Microsoft, Google to replace coding terms such as ‘master/slave’ amid Black Live Matters Movement

GitHub is working on replacing terms that might be perceived as references to slavery with more neutral terms, according to reports.

The Microsoft-owned coding platform will replace terms such as "master" on its service with neutral terms like "main,” ZDNe t reported.

The platform follows a similar move by Google Chrome that had removed terms such as ‘blacklist’ and ‘whitelist’ replacing them with ‘blocklist’ and ‘allow list,” according to a Hindustan Times report.

Google Chrome developer Una Kravets on Friday had prompted the GitHub to follow Google in its move to remove such terms. GitHub CEO Nat Friedman had replied stating that they were already working o the issue.

“For what it’s worth, I’m *super* happy to rename the default branch structure of “master” to “main” and I hope we can all do this together as a community with @github leading the charge by implementing in their product moving forward,” Kravets had tweeted.

“It's a great idea and we are already working on this!” Friedman had replied.

The Black Live Matters movement amid the ongoing protests against racial discrimination and police brutality has made waves in the tech industry with multiple tech companies cleaning up their software language and removing references to slavery.

Companies are dropping terms such as "master" and "slave" and are replacing them with terms like "main/default/primary" and "secondary;" along with replacing "blacklist" and "whitelist" for "allow list" and "deny/exclude list," ZDNet reported.

In another instance, the Android mobile operating system, the Go programming language, the PHPUnit library and the Curl file download utility have also expressed interest to replace terms like blacklist/whitelist, the report said.

The OpenZFS file storage manager has also exchanged terms like master/slave with neutral replacements.

LinkedIn software engineer Gabriel Csapo also mentioned that he is in the process of filing requests to update many of Microsoft's internal libraries to get rid of racially-charged phrases, it said.

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