I am strongly in favor of changing master to main. As a person currently in a country where 14 million of my people are enslaved, who also had experiences living in a factory as a child, with many friends who are descendents or have their own experiences being trafficked, this is one of those things that causes unnecessary cognitive ergonomic friction. It's a bandwidth tax for anyone not privileged enough to know only freedom.
As an engineering tool, creating pointless cognitive bandwidth sapping is counterproductive.
This is not just about history, this is about the present, where even in Florida there are 700k people who were trafficked in the last year. This is not just about the sensitivities of the privileged, but also about preserving the cognitive bandwidth of those without it.
An engineering tool should not cause emotional recoil just to use. Accessible and ergonomic design standards ought to be upheld to support seamless usage for all who use a tool.
Thank you,
Chandra Kethi-Reddy @archonphronesis:matrix.org
Sent from Proton Mail for iOS.
-------- Original Message -------- On Thursday, 05/14/26 at 19:00 A D <diop.alpha@gmail.com> wrote: It is not your role, as a tool, to try to engineer society through warnings or changes of names. Your role is to deliver solid, reliable versioning, that's it! Leave the rest to spheres where it can actually be done without weaponizing your position or your audience.
I happen to be black African myself, and I never had any problem with the term "Master", and its history for literal decades. The term has been used in Computer Engineering longer than some of you have been alive, and I see no reason to change, or to nudge people toward changing it, just because it offends the sensibilities of some of you, who I very much doubt are even black in the first place.
"Master" is a term with a history, and it's cool, if some of you are offended by it, change your repos, but leave ours alone and keep your warnings to yourself.
Cordially, Saliou Alpha Diop