June 9, 2020

What's in a name?

I decided to catalogue examples of engineers– primarily software developers– being asked to change a name to avoid being racist, sexist, transphobic, ableist, or otherwise bigoted. About half of these examples come from responses to my AskMetaFilter question.

Note: This list is not any sort of exhaustive or representative sample. I offer it as a starting point for anyone interested in reading more about how tech communities respond. If you find any links that should be added, please don’t hesitate to send me an email.

✓ accepted
✗ rejected
~ unclear / not applicable

????? ✓ PCI bus uses “target” instead of “slave” after reviewer objects.
2003 ~ LA County asks manufacturers, suppliers and vendors to stop using “master”/“slave”
2011 ✓ Rename Mozilla “libpr0n” to image
2011 ✓ The C Markdown library “Upskirt” renamed to Sundown
2013 ~ “the Pidora name bears an unfortunate similarity to another word in Russian”
2013 ✓ Rename “Feedzirra” to Feedjira.
2013 ✓ Rename “teabag.js” to teaspoon
2013 ✓ Rename “testacular” to karma
2013 ✓ Use gender-neutral pronouns in the lubuv repository.
2013 ✓ The SCRUM guide renames backlog “grooming” to backlog “refining.”
2014 ✓ Django stops using “master”/“slave”
2014 ✓ Drupal stops using “master”/“slave”
2014 ✗ Attempt to rename the PHP library “ColorJizz”.
2015 ✓ Rename “moron.js” to objection.js
2015 ~ Rose Eveleth recommends changing “male/female” connectors to “muffin/pan”.
2015 ✓ chromium: Make code and contents gender neutral
2016 ✓ Redis stops using “master”/“slave”
2017 ✗ Attempt to rename “voluptuous”
2017 ✓ The Ruby gem “factory_girl” becomes factory_bot.
2018 ✓ Rails uses allowlist/denylist instead of “blacklist”/“whitelist”
2018 ✗ Richard Stallman refuses to remove an abortion joke in the glibc manual.
2018 ✓ IETF publishes “Terminology, Power and Oppressive Language”
2018 ✗ Rename “pydor,” which is a derogatory term for homosexual in Russian.
2018 ✓ Rename Erlang library “coon” to “enot.”
2018 ✗ Attempt to rename “nipple.js”
2018 ✓ ContributorCovenant: Consider renaming the “master” branch
2018 ✗ Avoid “master”/“slave” terminology
2018 ✓ chromium: Avoid the racially-charged terms “blacklist” and “whitelist”
2019 ✓ yellowbrick renames poof() method to show()
2019 ✓ Angular.js - Rename “blacklist”/“whitelist”
2019 ~ GIMP forked as Glimpse after GIMP devs refuse to change the name.
2019 ✗ Gnome: Replacing “master” reference in git branch names.

There’s a TON of 2020 Pull Requests about this, so I am going to pick some of them.