According to The Apache Software Foundation, its name was chosen "from respect for the various Native American nations collectively referred to as Apache, well-known for their superior skills in warfare strategy and their inexhaustible endurance".[15] This was in a context in which it seemed that the open internet -- based on free exchange of open source code -- appeared to be soon subjected to a kind of conquer by proprietary software vendor Microsoft; Apache co-creator Brian Behlendorf -- originator of the name -- saw his effort somewhat parallel that of Geronimo, Chief of the last of the free Apache peoples.[16][17] But it conceded that the name "also makes a cute pun on 'a patchy web server'—a server made from a series of patches".
Correct, the keyword is respect. Apache is a modern label to describe various groups of Native Americans, who were on the verge of being conquered and colonized by an expanding empire. Like your quote says, Apache shares a similar, albeit less existential, plight and mission in software.
As a not-white person, the disrespect being discussed here seems imaginary.
I wonder if the disrespect others see is because of a belief in a hierarchy of victimhood. The kind that grants authority to members whose ancestors who were once oppressed. Authority that justifies private ownership, authority that cannot be questioned, authority that demands greater and greater respect, if not obedience.
Imagine if this was called the Irish Software Foundation or the Palestinian Software Foundation or the Xhosa Software Foundation or the Asheknazi Software Foundation.
> The Irish Software Foundation was named from respect for the Irish people, well-known for their fighting spirit and perseverance against hundreds of years of adversity.
> The Ashkenazi Software Foundation was named from respect for the various Jewish peoples of Europe collectively known as Ashkenazi, well-known for their strong academic traditions.
It would be so blatantly idiotic and racist that nobody would ever do it.
The name "Apache Software Foundation" sucks, and this is long overdue.
> Imagine if this was called the Irish Software Foundation or the Palestinian Software Foundation or the Xhosa Software Foundation or the Asheknazi Software Foundation.
You mean like the "Fighting Irish" from University of Notre Dame? I'm Irish and I've never heard anyone criticise them. In fact they are welcomed to Ireland for St Patricks day parades.
You can find a small group of people to complain about anything, especially in a world where being offended gets you clicks and attention.
You said "It would be so blatantly idiotic and racist that nobody would ever do it". People have being doing exacty this forever and, while it may be sometimes cringe-worthy or even insensitive, I would contend it is not inherently a bad thing to find inspiration in other peoples culture and history.
> The Irish Software Foundation was named from respect for the Irish people, well-known for their fighting spirit and perseverance against hundreds of years of adversity.
oh no that would be horrible I bet the Irish would be so mad.
Renaming Apache on any kind of sane timeframe is impossible. The name is baked into hundreds of millions of lines of Java in such a way that if you attempted to rename it, all you'd do is cause chaos, bugs and security vulnerabilities on an epic scale for the next 30 years and it still wouldn't be done by the end. Renaming git master branches is a quick walk in the park compared to that.
Which is why the correct response to these people is to tell them they're welcome to maintain forks of Apache software that uses different names and advertise them to other people, but they should not attempt to go further, like by insinuating that everyone writing and using Apache software (millions of people) are racist, because that is inflammatory, wrong, and outside of the USA most probably libel.
And for those who haven't figured it out yet, this is exactly why so many of us were and still are opposed to the stupid git master branch rename. Only the wilfully blind couldn't see this sort of escalation coming. Until people power tripping on bogus victimhood claims are consistently given the cold shoulder the amount of chaos they cause will increase fast and hard.
Making no judgements about this, I would point out that the name Apache, like a lot of names for native American groups were used by the Spanish as they went across that part of the Americas. Various Spanish "explorers" of that era had many different names for the same group, per Wikipedia[1] and its citation[2]. The name Apache was settled on to be the descriptor for the various groups sometime in the late 1890s/early 1900s by the Federal Government.
Obviously every discussion of naming winds up being controversial. On one hand, the name wasn't strictly culturally part of their identity until the Spanish came along, and probably not even until 1900s or so. But, the government essentially making it that particular group of people's identity then solidified that and enshrined it.
