not always a barrier.

And anyway, there is a kit you can learn from people you don't understand.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 years ago

maybe I am; what would you recommend to browse that is more aware of international context?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago (1 children)

Github is an American company acquired by Microsoft which is an American company. Feel free to name your branches whatever is appropriate to your cultural context

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 years ago* (last edited 4 years ago) (1 children)

Just because it's incorporated and registered in america make it an american company? That's not how internet works. If you have international community you should respect it as an international body.
You're kinda the problem I mentioned in my OP: "Everything is american! hur dur" ugh 🤮

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago (1 children)

Literally that's exactly what this means. Company incorporated in country X is a country X company. Why are you so upset that they've made this semantic decision which will likely barely affect you?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 years ago

No that's not what it means. For example if country services France it has to obey French laws, the "incorporated location" is completely irrelevant for anything but taxing. Same way if you serve mutli-cultural user base you shouldn't be forcing everyone to follow single country's culture.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 years ago (1 children)

I know you Microsoft, I know this is just a PR move and you won't do anything else to challenge racism (considering all the power you have).

It's a good move, but I know that coming from Microsoft is not sincere.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 years ago* (last edited 4 years ago)

Exactly. Big companies talk about huge issues like this but rarely actually do anything meaningful. Imagine if they used same effort they used to lobby against privacy laws to lobby for better protections against discrimination.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 years ago* (last edited 4 years ago) (1 children)

My opinion? Meaningless token action, basically a PR stunt. If they actually want to fight racism, this energy would have been better spent on more useful ways of doing it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 years ago (3 children)

On the other hand, this doesnt have any negative consequences. In the worst case, it will do nothing but piss off right-wingers, and then it would still be worth the effort for me.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 years ago* (last edited 4 years ago) (1 children)

Assuming this is intended to be a publicity stunt, my biggest problem with this is that they're using a massive issue like racism as essentially a marketing tool. IMO this waters down the importance of the issue and is all around disrespectful.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago (1 children)

Who is "they"?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 years ago (1 children)

The GitHub team or the Microsoft exec who ordered this.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 years ago

True, Github needs to stop working with ICE before they do anything else.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago (1 children)

"In the worst case, it will do nothing but piss off right-wingers, and then it would still be worth the effort for me."

And do you expect it to change their minds? Because pissing people rarely does. Pissing people off closes their minds to you and the influence you might have had. Oblivious meaningless pandering just makes everyone roll their eyes.

The word master has had and still has meaning completely unrelated to human slavery, pretending one use of the word should dictate the ability to use all other uses is asinine.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 years ago

Its probably not possible to change their mind, so I'm happy if they stay as far away as possible.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago (1 children)

Agree, this is good fly paper. Changing it is painless anyway.

I saw someone on that reddit thread say, "master bedroom doesn't have any negative connotations" lol.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 years ago* (last edited 4 years ago)

Changing it is painless anyway.

This could break a lot of Git scripts, CI/CD configurations and probably a bunch of other stuff.

[+] [email protected] 1 points 4 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

IMO it's an american thing. The society there is obsessed with race.

No matter what the issue is, somehow somebody will make a connection with race. It's really striking once you listen to enough conversation from there.

The word master has a lot of meanings, but one of them has racial connotations, in a context unrelated to git branches.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 years ago

virtue signaling

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 years ago

I think moves like this that piss people off is whats causing people to be more conservative/right wing.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago* (last edited 4 years ago) (1 children)

goddamned liberals

edit: Now that I am done knee-jerking, "main" does seem to be a better name for the branch considering what its purpose is.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 years ago

I don't think, it's better. The master branch is the master-copy, the original, and all the other branches, the other copies, are modifications of it. That's how the term is used in the music industry and for documents.

I don't think, "main" is worse either. If we were choosing it as name at the start of git's existence, I would absolutely not be opposed to it.

But changing it now, will break many scripts, will require updating of documentation and will cause confusion and various long-term problems, especially if not everyone switches to the new default. And worst of all, there is no sensible reason for doing this. The term "master" is used all the time, and basically never for referring to slavery.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago (1 children)

Looks like a PR stunt indeed. Should I destroy my ancient hard disks which still have master/slave settings ? Will that make a difference for black lives now ? Meanwhile 3rd world countries are still being exploited, which means keeping among others parts of the continent Africa under Western thumbs. For example Shell pulling out of Africa would be a significant step in abolishing structural racism. Working towards slavery free chocolate is a significant step too.

[+] [email protected] 1 points 4 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago* (last edited 4 years ago) (1 children)

There is no negative connotation here. Git doesn't use the term slave anywhere so that relation doesn't exist.

it removes the negative connotation of black.

So you're associating black people with slavery? (Isn't that a bit racist? That association doesn't make sense if you look at history, unless you only care about the US.)

