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Comment by oliwarner | Hacker News Reader

Sure... But why not remove imagery of slavery from tech syntax?

We have plenty of other organisational terms to denote a higher rank. What's wrong with those? They might even be more accurate. I don't suppose DBAs get in a ship to pillage and loot foreign lands for their database redundancy.

I see too many people arguing semantics or historical bias, or whataboutisms but barely anybody giving positive arguments to preserve the master-slave terms in tech. If "all races have had slavers" is the best you've got, perhaps it's time for change.

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There's no technical reason to make this change, it's an annoying change with literally zero positive impact on the world, this won't abolish slavery nor will it help anyone, it may help the promoters of this stupidity to feel better about themselves, like "look at us! we are aligned with the PC agenda! We're sooo progressive and docile!"

No technical reason, but clearly a political reason. And politics matter in an open project where diversity and collaboration are so important to their long-life goals.

You don't agree —and that's fine— but does it harm you to rename it? That is past the initial inconvenience of it not being the word that it's been before... Is that any more inconvenient than the other API changes that almost all software goes through at some point?

I can understand some light grumbling, but I don't see why people get so bent out of shape they feel the need to start summarising slavery through the ages.

"It's just a word" swings both ways.

What harm does it do to rename things based on nothing but the pathetic impulse to abide by the nonsensical PC agenda? Well, it introduces the need for me as a developer to adjust to a new naming scheme for no good reason, we know APIs change all the time, and adjusting to new naming schemes is part of the job, but when a project decides to break an API its always for a good reason, no professional team will ever break an API on a whim, because in most projects, people are aware that breaking APIs immediately deprecates massive amounts of code, and that these changes should only be made only if it's absolutely necessary; breaking APIs and forcing everyone else that just want to get the work done to comply to this nonsense is not going to help slaves around the world, if you really want to take action, set a donation prompt for a charity on the README or in the program itself as Vim does, but don't annoy the rest of us with this bs just so that you can feel better about yourself ffs

I can't tell if I'm just spinning my wheels at this point, but they're not trying to make themselves feel better, it's about fostering an environment for including those who do care. OpenZFS wants a more diverse user and developer community. Good for them.

And if you think that no professional developers ever break their APIs on a whim, you're either very young, or haven't been paying attention. Google does this all the time across their ecosystem. It's annoying, but you learn to get over it.

If you don't like it, fork it.

"it's about fostering an environment for including those who do care", that's exactly right, and my whole argument is that those who do care are not the ones that are affected by slavery, the people that care about these innocuous things are first-world neocons who haven't had to deal with any real problems in their lives, and my annoyance comes by the fact that people now just don't seem to have the guts to stand up to these trolls; this literally won't help make their community or userbase more diverse, in any case, it introduces confusion because any guides or tutorials around the net that used the term slave are now misleading/deprecated

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