GioCities

blogs by Gio

Tagged: culture war

politics Ethical Source is a Crock of HotĀ Garbage

There’s this popular description of someone ā€œhaving brain wormsā€. It invokes the idea of having your mind so thoroughly infested with an idea to the point of disease. As with the host of an infestation, such a mind is poor-to-worthless at any activity other than sustaining and spreading theĀ parasite.

A ā€œpersistent delusion or obsessionā€œ. You know, like when you think in terms of legality so much you can’t even make ethical evaluations anymore, or when you like cops so much you stop being able to think about statistics, or the silicon valley startup people who try to solve social problems with bad technology, or the bitcoin people who responded to the crisis in Afghanistan by saying they should just adopt bitcoin. ā€œBad, dumb thingsā€. You get theĀ idea.

And,Ā well.

Okay, so let’s back way up here, because this is just the tip of the iceberg of a story that needs years of context. I’ll start with the most recent event here, the MastodonĀ tweet.

The Mastodon ContextšŸ”—

The ā€œheā€ Mastodon is referring to is ex-president-turned-insurrectionist Donald Trump, who, because his fellow-insurrectionist friends and fans are subject to basic moderation policies on most of the internet, decided to start his own social network, ā€œTruth Socialā€. In contrast to platforms moderated by the ā€œtyranny of big techā€, Truth Social would have principles of Free Speech, like ā€œdon’t read the siteā€, ā€œdon’t link to the siteā€, ā€œdon’t criticise the siteā€, ā€œdon’t use all-capsā€, and ā€œdon’t disparage the site or usā€. There are a lot of problems here already, but because everything Trump does is terrible and nobody who likes him can create anything worthwhile, instead of actually making a social networking platform, they just stole Mastodon wholesale.

Mastodon is an open-source alternative social networking platform. It’s licensed under an open license (the AGPLv3), so you are allowed to clone it and even rebrand it for your own purposes as was done here. What you absolutely are not allowed to do is claim the codebase is your own proprietary work, deliberately obscure the changes you made to the codebase, or make any part of the AGPL-licensed codebase (including your modifications) unavailable to the public. All of which Truth SocialĀ does.

So that’s the scandal. And so here’s Mastodon poking some fun at that.

politics Is (git) master a dirtyĀ word?

Git is changing. GitHub, GitLab, and the core git team have a made a system of changes to phase out the use of the word ā€œmasterā€ in the development tool, after a few years of heated (heated) discussion. Proponents of the change argue ā€œslavery is badā€, while opponents inevitably end up complaining about the question itself being ā€œoverly politicalā€. Mostly. And, with the tendency of people in the computer science demographic to… let’s call it ā€œconservatismā€, this is an issue that gets very heated, very quickly. I have… thoughts on this, in bothĀ directions.

Formal concerns about problematic terminology in computing (master, slave, blacklist) go back as early as 2003, at the latest; this is not a new conversation. The push for this in git specifically started circa 2020. There was a long thread on the git mailing list that went back and forth for several months with no clear resolution. It cited Python’s choice to move away from master/slave terminology, which was formally decided on as a principle in 2018. In June of 2020, the Software Freedom Conservancy issued an open letter decrying the term ā€œmasterā€ as ā€œoffensive to some people.ā€ In July 2020 github began constructing guidance to change the default branch name and in 2021 GitLab announced it would do the same.


First, what role did master/slave terminology have in git, anyway? Also, real quick, what’s git? Put very simply, git is change tracking software. Repositories are folders of stuff, and branches are versions of those folders. If you want to make a change, you copy the file, modify it, and slot it back in. Git helps you do that and also does some witchery to allow multiple people to make changes at the same time without breaking things, but that’s not super relevantĀ here.

That master version that changes are based is called the master branch, and is just a branch named master. Changes are made on new branches (that start as copies of the master branch) which can be named anything. When the change is final, it’s merged back into the master branch. Branches are often deleted after they’reĀ merged.