"some idiot outraged over the removal of master/slave nomenclature"

Since GitHub repositories renaming their master branch did cost us significant money and almost caused downtime, I would be fully understanding if someone else is feeling outraged about it.

I belive you need to work on your example of a bad person ;)

How about we go with? And then in the same breath that gal defends selling people's secrets for pennies on the dollar and willingly accepting that they'll likely have very real negative consequences for your users once the private data in your database invariably gets leaked onto the internet.

Oh wait, that wouldn't leave much left at Facebook, wouldn't it?

So let's just question the moral integrity of anyone working at Facebook. Seems reasonable, given what egregious privacy infringements their work enables.

> Since GitHub repositories renaming their master branch did cost us significant money and almost caused downtime, I would be fully understanding if someone else is feeling outraged about it.

I think "outrage" is an inappropriate response. We're talking about removing nomenclature that has been (and continues to be) used to oppress an entire segment of society. I think removing that is worth a little money and downtime, if it comes to that. People who are "outraged" that it cost them some time and work probably could stand to show some compassion for their fellow humans.

> > Since GitHub repositories renaming their master branch did cost us significant money and almost caused downtime, I would be fully understanding if someone else is feeling outraged about it.

> I think "outrage" is an inappropriate response. We're talking about removing nomenclature that has been (and continues to be) used to oppress an entire segment of society.

In this specific case, outrage is appropriate because the nomenclature as used by git has nothing to do with "master/slave". It's a well-intentioned but misguided attempt at what you describe, unless you are making the preposterous claim that the word "master" should be purged from all contexts.

Of course, WRT this article and the discussion on it, if you try to point this out and discuss it at a company like Github (or mine) where the group making these decisions is convinced of their correctness you risk ostracization and career suicide. In fact, the statement you closed with

> People who are "outraged" that it cost them some time and work probably could stand to show some compassion for their fellow humans.

implies that you also are convinced of the correctness of this decision, and that anyone who objects to it is not compassionate (and by implication, not worthy of consideration). This is not a good approach to take if your goal is to educate.

Well, yes, I am convinced it's the correct decision, and by extension I do believe that people who disagree are at best misguided, and at worst are actively invested in perpetuating systemic inequality.

I'll agree that git's use of "master" is not as egregious as "master/slave" in database terminology, but it's still not great.

There are two prevailing uses of the term "master". One refers to the quality of being exceptionally good at a particular skill. By and large, I don't think most people have a problem uses of "master" where that's the intended meaning. But "master" in the sense of "leader" or "controlling" isn't great, even if (in the case of git's "master" naming) there isn't a corresponding "slave" role.

> if you try to point this out and discuss it at a company like Github (or mine) where the group making these decisions is convinced of their correctness you risk ostracization and career suicide

I agree that this is bad. These sorts of responses have a chilling effect on reasonable conversations and discussion. But in some ways I do understand why this happens; people who are directly affected by terminology like this are getting really tired of having the same conversations over and over about something that evokes significant emotional pain every time it's brought up. Again, it's not great, but I think it's understandable. And it's frankly hard to understand why using a word like "master" in technical terminology is somehow so important that it's even worth getting into repetitive discussion after discussion about it, especially when doing so causes some people pain. That's where the concerns about empathy and compassion come into play, because the people who constantly fight against this change do not seem to be even trying to look at this from someone else's point of view. (And I say this as someone who initially was resistant to these changes, but have since realized that I was wrong to do so.)

Surely it is very easy to take the moral high ground on these issues. But if you're the one working over-hours to fix the resulting mess, you start to wonder why those knights in shining armor forgot to show you the same compassion.

Usually, when open source projects introduce a breaking backwards-incompatible change, they will first deprecate things and then wait some months to give people time to update. After this nomenclature had been in use for 10+ years, I can't help but wonder why there was no time to take the user-friendly path in this instance.

So to the people who are fixing the mess, it certainly feels more like you got kicked because someone else wanted to show off his/her moral superiority.

There existed a reasonable way to change the nomenclature, but it wasn't taken.

> it certainly feels more like you got kicked because someone else wanted to show off his/her moral superiority.

And that's where the question of empathy and compassion comes in.

As a random white dude, the "pain" I face by dealing with problems around these name changes is completely minimal and trivial when compared to the emotional pain they cause people in certain groups that actually have a lived experience of oppression.

Regardless, I do agree that if there is crazy scrambling and short timelines to change these names, that's a problem in your org. There should not be reckless urgency to get this done; it should be done just as any other major change should be: with planning and risk assessments. Where I work, we are doing it slowly and with an eye toward not causing downtime. If your org is not doing that, then I agree that you have a valid complaint. But this complaint should be directed at the bad process, not at the work itself.