Linux Foundation's updated inclusive language guide
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It's somewhat common and perfectly acceptable, with no such history to it. The color black is the absence of light. You traditionally need light to see things. A box made entirely of black would therefor be impossible to see into. This is perfectly socially acceptable, is it not?
Electronics black boxes are a common item that allows one to enclose systems, hiding the way they are wired or networked, which is where the term originated from.
I struggle to understand how one would replace "ownership" in memory ownership. Memory responsibility? I would hope that it is still OK to be responsible for something, but this is still a form of "owning."
I suspect some of these will receive push back and fail to be adopted in the future, while a majority of them most people would not be able to find meaningful objections with.
You are correct.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/black
> The meaning "fierce, terrible, wicked" is from late 14c. The figurative senses often come from the notion of "without light," moral or spiritual. ... In English it has been the color of sin and sorrow at least since c. 1300; the sense of "with dark purposes, malignant" emerged 1580s (in black art "necromancy;" it is also the sense in black magic). ... The meaning "dark-skinned person, African" is from 1620s (perhaps late 13c., and blackamoor is from 1540s).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_exploration_of_Africa
> The Cape of Good Hope was first reached by Bartolomeu Dias on 12 March 1488, opening the important sea route to India and the Far East, but European exploration of Africa itself remained very limited during the 16th and 17th centuries. ... Exploration of the interior of Africa was thus mostly left to the Muslim slave traders, who in tandem with the Muslim conquest of Sudan established far-reaching networks and supported the economy of a number of Sahelian kingdoms during the 15th to 18th centuries.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/blackball
> The image is of the black balls of wood or ivory that were dropped into an urn as adverse votes during secret ballots.
All of the negative imagery associated with the colour black is completely intuitive: it represents an absence of light, which is essential to life. The Sun has been worshiped worldwide since antiquity. Nighttime was inherently dangerous in societies before the widespread artificial lighting made possible by electricity. It is exactly as you say.
The term https://www.etymonline.com/word/black%20box, meanwhile, is a modern invention.
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Of course, ultimately the root of all of this is in supposed colonialist attitudes as well as American slavery.
But in this medieval era when the language in question is first attested, the Europeans didn't establish any direct slave trade with sub-Saharan Africa; it's not clear to me that commoners in that society would have ever seen such a person. Slaves from sub-Saharan Africa would have come indirectly from the trade routes established by Arabs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Saharan_slave_trade), on the order of 10,000 people per year into a population of several tens of millions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_demography).
Of course, slavery in general dates to antiquity, and was well established in Europe in this era. But this largely picked up slaves from elsewhere in Europe and Asia Minor (Wikipedia has several articles on this). Going back further to ancient Roman times, north African slaves would have scarcely been any different in colour from the locals, having shared that same Mediterranean climate; and I'm pretty sure they also used to enslave "barbarians" from the northern regions.
This is nothing like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade (as a date reference: "In 1526, [the Portuguese] completed the first transatlantic slave voyage to Brazil.") This sent three times as many slaves across annually (with significant fractions of them dying in transit or shortly after arrival), into a smaller New World population, and also established the legal doctrine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partus_sequitur_ventrem) enabling generational chattel slavery. Under these conditions the proportion of African slaves in the general population was able to hold at well over 10% for decades after the English shut the trade down (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_Trade_Act_1807).
And then, you know, colonialism came later. For example, David Livingstone's exploration of Africa (i.e., European scholars still didn't have a full picture of the continent) was contemporary with the Emancipation Proclamation, and he wrote strongly against the East African slave trade he encountered (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Livingstone#Livingstone_...). Colonization of Africa mainly occurred after that point (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramble_for_Africa).
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So, yes. Terms like "black box", "blacklist", "blackball" etc. clearly have nothing to do with it. Meanwhile, although "master/slave" terminology obviously alludes to slavery, it is frightfully US-centric to project that specifically onto American history; and anyway none of the people objecting to it have given any explanation of why simply writing the words should cause harm — they only ever re-state points about how awful slavery in the US was. And as for the "master branch" of repositories, the argument that this has anything to do with human slavery requires multiple leaps of logic; see e.g. https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/21859 .
