Developer advocate, full-stack engineer, startup co-founder & CTO, bringing 15 years of experience in Silicon Valley, including at Google and Yahoo!. Public speaker.
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Developer Advocate at Weaviate, the open-source semantic search engine
Thanks for finding and posting that! It's an excellent point and I've reused it in my response. The OP doesn't offer any evidence of any black Git user actually being offended by the word "master". The problem may be completely imagined, but the pain caused by changing the word will be very real.
You linked to Petr Baudis explaining that he named it after "master recording", but you conveniently ignored the post earlier in the thread where he, himself, said that he is glad that it's being changed: twitter.com/xpasky/status/12714774...
I also have some doubt that he, all by himself, chose that name. Yes, he was part of the git core team at the time and made several commits to the code. But the particular commit that made "master" the default name for the first branch was made by Linus himself. And he probably had other reasons for choosing "master", regardless of what Petr was thinking.
... And, as Linus himself is a Finnish guy, with English being not his first language, and himself being not from the American-raised culture, I'm pretty sure he wouldn't create this name to promote slave culture
He might not have been aware at the time. That's totally reasonable. It's also possible that he was aware, and didn't care, because Linus is kind of a jerk.
He might be kind of a jerk (he is, to be honest, although he's better now), but there is a difference between being a jerk and being a racist piece of shit. Also, racism is not that much proponent in Europe nowadays, and not a thing people have their minds on in general.
(disclaimer: personally I don't feel a connection between word master and slavery. for the first 16 years of my life master was an HDD you put at the end of your IDE cable.)
Absolutely. To be clear, I was not trying to suggest that Linus is a racist. I was suggesting that he might be insensitive to those who are impacted by racism, but not that he himself is racist.
And again, I don't know if that's the case. I'm not trying to accuse him of anything in particular. It's completely possible that, if he chose the word, he chose it for no reason other than it was a familiar word to him, and it seemed reasonable, and he wasn't particularly concerned about it.
According to Petr Baudis, Petr himself chose the name. It's possible he made the suggestion to Linus, and Linus didn't care enough about what it was called and went along with Petr.
I'm not sure we'll ever know exactly how the name was chosen. It was 15 years ago. All the people involved in the development may not all remember exactly what happened perfectly.
But, in this discussion, it probably doesn't matter why it was chosen. More than that, what matters is what it means to people today.
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As per this creator's comment:
twitter.com/xpasky/status/12722807...
It's as "master copy" so it's a "solution" to a non-existing problem.
Also let me join this comment from a person that is targeted by this change.
Thanks for finding and posting that! It's an excellent point and I've reused it in my response. The OP doesn't offer any evidence of any black Git user actually being offended by the word "master". The problem may be completely imagined, but the pain caused by changing the word will be very real.
Thank you for making the only legitimate comment to this ridiculous topic.
You linked to Petr Baudis explaining that he named it after "master recording", but you conveniently ignored the post earlier in the thread where he, himself, said that he is glad that it's being changed: twitter.com/xpasky/status/12714774...
I also have some doubt that he, all by himself, chose that name. Yes, he was part of the git core team at the time and made several commits to the code. But the particular commit that made "master" the default name for the first branch was made by Linus himself. And he probably had other reasons for choosing "master", regardless of what Petr was thinking.
... And, as Linus himself is a Finnish guy, with English being not his first language, and himself being not from the American-raised culture, I'm pretty sure he wouldn't create this name to promote slave culture
He might not have been aware at the time. That's totally reasonable. It's also possible that he was aware, and didn't care, because Linus is kind of a jerk.
He might be kind of a jerk (he is, to be honest, although he's better now), but there is a difference between being a jerk and being a racist piece of shit. Also, racism is not that much proponent in Europe nowadays, and not a thing people have their minds on in general.
(disclaimer: personally I don't feel a connection between word
masterand slavery. for the first 16 years of my life master was an HDD you put at the end of your IDE cable.)Absolutely. To be clear, I was not trying to suggest that Linus is a racist. I was suggesting that he might be insensitive to those who are impacted by racism, but not that he himself is racist.
And again, I don't know if that's the case. I'm not trying to accuse him of anything in particular. It's completely possible that, if he chose the word, he chose it for no reason other than it was a familiar word to him, and it seemed reasonable, and he wasn't particularly concerned about it.
According to Petr Baudis, Petr himself chose the name. It's possible he made the suggestion to Linus, and Linus didn't care enough about what it was called and went along with Petr.
I'm not sure we'll ever know exactly how the name was chosen. It was 15 years ago. All the people involved in the development may not all remember exactly what happened perfectly.
But, in this discussion, it probably doesn't matter why it was chosen. More than that, what matters is what it means to people today.