[madsmith]

As a black developer... this all just makes me a little sad.

Terms like master/slave or whitelist/blacklist are common parlance and this attempt to remove these phrases for less well understood phrases just seems like an attempt to whitewash history for little to no gain.

I'm a firm believer that language is dynamic and the meaning of words is the meanings we currently associate to them.

[tehlike]

And it's all very us centric too.

In my native language, we have something called "black notebook" which is essentially a blacklist. It has nothing to do with skin color, never been. It's more reference to bright and dark - it's a list of people you wouldn't do business with. It's very natural for people to use words from of their sensors. We call greenfield)brownfield in a similar manner.

[eesmith]

GitHub is a US company. HN is run by a US company.

[tehlike]

So? Blacklist or master words dont have its roots in the us, and they don't have their roots in the racist history either.

[eesmith]

Because you wrote "it's all very us centric too" - and I struggle to find out how that's a relevant comment given that "GitHub, Inc. is an American multinational", so obviously embedded in the US context, and American interpretation of the words.

[tehlike]

But github caters to a global market. That's why replacing master->main is just doing busy work that doesn't do anything to address the problem?

[eesmith]

That global market includes the US, which is a substantial part of GitHub's revenue.

This thread started as madsmith's valid comment that "that language is dynamic and the meaning of words is the meanings we currently associate to them" - how do we determine what meanings are associated with a given term? All indications are that it has a US origin, which provides the appropriate interpretation.

What is "the problem" and what should GitHub do to address the problem?

If the problem US-centric, and you think the US-only issues can be ignored because GitHub caters to a global market, then isn't your logic that GitHub should do nothing?

[userbinator]

Perhaps you mean "attempt to blackwash history"...