Following George Floyd's death that sparked numerous Black Lives Matter protests, the terms 'black' and 'white' have become an increasingly sensitive subject.
This can include dealing with the terms on the internet. For example, the terms 'black' and 'white' have long been used to differentiate what shouldn't be allowed and what should be allowed. These terms may be offensive to the black community.
This is why tech companies are starting to remove some of those terms that they found may refer to slavery, in order to appeal the black community.
GitHub for example.
The global company that provides hosting for software development version control is working to replace terms that may be offensive to the black community, by removing unnecessary references to slavery, according to CEO Nat Friedman.
This includes GitHub in dropping terms like 'master' and 'slave' for alternatives like 'main/default/primary' and 'secondary', and also terms like 'blacklist' and 'whitelist' for 'allow list' and 'deny/exclude list'.
The code-hosting portal is just one out of a long line of tech companies and open source projects that have expressed support for removing terms that may be offensive to some.
The next that should be noted, is the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), the Go programming language, OpenZFS, and Grammarly.
They all have changed their terminology to remove terms that are racially suggestive.
These entities have made changes to 'whitelist' and 'blacklist' and replace them with more neutral terms like 'allowlist' and 'blocklist'.
LinkedIn is following close behind them, as noted by its engineer Gabrial Csapo, and so does Apple, according to its engineer John Wilander.
Some other programming languages such as Curl and PHPUnit library have also changed in their repositories.
They were then followed by OpenSSL encryption software library, automation software Ansible, Microsoft's PowerShell scripting language, the P5.js JavaScript library, and many others.
Google Chrome project also considered a similar move, as tweeted by its developer Una Kravets.
Security community! Can we please agree on what terms we're using instead of "whitelist" and "blacklist"? It would be great to make these consistent.
— Maya Kaczorowski (@MayaKaczorowski) June 11, 2020
This kind of move isn't actually new.
In the past, there were projects and organizations that started editing their terms. Drupal for example, oped for primary and replica since 2014; Python programming language removed the references to master/slave terminology in 2018; a UK government-backed cybersecurity company stopped using whitelist and blacklist in May 2020.
They were then followed by Chromium (the open source browser project at the base of Chrome), Microsoft's Roslyn .NET compiler, PostgreSQL and Redis database systems.
The difference between that time and following George Floyd's death at the knee of a white male police officer is that, Floyd's case prompted the developer community to react altogether, meaning that a surge in name changing is happening in many tech companies, organizations and projects, at the same time.
Most of these projects manage their source code via the Git software, or the GitHub online portal (which provides Git-based source code hosting).
Maya Kaczorowski, a product manager at GitHub, is trying to urge the industry to use a uniform terminology, but there might be some people won't follow.
It should be noted that a change like this,
This is because changing some of the terms is considered a massive overhaul. Developers may need to re-learn some of their experiences, as the name changing may have changed the source code.
What this means, transition may not be easy.
But the move is a positive step for the industry and the whole community to better support Black Lives Matter, and help end racism towards minorities and people of colors.
Later in July, Linus Torvalds, the principal engineer of the Linux kernel, approved new terminology for its code and documentation to promote the inclusive language. The change abolishes terms such as blacklist, master, and slave.
