[cortesoft]

I find it interesting that you think this rename serves a purpose when the master to main rename does not.

Neither change has any technical reason. The only reason why either name change was desired is because some contributors were upset by the names.

[wpm]

The difference I think is that it is reasonable for a company to not want to bother working in a project named after their competitor, when "master" has always had multiple meanings from "formal title for a young boy" to "really experienced tradesperson" to "authoritative record" and it is somewhat unreasonable to associate "authoritative record" with "slave master", especially since git branches were rarely named "slave". Wacom is a brand that hasn't been Xerox'ed or Kleenex'd or Band-aided. I don't call every drawing tablet a Wacom.

[chrismorgan]

When I started using a graphics tablet, long ago, I was confused about why all this stuff was labelled Wacom, and whether it was applicable to me or not, when using a device of another brand. Some parts of it seemed to be, and other parts didn’t? It was very confusing, and a genuine confusion that made me uncertain even in purchasing. (It would be less confusing now because user-facing parts don’t touch the “Wacom” name as much any more.)

Whereas the “master” thing was transparent linguistic nonsense and a strictly-US cultural thing that a few people foisted on the rest of the world because they decided to get offended on behalf of a hypothetical group.

[vachina]

We had to refactor all our internal and external documentation from Master -> leader and slave -> subordinate. So you get things like “… in subordinate mode”.

Thankfully the actual code remained the same (because only engineers look at it).

[Joker_vD]

I've seen "slave nodes" renamed to "children nodes". Because a node that exists solely to support another, more important node, has to carry out the orders it receives from that node, must not do anything on its own, and will be terminated and wiped if it diverges from the vision the main node has — yes, it's a child node alright. You see, that's how children are generally treated in our enlightened society, so the new name is now properly evocative, and has no unfortunate implications.

[lelanthran]

> Neither change has any technical reason.

This does - few companies want to get into a trademark suit. "Avoiding trademark infringement" is a technical reason.

[kouteiheika]

> Neither change has any technical reason. The only reason why either name change was desired is because some contributors were upset by the names.

Indeed, neither has any technical reason.

I suppose you're right that both changes have a purpose -- one could feasibly convince a company to contribute Linux drivers (a net win for everyone), and the other is a constant annoyance which wastes everyone's time (is this project using `main`, or `master` -- you never know, so have fun getting it wrong all the time) just to allow certain groups of people/corporations to virtue signal**.

** -- If "master" is such a naughty word then where are all of the people getting offended by e.g. "Mastercard", "Ticketmaster", "Master Lock", "MasterBrand", and many other company/product names, and why those names aren't getting changed? Why there isn't any outrage about them? My point here is not to engage in whataboutism, but just to point out that the word isn't actually offensive when used in a non-offensive manner, and virtually no one is actually genuinely upset about it.

[pmontra]

I'm entering troubled waters but hey... The master to main issue is an accident of the history of the USA, still unresolved in its consequences, when most of the world was not practicing slavery anymore. The typical reaction outside the USA is rolling eyes and hope that all the ethnic groups inside the USA will finally get along. If the IT and economic powerhouse of the world were India instead of the USA and Indians would have picked master instead of main despite the British colonial period, this would be a non-issue: the USA could use a different convention (like for units of measurement) and the rest of the world wouldn't notice.

BTW, every country had its expansionist and genocidal and slavery moments (I'm from Italy, think about the Roman expansion inside Italy, then the empire or our colonial wars 100 years ago.) The USA is one of the most recent examples. It takes time and I understand that master vs main is important inside the country.

The issue of Wacom branding is different because it's a business dynamic and businesses don't want to work for competitors no matter the country, no matter the history. They can work together or an equal footing. So rename to libtablet or whatever.

[bee_rider]

It seems most likely to me that this particular sensitivity to any sort of social controversy and the status of the US as the sort of… de-facto default place of doing international business for a long time, are probably linked. The US corporate culture’s default stance is probably a learned reflex. Better to look a little over-sensitive, than to scuttle a deal by blundering into somebody’s cultural trigger.

[chrismorgan]

It seems to be very popular in the US to take offence on behalf of others. For example: one hears of US people getting upset about “cultural appropriation” on behalf of others, when said others are actually actively happy about their culture being shown and appreciated. You can definitely take things too far in either direction.

[tadfisher]

There's a concept called "allyship", part of which means listening to marginalized people expressing negative reactions to certain popular demeaning acts and acting on their behalf to stop those acts.

In recent memory, you see this in response to last decade's trend of white people wearing Native American headdresses (particular to certain remaining groups of indigenous people in North America) at fashion shows and public events. This was practically the definition of cultural appropriation; in the cultures which display headdresses, one must earn the right to do so, and here you had the descendants of those who committed actual genocide wearing these symbols without even an attempt to understand their significance.

This is in a country that not only practiced genocide, it stole the children of native peoples, ostensibly to educate them to European norms, to cut them off from their hereditary culture; including their language and clothing. It's also a country that continues to ignore its own treaties with indigenous nations and erase their history through "termination" (the policy of un-recognizing individual tribes to eliminate their status).

So maybe it's popular here because this country is particularly terrible at appropriating culture. There's a ton of nuance you might miss if you don't live here and talk to people.

[WesolyKubeczek]

Good, but the number of internet stinks about this particular cultural appropriation I have encountered so far is zero. But I have encountered multiple dramas from people offended on behalf of the people who never asked them to whiteknight for them.