A question I would pose to everyone responding negatively here is this: If it were clearly a profit-motivated company using this name, like, say, Microsoft, Apple, or Google, would it be as obvious that they "shouldn't change their name"?
I'm not convinced there's a good answer here but maybe the authors do have a point regarding the Apache Foundation's support of native communities that bear the name they've trademarked and use.
[2]: Brugge, David M. (1968). Navajos in the Catholic Church Records of New Mexico 1694 - 1875. Window Rock, Arizona: Research Section, The Navajo Tribe.
In a detailed study of New Mexico Catholic Church records, David M. Brugge identifies 15 tribal names which the Spanish used to refer to the Apache. These were drawn from records of about 1000 baptisms from 1704 to 1862.
Renaming things is the classic example of wasted effort. The ROI is nil - both in a monetary sense, but also in a discovery and invention sense.
But in this case, there is a "return" - that is lack of confusion of all users between the apache software foundation and the Apache group of tribes.
Your stance on this issue will be determined by what you view as the bigger cost: The time taken by everyone who has to deal with a rename of all apache references, vs the loss of value caused by confusion between the group of tribes and the software foundation.
The ROI is measured in units of "care". As in: do you care more about the people involved (who themselves have expressed a desire for people to respect their name), or about the foundation having a specific name?
I'm all for the rename. Call it the ASF, update references in documents the next time we touch them.
It's very much the same discussion as master/main for branches, or Andrew/Andy for me: if I care enough to ask people to respect my name, people who wish to care for those around them will take care to respect my choice of name.
Changing the foundation's name is very obviously not going to undo any of the injustices that have been done over the years, but if we care about the people involved so little that we won't even stop using their name for something unrelated to them when they ask nicely then how can they (or anyone else) possibly think we'd do the right thing in a more weighty situation?
> who themselves have expressed a desire for people to respect their name
Some of whom have expressed that.
At this point, I see a single article with three listed authors. I have no idea what the opinion of those who self-identify as "Apache" is like. It could literally be anything in the range of "100% of Apaches oppose the name being used" to "(100% - 3) actively support the name in its current usage". My intuition is that the vast majority of those people don't have a strong opinion, and those that do are relatively evenly split - but I have no evidence for that, either.
Basically, if I were making the decision I'd listen to the concern and be open to acting on it, but would require a lot more justification than knowing that three people want it to be changed.
To understand how much people care, it must be expressed in dollar terms. For example, you could ask the people who wrote the article to contribute to a fund that will maintain renamed forks of various Apache software projects. If their inclination to fundraise and donate isn't there, we can infer they don't care very much relative to the caring of the people who would actually have to do the work.
Hence "care" rather than anything to do with ownership or compulsion. Just because being kind isn't mandatory doesn't mean it's forbidden.
There can be social implications of course. In the same way that I can't compel people to call me "Andrew", I'll notice if someone goes out of their way to give me the wrong name after they've been asked nicely to. And so will others around me. That's not a big deal if it's someone I know cares for me, but if it's someone who used to bully me who is trying to convince me that they've changed then it's going to make it harder for me to believe they will act any differently from before.
These kinds of attempts at language revision rarely have anything to do with the people supposedly offended by them; they are an excuse to gain moral standing. The goal is to advance a particular political ideology, namely Social Justice, which its advocates believe is in the best interest of said minorities and thus doesn't require the consent of those they choose to speak for.
Who are these people? They're certainly not representative of Native Americans overall. Just like demanding the use of "latinx", 99% of the supposedly affected minorities either don't care or would prefer to leave it as is. This kind of activism is by and for white people, especially the kind with lots of family money, lots of "education" but few marketable skills.
Consider that "not contributing to the de-personification and cultural erasure of indigenous Americans" is inherently a benefit and should be part of the ROI calculation.
I wonder. Everyone has heard of the Apache. Does removing the name cause the name to be used less? How many tribes are there, for whom there are living members, but for which most of us have never heard of? Is obscurity better than having your name used in a different way?
It's really limited to think the only values that can inform this decision are the financial ones.
