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.
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.
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?
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
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 🤮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?
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.
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yet the word “master” has absolutely zero relevance to slavery in Europe. I mean it’s not like Europeans translate “master” to their equivalent of “slave lord” in their git repository. In Lithuanian for example word “master” is a de facto loan word for “someone who mastered something” as in master craftsman and absolutely no one would associate the word with slavery.
Maybe Americans should start mandatory linguistic classes to catch up with the rest of the world a bit?
Maybe for americans, “master” means “landlord”/“lord”.
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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 :)
maybe I am; what would you recommend to browse that is more aware of international context?
Show me the right parts!
they’re not in english :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Who is “they”?
The GitHub team or the Microsoft exec who ordered this.
True, Github needs to stop working with ICE before they do anything else.
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.
Changing it is painless anyway.
This could break a lot of Git scripts, CI/CD configurations and probably a bunch of other stuff.
“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.
Its probably not possible to change their mind, so I’m happy if they stay as far away as possible.
I think that people that get pissed off about this are going to get pissed off about any small change to their lives due to people trying to help with equality. So nobody should be worry about pissing off snow flakes like that when real progress could be made. Not that I think the change to the word ‘master’ in software development is actual progress.
if they do it retro-actively it will break a lot of projects. hopefully they do not, but github kinda has a history of deprecating older methods of doing things (look at the github app).
I don’t think they can retroactively change everything. Some projects don’t even have their ‘master’ copy on GitHub. I think they will probably just change default behavior on new projects.
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.
Wait but the words master and slave have meaning, don’t they?
Master has different defintions as well. Welcome to human languages!
In the context of git master means “master copy”.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
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Really? I don’t. Some protocols use the term slave because it performs in a master-slave relationship. It has nothing to do with race. Server-client is fine too though, but choosing words out of context because of race is a dangerous and slippery slope to to go down. MS is just virtue signaling.
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This feels like justification-backflipping, and to be honest, nobody really cares what the term actually is or whether it fits semantically. The discussion that people are having is whether we should be renaming unrelated things in the name of racial hysteria. I am 100% behind the black lives matter movement, and other minority groups struggles, but these kind of things actually damage it by coming off as irrational.
Lets just put things in perspective: Microsoft, the same company that has an ongoing relationship with ICE and was one of the first to sell out to the NSA under pressure to sell our privacy out, is now pretending to care about people.
Remember to stay on topic. I couldn’t care if it branches were originally named chicken and egg or something crazy either and that really was not the point I was making.
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We can’t outlaw negative words, the connotations of that are insane. You use words to describe things. Non-sentient software might act in a slave-like manner, and if the word fits, use it. If it doesn’t, don’t. Thankfully platforms are starting to become decentralised and not at the authority of any one person, so relatively free speech and anonymity will eventually be upheld regardless of the law and what people on social media think.
I think you are just virtue signalling your beliefs in free speech. Virtue signaling is what all humans do with most of their conversation.
I honestly don’t mean to sound trollish here, but, not it’s not. Virtue signalling has a fairly clear definition and I don’t believe we live in a land where every word is spoken purely for the sake of seeming like a good person.
I don’t think you are trolling. There is a definition of virtue signalling in current social media that seems to only mean when the left is signalling their virtues, but virtue signalling is a pretty straight forward phrase that can mean any sort of signalling of virtues. I think you are also using it as if people are being insincere about why they are wanting the change. Just because you believe that changing the word ‘master’ in software development will not change anything does not mean that those who want the change do not believe it will have an effect.
But they (Microsoft) will keep enslaving the users of their products by all means and fighting free software. How hypocrites they are.
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I think that people were just more subtle being conservative, but these moves make them show it more. Is really this name change so big that will change some people’s political leaning?
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I understand your point, but I also think the people that get pissed of at this would have gotten pissed off about any change in their life to help with equality. Things are gonna change. People are gonna get pissed off. Not that I agree the change to the term ‘master’ with regards to software development will help anybody, but it isn’t hurting me to accept the change in case it does.
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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.
virtue signaling
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But is this vanity virtue signalling really worth breaking all of the scripts and international standards?
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.
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.
People use different branches all the time, and non-programmers wouldnt even notice this change if it wasnt for the whining of right-wing snowflakes.
They do use different branch names all the time, e.g. many projects have a development branch or branches for developing new (larger) features, but it’s still useful to have one standardized branch name in each project and especially so for the code that you want to present to the outside.
It’s what GitHub, GitLab, Gitea etc. show by default. It’s what gets checked out when you run “git clone”. It’s just been perfectly clear terminology up until now, for discussing the handling of branches.
And now we’re throwing that all away for really just no reason. I’m not saying that I disagree with the reason, I’m saying there is no reason presented. “Master” is not related to slavery in any way here. And no, calling me a right-wing snowflake is not a reason either, especially since I’m a far-left snowflake.
According to this it actually is a reference to slavery.
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2019-May/msg00066.html
HOly fuck. That guy whom it was a reply to got owned by facts but kept yapping on about “master” copy in the replies lol
I had a think about this, and I don’t want to drag this out too much longer anymore, but I think this is important:
I don’t think, that’s a good enough reason, specifically because many will think it’s bullshit. Which is an important metric in itself, because those who think it’s bullshit, will take the BLM movement less serious and will become more receptive for right-wing ideology.
It’s well possible that this was even started by right-wing trolls trying to achieve exactly that. Wouldn’t be the first time.
And I do think, it’s absolutely worth offending those hypothetical black people that actually do get offended by this, in order to prevent strengthening the right wing. Because the right wing is what causes the actual problems for black people.
Ah, pandering to people who were never offended in the first place. Good job guys…
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It’s a good move, but coming from Microsoft probably isn’t sincere :( They have so much power but won’t use it for good, only profit. At least it will help on the things you mentioned, which is nice. A PR move can have good consecuences and that’s something.
Edit: I would believe it as sincere if Microsoft did more to challenge racism, considering its power in our society.
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.
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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.
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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.
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