Our acquaintance GitHub will replace the term “master” (and not only) with an 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 web hosting portal is the latest in a long line of technology and open source companies trying to voice their support for the BLM movement by removing terms that may be offensive to black community developers.
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 in all the USA, the technology community is again involved 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 he is also on procedure submitting requests to update several internal Microsoft libraries to remove any racist phrases.