[smcl]

That's a bit of an oversimplification, it's not like they had a choice between adequately funding R&D projects or Doing Political Correctness and chose the latter. Besides, remember that Eich was appointed in 2014 and had only a short stint at CEO, so I don't think you can attribute the 2013 figures to him

I think all of us on HN are a bit saddened about Mozilla cutting back on the Rust and Servo teams, but political-correctness isn't the reason behind that. Let's not turn this into one of those discussions.

[leeroyjenkins11]

They did give like a 10k grant for people to remove master/slave terminology from docs, so who knows what other PC work they were funding.

[ramesh31]

>They did give like a 10k grant for people to remove master/slave terminology from docs, so who knows what other PC work they were funding.

As a black person in tech, I can't tell you how much that whole debacle drives me insane. I never once in my life ever made the association between "master branch" and "slave master". But now every single time I pull a repo with a "main" branch instead of "master", I have to think about it and play along to assuage someone's white guilt. I absolutely refuse to ever make the switch.

[dotancohen]

As someone whose grandfather was an actual slave, I agree with this 100%. If I pull a repo and find "main" I have to WTF and be reminded again that somebody somewhere has a guilty conscience. I would have preferred that they keep their guilty conscience to themselves and let us work without constant reminders of the chip on their shoulder.

[smcl]

I think I can set your mind at ease on this one. If you see "main" instead of "master" then I can almost guarantee that it's not someone with a guilty conscience believing that naming their branch differently absolves them of something they or their ancestors did. But rather it's someone trying to follow a broader movement whose aim is to try to avoid terms they think are rooted in hatred or oppression.

If you're getting harrassed by someone because you've got some repos with a "master" branch then I sympathise with you - the people giving you shit are likely engaging in a bit of performative outrage and don't really understand what this is all about. However if you're really getting upset when you clone a repo and see that someone's named it "main" then I have to say that might be on you.

[Dylan16807]

> I can almost guarantee that it's not someone with a guilty conscience believing that naming their branch differently absolves them of something they or their ancestors did.

"white guilt" doesn't necessarily care if their ancestors did it.

> But rather it's someone trying to follow a broader movement whose aim is to try to avoid terms they think are rooted in hatred or oppression.

It's annoying and sigh-inducing to be reminded that such a movement is full of people that don't understand how words work, that "master" has plenty of perfectly good contexts that don't imply "master/slave".

> However if you're really getting upset [...] that might be on you.

Nobody is "really getting upset" and that entire part of your post is needlessly insulting.

[smcl]

> "white guilt" doesn't necessarily care if their ancestors did it.

Honestly don't know what you're getting at here. You're going to have to spell this one out to me.

> It's annoying and sigh-inducing to be reminded that such a movement is full of people that don't understand ... that "master" has plenty of perfectly good contexts

I don't disagree. See my comment about people engaging in performative outrage, it does exist. But in this case you're annoyed at the very sight of the word "main". Like ... c'mon

> Nobody is "really getting upset" and that entire part of your post is needlessly insulting.

Are you misunderstanding that "However if you're really getting upset ..." means "However you're truly getting upset ..." and not "You're getting really upset ..."? Additionally if you read my comment, I provide two interpretations:

1. they exclaim "WTF" when attacked for having named a branch "master" (IMO understandable)

2. they exclaim "WTF" at the very sight of a branch named "main" (IMO a bit silly)

I honestly don't know which is the right one. It is up to the commenter if they want to tell us which it is.

Update: and just like that this part of the thread has become the farce I feared it would, we are debating whether the words "main" and "really" are offensive. This is a very important thing to consider when answering the question "Why do new browsers use Chromium instead of Firefox as their base?"

[acdha]

I think changing the default in Git was fine — it's such a small amount of work and doesn't affect existing projects — but what I really wish was that more people had taken this as the cue to ask what “master” even meant for their project. I've tried to switch my projects to names which actually describe what we use them for — e.g. tracking branches like development, staging, production representing what is currently being deployed to those environments — and that's been far more worthwhile because it brings clarity to discussions and simplifies things like CI/CD scripting.

[acdha]

This is a silly conspiracy theory if you think about it even a little bit. The grant you're referring to was $15K grant to Buildbot, which Mozilla has used heavily for years, and that was both to update terminology and “also to make improvements so Buildbot works better in the Amazon EC2 cloud” — guess which one is more work? — and $15K is a big amount to an open source maintainer but tiny when you're talking about budgets measured in hundreds of millions of dollars. You don't solve major budgetary issues by going after tiny fractions of one percent when there are individual people making orders of magnitude more money.

Mozilla is also one of the most open companies in our field — given how often we read about far less significant events there, it seems incredibly unlikely that there's some sort of substantial but well-concealed dark funding of “PC work” which has remained secret even after, say, lots of people being laid off or leaving especially when such work would by necessity have visible impacts.