But activists of this stripe don't seem to care about what the history is, in my extensive experience.
I think "guys" is one of the few ones I disagree with, along with man hours, as in man meaning human, not man meaning male individuals. We don't stop using the term mankind because the word man is in it. It's not gendered.
To GP’s point, “guys” is interesting to me; it feels like a U-shape where people who don’t “get it” think it’s non-gendered, as do people who are very tuned in online (streamers, gaming spaces -which lean heavy male anyway -, highly online twitter types, etc) where cultural trends move and spread quickly. Then there’s kind of the middle I see, think HR activist types (acknowledging that HR does not always mean activist and vice versa) - clued in enough to follow the ideological trends, not quite enough to sense the ongoing shifts in real time. To be a bit reductive, I’d sum it up as something like people carrying the cultural context with them of the 2000s, the 2010s, or the 2020s
My experience with similar forms of argument (going back to at least 2007) leads me to believe otherwise. The same people who prescribe these kinds of changes will call themselves linguistic descriptivists as they chastise you for accepting the notion of a "standard" English or for buying in to treating certain dialects as more "prestigious" than others.
And at the same time that they ask you to give up words that they think have harmful connotations (based on associations that they make without heed to actual etymology or history), they will also push upon you modern coinages that were constructed to do the same, in the same way. Where this document asks me to avoid "jargon", I am quite sure they do not have in mind words and phrases such as "patriarchy", "toxic masculinity" or "man-$VERBing". (Not that there's any reason these concepts would come up in technical documentation, but policies like these are not by any means unique to tech.)
Saner minds eventually got things under control and replaced the code, but it took a couple of years and some good developers never came back. This kind of thing can do a lot of damage, not all of it obvious.
Because I always assumed a hung process was one that “hung up its boots” and retired, as in, the process has stopped working. It’s not dead, it’s no longer doing meaningful work or proceeding with a task.
I hope this has been an innocent, naïve understanding.
This is listed as a Linux Foundation "project" (https://www.linuxfoundation.org/projects), implying they receive one or more forms of support from the Foundation (https://www.linuxfoundation.org/projects/hosting) although there isn't a lot of transparency to be found here about funding etc. What is clear is that the Linux Foundation is one of the two things in the entire FOSS world receiving significant funding (the other being Mozilla; the funding received even by e.g. the Python Software Foundation is nowhere close, even if you count Fastly's in-kind donation to keep PyPI running) — and quite little of that money actually goes towards the development of the Linux kernel itself.
Attributing this guide to the Foundation as a whole doesn't seem well supported, though.
Except maybe sweaty gamers on Twitch whose identities revolve around being smelly gamers.
Do we understand these terms colloquially? Sure, but also the alternatives also contain the same meaning and do not cost us anything to use instead.
Good on the Linux Foundation for this especially in today’s climate.
> Avoid using terms that have social history. Terms that can have historical significance or impact in regards to race, ethnicity, national origin, gender, age, mental and physical ability, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, religion, and educational background.
> Avoid using idioms and jargons. These can exclude people who don’t have particular specialized knowledge, and many idioms don’t translate from country to country. Additionally, these sometimes have origins in negative stereotypes.
I can guarantee you, however, that they won't object if you use terms that deliberately make negative associations between "powerful" or "privileged" groups and various negative characteristics, that were specifically coined for activist or ideological purposes. And woe betide you if your own "particular specialized knowledge" doesn't extend as far as the "101" of their particular ideology.
I'm speaking from experience. If guidelines like these were applied fairly, we wouldn't see codes of conduct that preemptively reject claims of "reverse racism" or "reverse sexism" (which are not terms actually used by the people making such complaints). Yet I got banned (https://zahlman.github.io/posts/2024/07/31/an-open-letter-to... ; https://zahlman.github.io/pages/dpo/) from the Python discussion forums for (among other related things) objecting to such language, and then my objections were misrepresented as themselves being such claims — in the process, putting in my mouth the very words I consider invalid. (That incident is actually related to what brought me to HN a bit over a year ago.)
By the way, "jargon" is a collective noun and shouldn't be pluralized here.
> Write inclusive examples. Try to avoid using examples in documentation that is culturally-specific to a particular country, and be sure to use diverse names.
