Our familiar GitHub will replace the term “master” (and not only) with some alternative to avoid references to slavery
Yes, GitHub seems to be preparing to replace the term "master" in its service with a neutral term like "main" to avoid any references to slavery, the company's CEO said on Friday.
The portal code hosting is the latest in a long line of tech companies and open source projects trying to express their support for the BLM movement by removing terms that might be offensive to developers in the black community.
Terms to be changed include "master" and "slave" and will be replaced by alternatives such as "main / default / primary" and "secondary". Note that the terms "blacklist" and "whitelist" will be replaced with the terms "allow list" and "deny / exclude list."
The concern of technology companies is that the continued use of these terms could prolong racial stereotypes.
"Such terminology not only reflects our racist culture, but also serves to strengthen, legitimize and perpetuate it," some academics said in a statement. 2018 publication.
So now with the Black Lives Matter protests across the US, the tech community is once again engaging in efforts to remove these terms from the source code, the applications software and online services.
Thus the OpenZFS file storage manager has already replaced the master / slave terms it used to describe the relationships between storage environments in appropriate terms.
Gabriel Csapo, software engineer at LinkedIn, said on Twitter this week that it is also in the process of submitting requests to update many of its internal libraries Microsoft to remove any racist phrases.