Worse, they scale in the other direction. Post modernist literary theory declares, among other things, that language acts on a subconscious level, the reader, rather than the author, is the arbiter of meaning, and that central arbiters of truth do not exist. Which is an interesting perspective to criticize a novel, but it raises holy hell when the written work–the linux kernel-- depends on being unambiguous.
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Ah, so the corporate wokewashing is already starting. Heh. So much bravery. It’s rather absurd how predictable this is…not sure if this tops Microsoft/Github - and other companies that piled on like IBM and so on - for forcing everyone else to change from “master” to “main” (I guess the phrase “master copy” is now verboten? Talk about “centering” things on American culture, I guess? My understanding is the rest of the world did a collective shrug at this.) and give themselves gigantic claps on the back for making others do work, and scolding “pale males” in the open source world for supposed transgressions, real or perceived (but changing nothing substantive about their own corporations, naturally), but we’ll see how it plays out.
They might top Microsoft’s actions if they manage to blame-shift this onto some powerless “pale males” putting in their own time on something (or getting paid rather average salaries) all while doing nothing substantive about their corporate culture. Nike is maybe second in the running for high-profile absurdist wokewashing…
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Did it go with “slave copy” as the counterpart? Because that was the actual problem. Nobody is upset when you talk about mastering your field or something like that, they didn’t like the analogy of something as horribly cruel as slavery for something simple like running chained processes. Funny you missed that part. 
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That decision was made during the fraught summer of 2020, at the prompting of the OSS org Software Freedom Conservancy. The change, which also effectively eliminated the “slave” part of the paradigm, only affected new repositories. While most devs shrugged it off a small and vocal minority of white males whinged about it, no doubt in the same way they whinge when a change in a pop culture franchise “destroys their childhood”.
That doesn’t mean that the action somehow redeems Microsoft’s many other flaws, but making a start at removing “master” and “slave” from common IT parlance was a lot more substantive and pro-active than this BS Spotify press release.
[if you want to discuss this further I’ll be glad to move it off to a topic of its own rather than de-rail.]
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On no, please, let’s let this get derailed by some “white man’s burden” bullshit. That never gets old.
/s
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Um, I’m not aware of a corresponding “slave” terminology used in git - at all. The master terminology was a reference to the “master copy”. Also, again, this was a “brave” move by a corporation - foisting lots and lots of changes to be made by other people in their superficial bravery.
Then, they later fired someone for calling the insurrectionists Nazis. Also, as far as I know, there have been no real fundamental changes post-2020 to orgs such as Microsoft (and those that piled on with the name change for repos).
This is the problem with corporate woke-washing. It’s superficial feel-goodery aimed at deflection and blame-shifting.
I’m just fine with actual master/slave terminology removed - I’ve always thought that was stupid, and I’ve been in IT forever. To be clear. And the name from master->main (although there is no corresponding slave terminology in git, so it was rather silly and knee-jerk and makes about as much sense as replacing every instance of “master copy” or “master key” with other terms. No one says “slave copy” or “slave key” as counterparts, just like no one says “slave branch” for a non-master branch), again, whatever, don’t care. It’s fine… But to pretend that Microsoft is really doing something here…nope, not going along with it, sorry.
One of the subjects I teach is Adobe InDesign layout software. In their most recent update I notice that they too changed the terminology of “Master Page” to “Parent Page.” Seems like a perfectly reasonable change to me, though I still find myself slipping in class thanks to about two decades’ worth of habit. I’m sure I’ll get used to the new term soon enough though.
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