"Slave" is not a term used by Git or Github, and its use of "master" is not related to the vocabulary of "master/slave". Not the first to say this, but the media seems to be getting this all wrong.
For what it's worth, I have to reactions to that, both positive:
1) I came from an SVN background and only switched to Git because I started working at companies that used it. I still prefer SVN's aesthetics (and I wish I had more opportunities to use Mercurial), so I would much rather have 'main' or 'trunk' than 'master'.
2) At my company, my team uses the forking workflow (i.e. we do all our work in our own forks and then submit PRs to merge into the repo on the central server). Whenever I clone and fork a repo, I always nuke the 'origin' remote and create two new ones: my own fork, which I name after my AD username at my company, and the repo on the central server, which I name 'upstream'. That way, whenever I pull or push, I don't have to worry about mindlessly pushing or pulling 'origin' and accidentally touching the wrong repo: if I accidentally do so, I'll just get an error. So I am very, very much used to pulling from 'upstream'.
You can branch from master the way you duplicate a master tape cassette, and the copy is not any worse or subordinate. In fact the whole point is that the branches are improvements.
The 'master' branch uses the word the same way an audio recording does. There isn't a corresponding slave.
The word does come up in database replicas, which are often called master/slave. I can see a clear case where that would be offensive.
Renaming the master branch might be throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but it's just easier to do that right now, and it's a small price to pay.
The only git-specific aspect is that every clone of a repository gets a "master branch" (more precisely a branch named the same as the cloned repository's HEAD, but that is 99.9% of the time "master") and that is the only branch that is automatically created in the clone, just like a "master disk" is used to make copies of the disk.
This is actually a git concept not specific to GitHub.
It doesn't actually matter what the etymology of "master" is in this context. What matters is how people affected by a legacy of slavery view the term and its usage. In general, the term "master" used to denote something that is in charge or in control is problematic.
That is hearsay at best, an intentional strawman at worst. The fact that bitkeeper uses master and slave repositories has no relationship on the meaning of master for git branches.
> (this probably means you shouldn't give much weight to my name preferences :) )
> I have wished many times I would have named them "main" (and "upstream") instead.
> Glad it's happenning @natfriedman
https://twitter.com/xpasky/status/1271477451756056577?s=21