Racial injustice is alive and well in the United States. You’d be hard pressed to find a software engineer that disagrees with that statement, and who doesn’t want to be part of meaningful change for our POC brothers and sisters.

You would also be hard pressed to find many software engineers that would have thought there was anything wrong with how the “master” branch is named.

For those who are not aware, most code is hosted in online repositories like GitHub. Every repository begins with one version, or branch, which has been named “master” by default for over 15 years to designate that branch as the central production ready version of any application.

The average software engineer has had nothing to do with the echo chamber at Git that has been pushing these radical changes. They’re radical because no one asked for them.

We really do appreciate that Git wants to do something to combat racial justice, but the name of the “master” branch will do nothing of the sort. I, along with the majority of software engineers, will tell you that no one has ever taken issue with the name “master”. And it’s been around for more than a decade!

Master is not a racially charged word and meaningless changes like this serve nothing more than to usher our descent into an Orwellian state of groupthink, to the point where we’re banning innocent words from our vocabulary for the crime of association.

Thanks, Git, but no thanks.

In addition to signing this petition, also feel free to leave dislikes on the ongoing discussion at Git.