I've been around long enough to have set up MySQL master/slave replication back when those were just the words. git checkout master is what I typed when that was the default, and it's what my fingers still reach for. The habit is old.

The word "master" carries weight for some people and I don't want to be dismissive about that — names do matter. MySQL's switch to source/replica is faithful to what it was fixing: the pair was master/slave, and half of that pair is unambiguously awful. Renaming both halves at once is reasonable, even if "source/replica" reads a little awkwardly to my ear.

Git is a different shape. There is no slave branch. There never was. master in git is the master of the house, not the owner of another person — closer to a master copy of a recording, or the master key for a set of locks. Renaming it to main swaps the word without changing anything the word was attached to, because there was nothing else there.

If the argument is inclusion, the accounting has to be honest. Slavery was abolished in the US in 1865; the weight the word still carries comes from that history and the long tail of stigma it left behind. That history deserves respect. But the people a 2021 rename is protecting are not the people who were actually enslaved.

Meanwhile, "master" is alive in contexts where it's an entirely positive word. Maid cafes start with "Goshujin-sama" — master — and that's part of the point of going. The maids aren't slaves; they serve within a set of rules, and most of them are there because they enjoy the cosplay or have some reason to like the role. There's nothing negative about any of it. Anime fans of the genre — many of whom have never set foot in a maid cafe — use the word in the same positive sense. So do people who voluntarily play this kind of role with partners or friends.

Including a group that isn't around anymore, by writing over a word that a lot of living people use happily, isn't really inclusion. It's a trade, and not one everyone in the room was asked about.

Nothing against main. I just don't like pretending the rename did something it didn't. Mine will keep saying master until someone gives me an actual reason to retype it.