Of course, we are also counseled to ensure that we treat men and women as equal in our writing — as we should; but in some cultures that is heretical.
And "using diverse names" is going to get you in trouble when you choose two names from cultures that hate each others' guts and depict them having a pleasant interaction. Or when you misspell them, or use a politically contentious romanization of them, or are wrong about what gender they connote in that culture, or....
Not to mention the premise that names are associated with cultures in the first place. And not to mention what happens when someone decides that your examples have a bias towards depicting people from certain cultures as more capable than people from others, even if you got the names from an RNG. And that will eventually happen.
> Language that has historical or social roots, often assuming one classification as dominant over another.
Well, no, it doesn't. The etymology simply isn't what you imagine it to be, and there's generally reams of documentation of that fact.
It's frankly offensive to have others try to tell me what my own words mean, and assign purpose to them. These interpretations are not reasonable, and reflect a failure to engage with the culture and history of others in the same way they'd like done for them.
But I mean, seriously, they object to "housekeeping". How, even? If you think there's a negative connotation in that word, and if you furthermore think that there's something discriminatory to tie to that connotation, I think that says more about you than about the person who used it.
> Language that either assumes the gender of the users and developers, or that makes assumptions of a gender.
It quite literally doesn't in most cases. This is ignorant of English etymology and should be considered offensive, especially by speakers of Germanic languages.
Besides which, sometimes your group actually does consist of all men, and interlopers like this want to limit the forms of camaraderie deemed socially acceptable. From outside the group.
> Gendered pronouns (he/him/his, she/her/hers) → they, them, theirs
You should absolutely be permitted to "assume" the gender of a hypothetical person you made up in your own head for the purpose of laying out an example in documentation. And individuals have as much right to be offended by being referred to as "they" as by "he" or "she", according to their own respective preferences. You cannot have it both ways: if everyone's gender self-identification is supposed to be taken at face value, then you cannot also have gender-neutral, one-size-fits-all solutions.
> Language that assumes a certain state of body or mind as superior to others.
There is no "assumption" taking place here.
Let me apologize, though. Above, I used the word "invalid" as an adjective, to describe something I don't consider valid. But this is also used as a noun to describe people who are "sickly or disabled", excuse me (Merriam-Webster, how could you feed me such horrible language?), in poor health or... you know what, I genuinely don't know how to continue this.
> Normal → typical, usual
> Abnormal → atypical, unusual
These are synonyms. The supposedly problematic terms don't even have anything to do with "states of body or mind" in the first place.
> Language that makes assumptions based on age or that reinforce an age-based stereotype.
Okay, but...
> Grandfather, grandfathering, legacy → flagship, established, rollover, carryover
... really? The harmful "stereotype" that... people would like to leave an inheritance to their descendants? Or that people who have lived longer have experienced policies that are no longer in effect? What?
> Violent language: Language that practices a degree of aggression or machismo.
Hold on, "machismo", you say? As in:
> Machismo (/məˈtʃiːzmoʊ, mɑː-, -ˈtʃɪz-/; Spanish: [maˈtʃismo]; Portuguese: [maˈʃiʒmu]; from Spanish macho 'male' and -ismo)[1] is the sense of being "manly" and self-reliant, a concept associated with "a strong sense of masculine pride: an exaggerated masculinity".[2]
This is where the mask slips, although I think it was transparent to begin with. (Sorry about the use of idiom.) Yes, the same people that tell us to avoid "language that makes assumption of a gender" will happily and freely associate violence with masculinity on the same page. Thanks a lot, really. I certainly feel more included now.
I also have sympathy as, if this thread gets bigger, I bet you get more of the same reactions you’ve already described. Feels to me like this is less screaming into the void for nobody to hear and more into a hurricane where, for your troubles opening your mouth, it gives you back a metaphorical lungful of water to choke on and a metaphorical cloud of debris to batter you with.
Thanks for trying anyway
Edit:
> Thanks a lot, really. I certainly feel more included now.
Sadly, I believe that to them, this is a feature, not a bug
With respect, my politics are very different from what you seem to be inferring, if it makes sense to you to say that.
Love this one :D