The tech giant, who bought by Microsoft, will stop using the word “master” due to its relations to slavery. More and more companies now start thinking on these terms and will make changes in their terminology because of the “Black Lives Matter” movement that was gaining attraction lately after George Floyd death.
Some of the keywords that are going to be change are “Master”, “Slave”, “BlackList” and “WhiteList”. At first it seemed like big companies won’t support this effort, the picture is now different and GitHub is one of the first companies to do so.
Microsoft’s GitHub will change the term “Master” from all repositories and switch it with a natural name – “Main” in order to disassociate the repositories with slavery. Nat Friedman, the CEO of GitHub approved this move.
Friedman commented on a twitter post made by a Google developer that called to change the term from Master to Main and said the company is already working on it.
It seem like the Open Source company, GitHub, couldn’t ignore the protests in the US and according to Google’s developer Una Kravets, Google will act as well.
In GitHub, the term “Master” is used to find the default version of the repository that are stored in the platform. Developers takes the “Master” versions and add more layers to it.
Many followers on Twitter said that big company such as GitHub can’t just do symbolic actions like name changing and has to take big actions against racism like ban the ICE project. On the other hand, many followers said this action is basically meaningless because the term “Master” is used in context of “center” and not “slave”.
GitHub is not alone – Google will change terms like “BlackList” and “WhiteList” in android and their programming language Go. Some protesters online even want to change term in the cyber security world like “Black Hat” and “White Hat”.
