As I've said when this was discussed a while ago, the problem is not with the word "master", it would be with the word "slave". "Master" has many uses that have nothing to do with slavery, as evidenced in words like "master's degree", "master" vs. "apprentice", "mastery", etc.
Once "master" is used in combination with "slave", it refers back to slavery and leans on it, there is no doubt about it. That's the case for MIDI, for example. But in the Github case it is not related to that at all, and the change is wholly unnecessary. That doesn't make it wrong, as a sign, to change your master branch to "main" branch, of course. There is a lot of arguing in bad faith in this area. As if showing a bit of good will and following a simple name change guideline would seriously harm any of those complainers. But I agree that this change can is not really justified linguistically.
Personally I don’t even think master/slave is bad. Do black people look at the word “slave” and think “Oh, that’s about me”? Does a white person see it and think “This must be about black people”? I just cannot see the value. It just feels like brainless censorship.
And more importantly, like the post saliently points out, it gives the illusion of affecting change while in reality doing nothing for the people it’s supposed to be done for.
Hire more POC. Mentor and tutor POC in engineering. Don’t police innocuous words.
I'm not sure telling everyone to associate a race with "master/slave relationship" is the best idea. Black people aren't the only ones to have been enslaved.
The association varies based on geography. American history is inextricably tied to the slavery of black people, so it's fair that the master/slave relationship is overwhelmingly associated with them in America
What do you mean? Slavery in America was inextricably tied to racism just as the Holocaust was inextricably tied to Antisemitism or the Civil War was inextricably tied to slavery. None of those aspects should be ignored or downplayed. History can be ugly and uncomfortable, but we should try to learn from it rather than ignore it.
> Once "master" is used in combination with "slave", it refers back to slavery and leans on it, there is no doubt about it.
This is not how language works. E.g. if you recall the debate about this, some people dug up an email from, I guess, Linus that mentioned master and slave repositories and some reasoning around that repositories are identical to branches yadda-yadda. (Or maybe the email was actually referring to the terminology used in another DVCS they were taking idea from.)
So they have proven that say some 15 years ago the thing was originally named so because of the master/slave concept (the technical concept). However, nothing proves better than the need to dig this up that meanings indeed do change. Especially when you use a name that has multiple meanings, like master. They named it master because of master/slave but the majority probably never knew this (I've never heard anyone talking about a slave branch) so just assumed master is master as in master copy, source of truth, etc.
This is how language works. After all, this is how the word master acquired the meaning of "owner of slaves" which it did not have originally. So yes, it was named master because it was related to the concept that we (used to?) describe with the expression that does refer to slavery but we definitely changed the context over time.
Regarding the name change, you can see several ways how it does harm. One of them was described in the post: by diverting the discourse and using up the effort that could have been spent on handling the real issues. Whether we are talking about people who did want to do something positive and now they feel they did (this is what the post is about) as well as the people who could have been recruited for taking meaningful actions but got pissed off/tired of this stupidity.
I honestly think that both this master branch thing and black/whitelist was 100% stupid because, as said in the blog post context . I'm not sure about the master/slave, but I'm 100% willing to accept that it can be offensive (and I'm treating it as such), though it would be interesting to hear the opinion of those affected, like the post author. (I just miss the nuisances here as I'm not from the US. Before hearing all the debate around this, I would have simply said that slavery was a wide-spread phenomenon during human history and it refers to that concept. That doesn't mean we don't think it's a terrible thing to do to a human being or that we don't empathise will all of those who had to endure it during their life.)
Once "master" is used in combination with "slave", it refers back to slavery and leans on it, there is no doubt about it. That's the case for MIDI, for example. But in the Github case it is not related to that at all, and the change is wholly unnecessary. That doesn't make it wrong, as a sign, to change your master branch to "main" branch, of course. There is a lot of arguing in bad faith in this area. As if showing a bit of good will and following a simple name change guideline would seriously harm any of those complainers. But I agree that this change can is not really justified linguistically.
My 2 cents, for what it's worth.