Red Hat to remove contentious terms like master and slave from its source code
1–10 of 104 posts
Re: Red Hat to remove contentious terms like master and slave from its source code
#2We live in the dumbest time-line.
Re: Red Hat to remove contentious terms like master and slave from its source code
#3What does stuff like this actually do except give them some good PR? It doesn't end racism or help black lives at all. It seems like a corporate facade of change while ignoring the real material issues of life for black inidividuals that these major protests pointed out.
Re: Red Hat to remove contentious terms like master and slave from its source code
#4What does stuff like this actually do except give them some good PR? It doesn't end racism or help black lives at all. It seems like a corporate facade of change while ignoring the real material issues of life for black inidividuals that these major protests pointed out.
Does it really give them good PR though?
Re: Red Hat to remove contentious terms like master and slave from its source code
#5Google is also mass refactoring internally as well, blacklist/whitelist are now blocklist/allowlist and so on. It's quite a bit of churn.
Re: Red Hat to remove contentious terms like master and slave from its source code
#6The New New International version of the Bible is going to be soo awesome.
Re: Red Hat to remove contentious terms like master and slave from its source code
#7What does stuff like this actually do except give them some good PR? It doesn't end racism or help black lives at all. It seems like a corporate facade of change while ignoring the real material issues of life for black inidividuals that these major protests pointed out.
I'm afraid the only thing that will come out of this is platitudes like this and no real change long term, at least until it all blows up again. Changing packaging is easy and gets you press. Search and replace is a little harder, but can be done with not many resources. Re-culturing a 100+ year old police departments independently while maintaining that police department's purpose is very hard and we have to do it for every bad one out there. Many cases need to be a complete ground-up effort.
I think people who can actually do the work and enact that change are hoping it will just blow over with the next news cycle, because it's hard.
I have hope though. I don't like living with our current justice system.
Re: Red Hat to remove contentious terms like master and slave from its source code
#8What does stuff like this actually do except give them some good PR? It doesn't end racism or help black lives at all. It seems like a corporate facade of change while ignoring the real material issues of life for black inidividuals that these major protests pointed out.
The way I see it: free advertising. Nothing beats piggybacking on a hot topic by presenting a non-issue as an actual issue or a threat. Which is what that is, given that as far as cs is concerned, "master" and "slave" refer to concepts which have nothing in common with slavery, colonialism, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, bigotry or whatever other buzzword you may think of. What is a bit worrying is that those exact methods of promotion were used on several occasions in history, and neither of them produced a good result.
Re: Red Hat to remove contentious terms like master and slave from its source code
#9Why not owner or subject?
Are accountants not to refer to master records?
Do we have to stop killing child processes?
Re: Red Hat to remove contentious terms like master and slave from its source code
#10In discussions about this on social media, there's significant push back from those who are actually affected by the issues BLM is fighting for, who feel moves like this are more white guilt with no real change for what really matters. I'm sure an at-risk youth, when pulled over by two white police officers, is grateful that a bunch of highly paid programmers aren't subjected to politically incorrect variable names.
(edited: I referred to this group as "BLM core", but I realize that's confusing to some)