Hacker News

Not necessarily.

The technical people managing the repos might just be opposed to name changing in general (seeing how a boatload of links, references, documentation would require updating, some of which you don't even control), and meanwhile those people might feel the "misbranding" drawbacks much less (if at all).

Name changes are controversial. Nothing gets nerds going more than changing a project name so companies work better with OSS.

Preach. And it's a disease.

Signed, the guy who will forever believe GIMP could have been a contender with a name change decades ago.

I think it makes them own you - a little. You look subsidiary to Wacom.

Pretty sure the reason is, that anybody who could actually do the changes thinks works for me, the alternative is a lot of work for little technical gain.

And besides once you start your tablet for Linux Projekt you have to touch everything, so that is a nice opportunity to finally refactor the wacom_debug_2 mess and pretty soon you're drowning in yak shavings.

When I started using a graphics tablet, long ago, I was confused about why all this stuff was labelled Wacom, and whether it was applicable to me or not, when using a device of another brand. Some parts of it seemed to be, and other parts didn’t? It was very confusing, and a genuine confusion that made me uncertain even in purchasing. (It would be less confusing now because user-facing parts don’t touch the “Wacom” name as much any more.)

Whereas the “master” thing was transparent linguistic nonsense and a strictly-US cultural thing that a few people foisted on the rest of the world because they decided to get offended on behalf of a hypothetical group.

The difference I think is that it is reasonable for a company to not want to bother working in a project named after their competitor, when "master" has always had multiple meanings from "formal title for a young boy" to "really experienced tradesperson" to "authoritative record" and it is somewhat unreasonable to associate "authoritative record" with "slave master", especially since git branches were rarely named "slave". Wacom is a brand that hasn't been Xerox'ed or Kleenex'd or Band-aided. I don't call every drawing tablet a Wacom.

> Neither change has any technical reason. The only reason why either name change was desired is because some contributors were upset by the names.

Indeed, neither has any technical reason.

I suppose you're right that both changes have a purpose -- one could feasibly convince a company to contribute Linux drivers (a net win for everyone), and the other is a constant annoyance which wastes everyone's time (is this project using `main`, or `master` -- you never know, so have fun getting it wrong all the time) just to allow certain groups of people/corporations to virtue signal**.

** -- If "master" is such a naughty word then where are all of the people getting offended by e.g. "Mastercard", "Ticketmaster", "Master Lock", "MasterBrand", and many other company/product names, and why those names aren't getting changed? Why there isn't any outrage about them? My point here is not to engage in whataboutism, but just to point out that the word isn't actually offensive when used in a non-offensive manner, and virtually no one is actually genuinely upset about it.

I'm entering troubled waters but hey... The master to main issue is an accident of the history of the USA, still unresolved in its consequences, when most of the world was not practicing slavery anymore. The typical reaction outside the USA is rolling eyes and hope that all the ethnic groups inside the USA will finally get along. If the IT and economic powerhouse of the world were India instead of the USA and Indians would have picked master instead of main despite the British colonial period, this would be a non-issue: the USA could use a different convention (like for units of measurement) and the rest of the world wouldn't notice.

BTW, every country had its expansionist and genocidal and slavery moments (I'm from Italy, think about the Roman expansion inside Italy, then the empire or our colonial wars 100 years ago.) The USA is one of the most recent examples. It takes time and I understand that master vs main is important inside the country.

The issue of Wacom branding is different because it's a business dynamic and businesses don't want to work for competitors no matter the country, no matter the history. They can work together or an equal footing. So rename to libtablet or whatever.

or Drawing Tablet Drivers for Linux

but open source will never have such sensible names. It'll probably be called something like Ujagu Flemble or Bananahead.

Or, as is tradition, something stupid like “the gimp” or “go”.