GitHub is working to replace the term “master” on service with a neutral term like “main” to avoid any references to slavery and racial stereotypes in general, the company’s CEO said a few days ago. The code-hosting portal is the latest in a long line of technology companies and open source projects that have expressed support for removing terms that may be offensive to developers in the “black” community. This includes the rejection of terms like “master” and “slave” and their replacement with neutral terms like “main/default/primary” and “secondary,” as well as the replacement of terms like “blacklist” and “whitelist” with “allow list” and “deny/exclude list.” The concern is that the continued use of these racially charged terms could perpetuate racial stereotypes and discrimination. As academics reported in a journal in 2018, such terminology not only reflects racist culture and racial stereotypes, but also contributes to reinforcing, legitimizing, and perpetuating them. In the wake of protests across the United States against racism and racial stereotypes under the slogan “Black Lives Matter,”the tech community is once again participating in efforts to remove such language from source code, applications , and online services. For starters, the Android mobile operating system, the Go programming language, the PHPUnit library, and the Curl file download utility have all declared their intention to replace blacklist/whitelist terms with neutral terms.
Similarly, the OpenZFS file storage manager has replaced the master/slave terms used to describe relationships between storage environments. Additionally, Gabriel Csapo, a software engineer at LinkedIn, said on Twitter this week that he is in the process of submitting requests to update several internal Microsoft to remove racially charged phrases. Other projects that do not use racially charged constructs in their source code or user interfaces are now reviewing their source code repositories. Most of these projects manage their source code through the Git software or the online portal GitHub. Both Git and GitHub use the term “master” for the default version of a source code repository. Developers fork a version of “master” to create minor versions, add their own code to that default version, and then merge their changes back into “master.” Now, many open source projects are changing the name of their default Git repo from “master” to alternatives like main, default, primer, and root. For example, ZDNet has found that projects like the OpenSSL encryption software library, the Ansible automation software, Microsoft’s PowerShell scripting language, the JavaScript library, and many others are trying to change the name of their default source code repositories in an effort to remove terms related to racial characteristics and slavery to show their support for the BLM movement and its protests.
Whether or not Git officially replaces the term “master,” GitHub appears to have decided to go ahead with the move, regardless of Git’s decision. On Friday, Google ChromeUna Kravets tweeted that the Chrome project is considering a similar move to rename the default branch of the Chrome browser’s source code from “master” to a more neutral term like “main.” Kravets asked GitHub to follow Google’s lead and help with the change. It’s a move that GitHub CEO Nat Friedman quickly responded to, revealing that the company had already been working on the matter.
GitHub, which supports this movement, ensures that the term will be removed from millions of projects and legitimizes the effort to clean up software terminology that began this month. But in reality, these efforts began years ago, specifically in 2014, when the Drupal project was first introduced to replace the “master/slave” terminology with “primer/replica.”.
Drupal's movement was followed by the Python, Chromium (the open-source browser based on Chrome), Microsoft's Roslyn .NET compiler, and the PostgreSQL and Redis database systems. However, despite the launch of some very large projects, efforts to clean up the software language over the years have not been widely accepted. Most critics, and the explanation that often appears in these discussions, are that terms like master/slave are now used more broadly to describe technical scenarios than actual slavery, and that the word "blacklist" has nothing to do with "blacks" but rather relates to the practice of using black books in medieval England to record the names of "problematic" workers, in order to prevent them from being hired in the future.
