Mozilla gives 15k to remove "Slave" from build bot documentation

Timeless Lavender

Lord of Chinchilla
Feb 2, 2015
197
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This reminds me of psychology where there were scientific words that the general public used incorrectly for social and cultural context. Words like 'moron' and 'idiot' are actual scientific words that hold too much cultural baggage to be used professionally.

At the end of the day, it is their money and their right to spend it on this.
 

Areloch

It's that one guy
Dec 10, 2012
623
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Few things come to mind reading this:

1) This is the very definition of the concept of 'Feels before Reals'. Master/Slave has a perfectly technical use and doesn't imply or denote any human slavery was involved. Ditching all context to change some words around because it could make someone somewhere feel bad is NOT something to be encouraged.

2) While the people saying "Just don't donate" are entirely correct, it still feels like the people that did before this action should be allowed to at least voice their opinion on the subject, since, you know, their money was involved in some capacity. They're free to stop donating going forward to be sure, but I think it's fair that they can voice their disapproval pertaining to the money they already had donated going to something they disagree with.
 

Major_Tom

Anticitizen
Jun 29, 2008
799
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So they will only remove the word "slave", but leave "master"? As a Vault Dweller, I find that offensive.
 

munx13

Some guy on the internet
Dec 17, 2008
431
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Pluvia said:
munx13 said:
Yeah, they didn't make money to put it back into the project, they just spent it. On a problem that didn't exist.
So what you're saying is it's their money and they can spend it how they like?
I never said it was not their money, in fact, the first comment I made was how technically they are free to do with it as they want. The problem that I find here is that so much of their funding relies on donations, which in this case were (poorly) spent on purposes that werent mentioned or implied.

Pluvia said:
Well took you long enough but you finally got there.
not sure I want to continue this anymoe now
 

NiPah

New member
May 8, 2009
1,084
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Pluvia said:
Their money, they can spend it how they like. Don't think it matters if you get behind it or not.
Pretty sure no one was lining up to sue Firefox over their use of donated funds, but the fact that people are against practices such as this is meaningful.
I mean the fact that they spent 15k changing the programming language means they'll do just about anything for cheap PR.
 

fix-the-spade

New member
Feb 25, 2008
8,639
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Pluvia said:
Their money, they can spend it how they like. Don't think it matters if you get behind it or not.
It does seem like a waste of time though. Whatever their reasoning, surely $15k could be better spent than altering accepted technical terms.

It reminds me of when Oakley stopped using the term Asian Fit to describe their Asian Fit glasses. Fine, you think it's racist, but it's a term the entire optics industry uses and now nobody knows what your new terms mean (they went back to using Asian Fit after a couple of years). I doubt Mozilla will have quite that problem, but I bet they will still say slave/master when they're talking about code internally.
 

Zombie_Fish

Opiner of Mottos
Mar 20, 2009
4,584
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$15,000 is 3% of the total money Mozilla awarded to open source projects this time round. These points are already considered by the MOSS Selection Committee:[footnote]https://wiki.mozilla.org/MOSS#Selection_Criteria[/footnote]

Will this grant make a significant impact on the project?
Is the level of funding appropriate for the task to be accomplished?
Chances are the Selection Committee saw it as a low risk funding that could yield some benefits regardless of whether they agree with use of the term slave or not. After all, the money is also going towards making "improvements so Buildbot works better in the Amazon EC2 cloud."

Also, this isn't the first time this discussion has turned up either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master/slave_%28technology%29#Appropriateness_of_usage

Personally I'm more disgusted at the $75,000 going towards Mercurial, but that's just my preference for Git shining through.

EDIT: Added point about the MOSS Selection Committee's criteria.
 

Vigormortis

New member
Nov 21, 2007
4,531
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munx13 said:
I'm not sure how you came to a conclusion that I thought donating was mandatory.
Uh....did I say that you did?

You implied some people might not like where their donated money was going. I presented an easy solution. Don't donate.

How you took that to mean I implied you thought donating was mandatory is beyond me. Sorry.
 

cthulhuspawn82

New member
Oct 16, 2011
321
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Do we know the proper gender pronoun that build bot prefers, I dont want to offend it. Also, does anyone know if the Firefox mascot identifies at otherkin?
 

MysticSlayer

New member
Apr 14, 2013
2,405
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Revnak said:
After all, this is something that would need to be changed eventually anyway, assuming we ever create artificial intelligence or partially virtualized biological intelligence, so we may as well get it out of the way now.
Would you mind explaining the significance of AI to this, because I'm not seeing the connection.
 

iller3

New member
Nov 5, 2014
154
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Denamic said:
Next, we'll only have grey cables because having different colouring is racist.
you got me, I laughed out loud at this. ...as someone who does a lot of soldering, yeah that'd be a nightmare
 

Creator002

New member
Aug 30, 2010
1,590
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Personally, don't care. Besides some possible confusion and backwards compatibility issues, I don't really see many problems arising from the change.

That being said, if they don't change it to Dom and Sub, then we're going to have a problem.
 

shintakie10

New member
Sep 3, 2008
1,342
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NiPah said:
Pluvia said:
Their money, they can spend it how they like. Don't think it matters if you get behind it or not.
Pretty sure no one was lining up to sue Firefox over their use of donated funds, but the fact that people are against practices such as this is meaningful.
I mean the fact that they spent 15k changing the programming language means they'll do just about anything for cheap PR.
It was 15k to remove the terminology and to quote the relevant blog post.

to make improvements so Buildbot works better in the Amazon EC2 cloud
Its like people didn't bother to read anythin other than the OP's title and just jumped straight to "PC GONE CRAZY!"

On topic. I'm down with this change. Sure its a technical term that technically is relevant, but so would be the words they replace it with. Also the word they replace it with wouldn't be uncomfortable for anyone. Not sure why people think this is such a problem.
 

Revnak_v1legacy

Fixed by "Monday"
Mar 28, 2010
1,979
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MysticSlayer said:
Revnak said:
After all, this is something that would need to be changed eventually anyway, assuming we ever create artificial intelligence or partially virtualized biological intelligence, so we may as well get it out of the way now.
Would you mind explaining the significance of AI to this, because I'm not seeing the connection.
It would be odd to have terms like that being used to denote the status of an independent intelligence, or even the device it exists on. Then again, I'm kinda assuming that slave in a technical context is similar to how it is used in Shadowrun, so I may be super mistaken. Somehow, despite being a programmer and an IT consultant, this term has never come up for me outside of Shadowrun.
 

NiPah

New member
May 8, 2009
1,084
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shintakie10 said:
NiPah said:
Pluvia said:
Their money, they can spend it how they like. Don't think it matters if you get behind it or not.
Pretty sure no one was lining up to sue Firefox over their use of donated funds, but the fact that people are against practices such as this is meaningful.
I mean the fact that they spent 15k changing the programming language means they'll do just about anything for cheap PR.
It was 15k to remove the terminology and to quote the relevant blog post.

to make improvements so Buildbot works better in the Amazon EC2 cloud
Its like people didn't bother to read anythin other than the OP's title and just jumped straight to "PC GONE CRAZY!"

On topic. I'm down with this change. Sure its a technical term that technically is relevant, but so would be the words they replace it with. Also the word they replace it with wouldn't be uncomfortable for anyone. Not sure why people think this is such a problem.
True, after reading it I was completely wrong.
I was just pissed as pluvia's "you can't do shit, your opinion is meaningless" post that got tacked on and did something I hate, offering an opinion when I don't know what's going on.
Thank you for the heads up though, at least now I know what's going on.