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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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.