I think the value lost to confusion is likely very low, and the cost of renaming quite high. And yet I still think it should be done, because I highly value a group's right to choose the name they are referred to as and to have some control over how that name is used. There's not really a financial representation of that, but I don't think it's inconsistent either.
I really think the overestimated the marketshare of Apache HTTP Server: "and the Apache® HTTP Server, which is used nearly everywhere to proxy requests to incoming servers."
I had always heard that the original name for the HTTP server was because it was just “a bunch of patches”. Seems a better name for the foundation is a good thing.
This type of erasure undermines the abilities of Native and non-Native people to work together
Romanticizing Indigenous culture [...] is harmful. It categorizes Indigenous people within the bounds of the stereotype [...]
Obviously diversity is important and stereotyping is bad, but Apache is just a nation. It's like demonizing using "pangea" or "constantinople" for a street name. Obviously it wouldn't offend me if Apache took action to remediate, but I think the importance of the complaints in this article are overstated.
At the risk of being guilty of cultural erasure, maybe it would be in the author's interest to be constructive about amplifying culture rather than destructive. This isn't about pedagogy amplifying some narrow view, it's barely even an homage, it's a positive view of history written hundreds of years ago. If you want to discredit that history, you'll have to be more specific.
It's really easy to argue that other people shouldn't be offended by this, but that's because indigenous American cultures have been so aggressively erased that we can barely empathize with them anymore as fellow human beings.
As I wrote in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34329605, imagine if instead this were the "Irish Software Foundation". It would be so blatantly stupid that it would never come to exist in the first place.
I am not sure if this is the elephant in the room but might this eventually lead to renaming most of the United States either to a neutral name or back to the names that Native Americans gave them? [1] Many websites also still refer to Native Americans as Indians. Louis C.K. has a bit about that one but I shall refrain from linking to it, because language. I support renaming the states.
There is no consensus among first peoples either. Some prefer the term Indian, some prefer other terms.
I prefer something besides Indian mostly to avoid confusion between East Indian and West Indian. When East Indians were minuscule in population, it wasn’t an issue but today there are likely more East Indians than North American Indians in North America.
This has been happening gradually for years and is continuing to spread. Renaming Mount McKinley back to Denali is probably the best known example.
It's a good thing. Certainly better than the governor of New York renaming a bridge after his dad (who apparently would have balked if he were still alive) and spending millions on new signage to do it.
There seems to be a lot of people here conflating the effort it would take to make the change with whether the ask is justified.
Europeans committed genocide in America - that's not a questionable statement, that was the stated policy of the early United States government, as well as that of most colonizing powers. We then named a bunch of things after the folks we committed genocide on, and made a bunch of racist caricatures of those people and slapped them on buildings, sports teams, and other cultural institutions. The survivors of that genocide are asking we stop doing that. It's a reasonable ask. It's probably not going to happen in this case, because it's a lot of fucking work, but it's a reasonable ask. They'd also like their land back, as well as their worldly possessions, maybe an apology, and, like, whatever else you do to make up for trying to wipe out several distinct entire peoples, and that's also sort of morally hard to argue with, even though it's also not going to happen. It's possible to say that a claim is justified and also that the work to do it is sufficiently large that it's not going to happen. It doesn't feel good, but it shouldn't.
>The survivors of that genocide are asking we stop doing that.
No they aren't.
Three people are asking. Three people, who most likely didn't survive anything, and just realized that extortion is easy money.
_______
Vote on it!
Let's ask the actual members of the Apache tribes today how they feel about the name. We both know this is gonna be like "latinx" -- only white people (with lots of "education" and rich parents) care about this stuff.
Not white people, but non-Spanish speaker. You know, Spanish speakers are of any race. But someone who puts "latinx", obviously, is not even 2nd language speaker.
> The Apache group was formed around a number of people who provided patch files that had been written for NCSA httpd 1.3. The result after combining them was A PAtCHy server.
One of the founders, Brian Behlendorf, describes how he came about choosing the name Apache in the documentary “Trillions and Trillions Served”:
"I suggested the name Apache partly because the web technologies at the time that were launching were being called cyber this or spider that or something on those themes and I was like we need something a little more interesting, a little more romantic, not to be a cultural appropriator or anything like that, I had just seen a documentary about Geronimo and the last days of a Native American tribe called the Apaches, right, who succumbed to the invasion from the West, from the United States, and they were the last tribe to give up their territory and for me that almost romantically represented what I felt we were doing with this web-server project…"
I get the feeling that this is a retcon etymology.
Either way, it's marginalizing[1] and needs to be changed.
[1] In one of my wife's murder mysteries, I forget which, a woman quips in a brilliant stroke of teleplay writing: "Don't call people 'babes' or 'lushes', it's marginalising." I propose we use "marginalizing" instead of "offensive" because "offensive" is subjective whereas "marginalizing" denotes objective harm to a community.
In other words, the name of the actual group of people is not even relevant, it's a programming pun that more or less disregards the existence of actual human beings who have come to be known by that name.
I think the indigenous argument is that we (Americans) decimated them and shipped the rest to reservations, then here we are making a cutesy pun with their name. I don't think the Apache foundation is unique in this regard. There's really no indigenous cultural exports from North America, so what we see for the most part is pretty bastardized.
The associations with the name are neutral or beneficial to the software foundation, but is not a chosen association of the actual people who are apaches. They have their own culture and ideas of themselves, and this isn't part of it.
It's not easy to explain because there really isn't an analog if you've never been part of an exploited or erased group in some way. You just have to put yourself in their shoes I guess. What would it be like to be part of a culture that was very nearly successfully genocided, and is now treated as a mythologized part of the past that people are free to use as inspiration for their names and logos. Meanwhile you still exist, have your own traditions, history, names for yourself, religion maybe. It's not some deeply sophisticated academic argument it's just a shitty way to treat people and we should try not to do it.
As a member of a people who were attempted to be genocided (I am Jewish), I like when people adopt pieces of my culture.
Please, by all means, spread matzoh ball soup as far and as wide as you can. It's delicious. Use the name `maccabee` as the name of your new software that is resilient and strong.
Then you can make that statement when it comes up? It's not necessary that all groups come to identical conclusions or approaches here, because all groups have their own history and traditions and relationships to other groups.
I don't really think it has a material impact in how people view my culture. I understand that they've incorporated some of the core tenants and mixed them with their own, but the existence of it doesn't bother me, and I don't think you can really appropriate ideas.
So the issue is many people are okay… but you may always come across ”orthodox/y” which isn’t. Does the minority opinion get to rain in the parade for everyone?
When "the minority" is a specific cultural group choosing to be known by a certain name, and "everyone" is an economic entity with no associations to that group? Yes.
So cultural group has a majority which is okay and a minority within the group which isn’t, then you have a smaller group where a majority of the group are not okay but a minority is and both the small group and larger group are in turn members of an umbrella group, by what reason does the small group get to decide for the larger group what is and isn’t okay?
English is a language like most languages that does not have a policing academy prescribing usage. People/speakers are allowed to use words as they see fit and use them in new and innovative ways.
Are you interested in understanding it more than you currently do? I'm sure it's not too complicated a concept for a reader of this site. Maybe if you tell us a quick rundown of your current understanding of "cultural appropriation", we could dispel some misunderstandings?
I am interested! I mean that genuinely. As a member of a few different cultural groups (Russian, Jewish, United States), I always have enjoyed people adopting pieces of my culture. Especially food.
I imagine it would mean to take an element of someone's culture, and then adapt it to your own use case that allows you to benefit from it, even if it shines a light on some sort of negative stereotype. Is that a decent definition
It's missing a key part, which is the decontextualization of the cultural element being adopted.
In another comment you wrote "Please, by all means, spread matzoh ball soup as far and as wide as you can. It's delicious." What if I took a recipe for cholent, added sour cream and cheese and some kind of shrimp ball, and sold it to people under the name "Authentic Jewish Matzo Ball Soup"? Imagine if that food product exploded in popularity and suddenly people that have never interacted with Jewish culture or food are talking about and making a "matzo ball soup" that contains beef, dairy, and shellfish (but no matzah).
That's all fine, to you, I'm sure.
Not all cultural appropriation is aggressive. Cultural exchange happens and not everything keeps cultural context. Japan loves to adopt bits of other cultures without context, and I don't think people are upset about that.
An imbalance of power can compound the issue. Back to the bastardised soup. A "regular joe" altering a recipe for a traditional Jewish food to repackage it and sell to a wide audience can be excused in a number of ways. But what if a violent antisemite was engaging in that kind of behaviour? Would that change anything for you?
picking parts of a different culture that sound cool to you and use it for your own benefit, to give you some cultural cache. You still think the people who produced this culture are not on par with you. Whites don't think native americans are on par with them so using apache for name is cultural appropriation.
corollary, picking up something from white culture like wearing jeans isn't appropriation because whites have established themselves as top dog already.
> Or is the “on par” piece completely made up and just assumed to not be the case?
You think the fact the native americans are poorest people with lowest life expectancy is made up ?
yes your fellow compatriot belonging to poorest class of people for belonging to a particular group of people should be a good hint. Like i said its really simple. People trying over complicate this or trying to find gotchas are being disingenuous.
try to find purity in an american rendition of northwestern european culture. language, holy days, vakue systems--all are taken from elsewhere. lmk what you find. I'll wait until St Paddy's day to find you crying in your green beer...
No worries. But I think that points out something of a hole in the argument, no? If the generic `you` is what you intended to mean, isn't that a blanket assumption?
I mean if I were Greek I would rather have appreciation for others’ knowingly or unknowingly helping to spread the idea of Greekness rather than keep greekness to myself and let it wither in provinciality.
They don't really have a point. They have a grievance, and one that matters exactly zero. It is armchair militance at its best; it's raising a loud voice on a topic that will make no difference in the inclusion of minorities in tech. It is a stupid timewaster that undermines real social causes.
Ah, that's part of the root of this issue - we don't know based on the facts in evidence if this is a widespread concern or not. We only know that it's a concern to those three people.
As you can see, there are more than three people in this thread alone who feel strongly in the opposite.
It seems to me the right things to do would be for the ASF to reach out to some Apache organizations to ask their thoughts, and for the article authors to approach (or create, if necessary) similar representative groups to make a formal statement of position.
Of all the people in this discussion, you seem to be the most thirsty to win a political fight, with all of your demeaning and ranting "ridiculous, useless and unnecessary" posts, to quote your own insulting words.
Are you done ridiculing and dismissing people yet, or are you still thirsty for more fighting and nothing else?
I am sorry, but this is an absolutely insane take that will add a huge amount of work for people for no good reason whatsoever. It's the github master -> main debate all over again. I really hope we are past peak woke now and this won't fly. The amount of hours of work wasted for pointless renaming just has to be accounted somehow.
Oh yes, you have a great point, those people are absolutely insane and should be locked up in mental institutions and medicated for not wanting other people to appropriate their name, and the computer industry still hasn't recovered from the destruction and devastation and ruined lives and lost fortunes and hurt feelings from having to rename git branches. /s
You clearly haven't had the pleasure of wasting half a day here and there due to botched master->main renames, like some of us have. Yes, it was actually net destructive because the actual delivered benefit was zero. Language does not define reality. Reality defines language.
I read everything and it the most ridiculous, useless and unnecessary cause I have seen, and this is coming from someone very much to the left of center and very interested in the causes of minorities.
First of all the posters assume they actually speak for all natives, which I find unjustified. They are one group of natives who happen to hold a certain set of opinions, as entitled to them as any one. The reality, in the same gist as the people who have complained about the use of "master" as Git name, is that they are a loud but irrelevant minority holding an opinion on a matter that has no benefit to anyone.
It is also apparently implying that any idealized representation of a minority group constitutes "erasure", as if certain cultural stereotypes were a sin. Every idealized telling of a story is going to omit details and be reductionist; every outsider perspective of a group will have some sort of stereotype because there are hundreds of minority groups out there and nobody has the time to engage in a deep investigation of each. That doesn't mean idealizations are bad, or negative, or actually useful if they're going to be retold in a historically precise manner (symbols need to be reductive to be useful in idealized contexts). Symbols are symbols; the rationale for the name is interesting and innocent.
