It's good that you find this GitHub initiative a useful reminder that racism can run very deep (including apparently harmless language), but for many people it is a reminder that:
- GitHub prefers cheap virtue signaling not only to actually caring about racism, but to technical merit and customer service: the public pays for this PR stunt with *millions* of adjustments to their repositories and working copies
- Branch names, and many other similar things, are now a battleground for freedom of expression, exposed to dangerous storms of political correctness
- GitHub has the arrogance of trying to control how people call their branches, and ultimately people's political ideology through the manipulation of language
For me and many others, the habit that is going to change (maybe slowly) is using GitHub.
> - GitHub prefers cheap virtue signaling not only to actually caring about racism, but to technical merit and customer service: the public pays for this PR stunt with millions of adjustments to their repositories and working copies
Neither git nor GitHub is forcing the branch names to change. git added the ability to specify a default branch instead of hardcoding it to 'master'. Github is taking this into consideration by allowing the users to specify their own default branch as well, and updating documentation and command examples to use 'main' as the default branch name.
> - Branch names, and many other similar things, are now a battleground for freedom of expression, exposed to dangerous storms of political correctness
No freedom of expression concerns here. You actually have more freedom now as git, GitHub, GitLab now make it easier to choose your own default/primary branch instead of hardcoding it to initialize to 'master'.
> - GitHub has the arrogance of trying to control how people call their branches, and ultimately people's political ideology through the manipulation of language
GitHub is not controlling anything. You, like always, can name your default branch 'master' if you want.
Microsoft can't stop publishing shit code full of security holes that get hacked every other day. If you want your software project to go south in a hurry take a dependency on any Microsoft product. This should be reason enough to ditch M$.
