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?
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.
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.
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.
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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
I think moves like this that piss people off is whats causing people to be more conservative/right wing.
What’s next? Master/slave replicas should also be renamed, right? What about client/server? Black/white-listing? This is really dumb
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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.
Blacklist/whitelist is objectively a less accurate term than blocklist/allowlist.
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.
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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?
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I concede to your second point, and I am starting to see why black/white-list can be a sensitive term and just trying to change the connotation like I suggested somewhere above is not tractable.
I still think that education is key. Not going outright and calling people racist, that is counterproductive I wholeheartedly agree. But instilling in them from a younger age the evil of racism instead.
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.
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?
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
But they (Microsoft) will keep enslaving the users of their products by all means and fighting free software. How hypocrites they are.
Free the slave IDE drives while you’re at it! How could it have taken this long! :upside-down face:
