GitHub is working on replacing the term "master" on its service with a neutral term like "main" to avoid any unnecessary references to slavery, its CEO said on Friday.
The code-hosting portal is just the latest in a long line of tech companies and open source projects that have expressed support for removing terms that may be offensive to developers in the black community.
This includes dropping terms like "master" and "slave" for alternatives like "main/default/primary" and "secondary;" but also terms like "blacklist" and "whitelist" for "allow list" and "deny/exclude list."
The concern is that continued use of these racially-loaded terms could prolong racial stereotypes.
"Such terminology not only reflects racist culture, but also serves to reinforce, legitimize, and perpetuate it," wrote academics in a 2018 journal[1].
BLM protests spurs new efforts to clean out software language
Now, spurred by the Black Lives Matter protests across the US, the tech community is engaging again in efforts to remove such language from source code, software applications, and online services.
For starters, the Android[2] mobile operating system, the Go programming language, the PHPUnit[3] library and the Curl[4] file download utility have stated their intention to replace blacklist/whitelist with neutral alternatives.
Similarly, the OpenZFS file storage manager[5] has also replaced its master/slave terms used for describing relations between storage environments with suitable replacements.
Gabriel Csapo, a software engineer at LinkedIn, said on Twitter this week[6] that he's also in the process of filing requests to update many of Microsoft's internal libraries and remove any racially-charged phrases.
Other projects that don't use racially-charged constructs in their source code or user interfaces directly are now looking at their source code repositories.
Most of these projects