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It's crazy how much effort people expend fighting against this. No one is asking you to do development work to make it happen. No one is forcing you to update

It's crazy how much effort people expend fighting against this. No one is asking you to do development work to make it happen. No one is forcing you to update your repositories or change your workflow. You're free to continue using whatever names you want for branches in your own repositories. If other people want to do this change and are the ones doing it, why spend so much time getting so heated about it?

amSNAY 6y ago
I would not get worked up about it if it came from individual OSS projects, out of their own free will, one by one. However, in several OSS projects I follow, it was always corporate steered "open" source devs who "proposed" the change and rammed it through, often against the majority opinion. To further their careers and stroke their egos. Now GitHub, who still does business with sketchy companies (as does MSFT) does this entirely meaningless virtue signalling change. Just to show OSS devs who is the boss and that they can do whatever they like with their money.
- Larrikin 6y ago
  All of these meaningless gestures to you add up over time. A single company supporting BLM was untenable when the NFL players were doing their protests but they continued. The current protests were considered meaningless but they continued and are effecting change in society and also in legislation. The small things actually matter and it seems this small gesture matters to a lot of people on here even as they continue to say it's meaningless because removing references to slavery actually isn't meaningless.
Udik 6y ago
Because language is a shared good, established by convention. When you unilaterally decide that a word in the language I use (and own, for my part) is tainted, and by chance- because you maintain a piece of software- you have enough power to impose your views, then one of two things happen: either you force me to change my language against my will (which I perceive as an aggression, because I own my language), or I decide to ignore you. But in this case, since I have to wilfully ignore you, by doing so I am implicitly making a statement, which might be (and will be) misinterpreted.

amSNAY 6y ago

I would not get worked up about it if it came from individual OSS projects, out of their own free will, one by one. However, in several OSS projects I follow, it was always corporate steered "open" source devs who "proposed" the change and rammed it through, often against the majority opinion. To further their careers and stroke their egos. Now GitHub, who still does business with sketchy companies (as does MSFT) does this entirely meaningless virtue signalling change. Just to show OSS devs who is the boss and that they can do whatever they like with their money.

Larrikin 6y ago
All of these meaningless gestures to you add up over time. A single company supporting BLM was untenable when the NFL players were doing their protests but they continued. The current protests were considered meaningless but they continued and are effecting change in society and also in legislation. The small things actually matter and it seems this small gesture matters to a lot of people on here even as they continue to say it's meaningless because removing references to slavery actually isn't meaningless.

Udik 6y ago

Because language is a shared good, established by convention. When you unilaterally decide that a word in the language I use (and own, for my part) is tainted, and by chance- because you maintain a piece of software- you have enough power to impose your views, then one of two things happen: either you force me to change my language against my will (which I perceive as an aggression, because I own my language), or I decide to ignore you. But in this case, since I have to wilfully ignore you, by doing so I am implicitly making a statement, which might be (and will be) misinterpreted.