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Loaded terms in free software

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Thursday 25th of June 2020 01:44:56 AM Filed under
GNU

The FSF has often refused to talk with news organizations (including LWN) without an advance promise that at least some of its word-use proscriptions would be followed in any resulting article. The loss of coverage resulting from that condition is, seemingly, considered a price worth paying in order to keep distance from perceived illegitimate use of loaded terms.

In the wider community, terms like "master" and "slave" have been the source of discomfort for some time; some projects have moved away from those terms in recent years. Current events — and not just in the U.S. — have raised awareness and greatly accelerated efforts in this direction. The topic has recently come up in the kernel community, which has also been discussing a proposal to replace "blacklist" and "whitelist" with "denylist" and "allowlist".

This discussion is not just limited to the kernel, though. The Git community is debating renaming the default "master" branch to something else — a change that is already being made at major Git-hosting companies and which is almost certain to be adopted. Similar discussions are being held in the Ansible community, the curl project, the Go language community, the OpenSSL project, the PHP community, and beyond. The Python community mostly eliminated these terms in 2018.

Needless to say, there has been opposition to these changes. Some of it comes from the usual spontaneous sock-puppet accounts that proliferate around this kind of discussion — but not all of it. Opponents make the point that words with the same spelling have different meanings in English, and that a slave device has nothing to do with an enslaved human. Making these changes, they argue, distorts the language, creates endless code churn, and confuses users in support of a sort of political correctness that does little, if anything, to address the actual problem of systemic racism. There is also a slippery-slope argument that can be heard; will one get into trouble for claiming to have mastered a difficult subject or listing one's master's degree on a resume? What should the kernel's position be on red-black trees?

Read more

Also: Ian Jackson: Renaming the primary git branch to "trunk"

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