Why? You were always free to delete or rename the master branch. There are enough repositories which don't have a master branch. Unlike SVN (trunk), in git "ma

Why? You were always free to delete or rename the master branch. There are enough repositories which don't have a master branch. Unlike SVN (trunk), in git "master" really has no value to the VCS. I also assume this will be for new repositories, so Github won't break builds by changing existing repositories - because that would indeed mess up a lot.