If we're talking about terms like blacklist and whitelist, those originated way earlier, and have no relation to slavery or skin color. Deriving meaning from colors doesn't imply associating those meanings with skin color.

What about terms like Master's Degree, master recording, mastery (of a certain skill), master bedroom, gamemaster, etc. None have any racist connotation. I don't think this change will do anything, as the term master is, on its overwhelming majority of uses, not racist.

In fact, I see this whole endeavor bringing a negative connotation to the word master when it didn't exist previously.

[+] [email protected] 1 points 4 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago* (last edited 4 years ago) (1 children)

So if the brain sees lots of negative things that are black and positive things that are white, it thinks “Ah! i don’t have remember that whitelist is contains good things, i can simplify that by remembering that whiteness is good”

And there it is, subtle racism is born.

And when you want to scream “Noooo!!!” remember i speak about subtle things here

I agree with you up until this point. I don't see how racism can come from there. In fact, I never realized someone could make that association. Because if someone thinks that that association is valid, they were already racist to begin with. Associating meanings of colors to skin colors isn't something someone would come up with were they not racist.

Besides, do you really think racism comes from any kind of intelligent reasoning? Most racist people are educated to become racist, and racism started from fear of the unknown and the different, not from reason.

[+] [email protected] 1 points 4 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

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[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 years ago* (last edited 4 years ago)

For instance, the old lady in the bus, who presses her bag harder to her chest, because of subtle fear of getting robbed. I agree that it is racist when she would think “oh, a black women, she wants to steal!”. But in this case, she probably hardly notices that she grabs her bag stronger because of a black women entering the bus.

The above is actually happend, according to alice haster. She (alice hasters) experienced that, as a black person, she noticed that the women would grab her bag stronger after seeing her.

I don't question that.

I also didn’t notice before, that “skincolor” (as in the color of a color-pencil) was always white-ish for me. when i thought of skincolor, i never thought of black skin.

I don't see that as racist, people think of themselves first, that's natural.

I was once part of a german conference, with many people. A black person said something during the conference and after the conference i met this same person again. Because i wanted to ask this person something, i started to speak english. Altough this same person had spoken perfect german a few hours ago.

So the natural assumption was that this person was a foreigner who doesn’t speak german. This is a racist stereotype. And altough i corrected myself in this situation, i didn’t notice the racist part until i drove home a few hours later.

I don't think that's racist, it's just an assumption people make based on their experiences: you know what the "locals" typically look like, so it's not that farfetched to think that anyone that looks significantly different (due to their skin color, clothing, hair, etc.) is probably a foreigner.

Going back to your first example, I think these kinds of things happen because the person is unfamiliar (has little meaningful contact) with people of other races or because of stereotypes, like you mentioned. I don't think avoiding a word vaguely related to slavery will make a difference on either of those things.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago (1 children)

This is some really dumb shit. This use of "master" has nothing to do with slavery. Practically all uses of "master" have nothing to do with it. But let's just break all kinds of scripts anyways, for a fucking PR stunt.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 years ago (1 children)

Wait but the words master and slave have meaning, don't they?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 years ago

They do. And slave basically has only one meaning and should be banned, also from technology. But master has a lot of different meanings, and it is ridiculous to ban it. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/master

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago (1 children)

What's next? Master/slave replicas should also be renamed, right? What about client/server? Black/white-listing? This is really dumb

[+] [email protected] 1 points 4 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago* (last edited 4 years ago) (3 children)

Is this really a good way to move forward? Rename everything and pretend like it did not happen? It feels like this kind of approach is just hiding things under the carpet. Renaming things that may have negative connotations due to a troubled history is too extreme form of censorship (similar to book burning) and a bit lazy IMHO.

All these technical terms are very descriptive of the concepts they abstract, (eg. it could be argued that black/white-listing is in relation to physical light and how it reflects off white and gets absorbed by black).

Disclaimer: I am culturally very far away from the colonial history so I may be a bit biased when I say renaming things like that is just dumb.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 years ago

I dont get this "pretend it didn't happen" thing people like to push these kinds of changes as, because they are actively admitting that bad things did happen and they would like to avoid associating themselves and normalizing the idea of something as horrible as slavery and instead use objectively clearer and language and terms less rooted in historical trauma.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 years ago

Blacklist/whitelist is objectively a less accurate term than blocklist/allowlist.

[+] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago (1 children)

As for the anecdote in your third bullet point: instead of renaming black/white-list terms to something else, what if we actually educate that shop owner about racism and why it is idiotic and evil to discriminate against a person because of their skin color?

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 years ago

But they (Microsoft) will keep enslaving the users of their products by all means and fighting free software. How hypocrites they are.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 years ago

Free the slave IDE drives while you're at it! How could it have taken this long! :upside-down face:

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