There's this awful trend in American minority militants that seem to get worked up about truly innocuous causes and stereotypes that are harmless, and at their very worst naive. As someone who's been around groups that have fought and resisted serious minority causes, it just shows their powerlessness and inability to fight for actually useful causes. It's just a huge waste of their breath that shows their lack of credibility.
I've been making this argument again and again across the thread but it apparently bears repeating ad nauseam.
Imagine if this were the "Irish Software Foundation", named because a guy watched a documentary on the Potato Famine and thought Irish people seemed noble and hardy. Of course that would be offensive and stupid.
The article outlined several reasons why the choice of “Apache” and its conception show classic errors people make by romanticizing indigenous cultures and then appropriating their terms or cultural symbols.
Sometimes people just need to be told how silly they are being. Also my post is regarding the OP specifically, nothing about other cultural appropriation or anything. Some of the arguments have actual merits. Arguing about Apache is not one of them.
Java and JavaScript are just a few technology names that can be perceived as cultural appropriation (Javanese culture from the island of Java, Indonesia)
Mazda is a car manufacturer, however, it also the name of a god.
Pick any technology name and it will have a double meaning in a language or region in the world.
Where do we stop?
It would be more meaningful if the Apache foundation included a link on the homepage explaining the origin of its name and an make an annual contribution to a relevant charity.
If a group with a strong claim to representing one of those names comes forward with a public statement about why it's harmful we can evaluate it. We don't need to create a perfectly generalizable framework to address a specific concrete request.
Are you aware of the origin of the word Apache ? Their name comes from a Zuni word meaning "enemy". It means the Apache tribes have been culturally appropriating a word from a different tribe as a badge of honour. Or doesn't that count?
It is detailed; it is not strong. There are tens of thousands of cultures and minority groups around the world and stereotyping will happen. Said stereotyping in this case is absolutely innocuous and frankly irrelevant in the grand scheme of actual problems indigenous communities have.
The article is written by "ADAM RECVLOHE, HOLLY GRIMM, DESIREE KANE". It sounds more like an opinion article than factual to me. But it's not up to me or anyone else to decide. Changing a company name is an expensive proposition. I don't see it happening without going to court.
It pisses me off and I'm not even distantly related to the Apache people, because I know if it were the name of my own ethnic/cultural group I would be personally bothered by it. Consider empathy.
This appears to be the opinion of the three people who signed their name to the post on this particular website, who appear to have nominated themselves to speak on behalf of the Apache tribes. There's not even an About Us page that describes their tribal influence.
I'm not dismissing the feelings of anybody other than these three people who are claiming a grievance. If the movement grows, I'll reconsider.
You act as if these are the only 3 people to ever express annoyance about this type of thing. These are the first 3 people you've seen complain about this specific instance. Look up what people say about the Cleveland Indians and Atlanta Braves, and similar heated debate over other sports mascots.
The reasonable thing to do would be to have this issue out to a referendum vote within the Apache community. Without knowing how the community overall actually feels about this issue it’s actually quite presumptuous for outsiders to butt in either way.
The Apache community may want to prioritize other issues, or maybe indeed they’d want to focus on renaming this piece of software. I’d be much more comfortable if we let the Apache community decide before spending too much time and energy on the topic
According to The Apache Software Foundation, its name was chosen "from respect for the various Native American nations collectively referred to as Apache, well-known for their superior skills in warfare strategy and their inexhaustible endurance".[15] This was in a context in which it seemed that the open internet -- based on free exchange of open source code -- appeared to be soon subjected to a kind of conquer by proprietary software vendor Microsoft; Apache co-creator Brian Behlendorf -- originator of the name -- saw his effort somewhat parallel that of Geronimo, Chief of the last of the free Apache peoples.[16][17] But it conceded that the name "also makes a cute pun on 'a patchy web server'—a server made from a series of patches".