google/brotli

Why? "br" is the abbreviation for Brazil. This is just confusing. I can't think of any collision or ambiguity for "bro". Please explain.

That's plain stupid. People who are offended by a HTTP header accidentally named like a slang word for a (male) friend have serious mind issues and should go see a doctor instead of being kept happy by developers.

The motivation of the change makes me palm my face.

@jyrkialakuijala You do realize that by immediately bending to peoples' will when they "express concern" (what a political way of putting it) over something, you are just making the problem worse. These people aren't gonna stop there.

I find the letters "br" extremely offensive for no particular reason. Please change it. I'm sure it won't be an issue for such a progressive project.

I am concerned by the cultural appropriation that is a connotation of using the country code of Brazil for this.

So after the change from a connotation of male sibling we get one now named after a country code the full name of which is also a form of pubic hairstyle of minimal proportions. OK, seems appropriate and not at all offensive (SRK).

Brotli will hence forth be forever known as "Giving your files a Brazillian wax".

br is also the chemical name for bromine, which also has "bro" in it. smh so hard on this

Ah, Social Justice and Political Correctness. Never change from your puritanical, authoritarian ideology / world view.

.bro, by brogrammers for brogrammers.

brc = brotli compression ?

I am now patiently waiting for a complaint from the Bat Conservation International Trust about *.bat files in Windows.

br is so much worse than bro, did that change really need to happen?
I like the idea of brc aswell

It's very insensitive : Br is a slur for brazilian http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=br
change it please

name should be brotli as is, imo.

Don't let some vocal social minority dictate technical decisions. Giving in on such a obviously ridiculous issue only feeds the trolls. This needs to be forked asap and put back .bro for no other reason but to state we will not give in to social terrorists.

BRBR? HUEHUEHUEHUE

Someone noticed an issue, the issue was assessed, and the cost of change was smaller than the benefit of the status quo. This is consistent with the behavior of a critical mind.

100% agree with cybrangl. Giving in to asinine demands like this sets a very very bad precedent.

Anita Sarkeesian, and Zoe Quinn have convinced Google that anything male is bad. They especially have convinced the Google Idea team that gamers are abusive to females online. This is why the Google team consult with a feminist about this fake issue. And of course a feminist would deem .bro as a misogynistic thing.

I personally do no see how a domain name or extension of .bro would imply hatred to women, even if it was made to be short for brother. I believe Google's motto of "Do the right thing" has ideologically placed them in line with the radicalized feminist that see hatred of women everywhere.

I want to commend the Brotli and Mozilla teams for this sound and cool-headed decision.

To the people upset by this change: if you want to blame anyone, blame the "bro culture" movement who have taken what used to be a perfectly good word, and poisoned it with misanthropic behavior. This is a reaction to them, and it makes a lot of sense for a project like this to want to avoid association with such poisonous behavior.

To the people who are trying to paint this as "giving in" to "demands", this view is not consistent with facts:

1. The concern about the misogynistic and unprofessional connotations of "bro" was raised between Mozilla and Brotli engineers themselves, not in response to any received demands.
2. What they did immediately receive was "a series of 'bro' jokes in response to my posting about this new feature" (Patrick McManus), which illustrates how quickly "bro" already attracts inappropriate and unprofessional behaviour, and how this concern is not hypothetical. Keeping "bro" means that the project will have to keep dealing with more of this behaviour for the rest of its lifetime.
3. Jyrki Alakuijala himself decided to seek out further advice, and followed it after weighing the costs and benefits to the project. The decision is easy to justify: changing the registration is easy while it's early, and avoiding the problematic wasp's nest created by bro culture adherents is a big long-term win.

So, this is not a bad precedent: it is a great example of mature technical and social leadership. to Patrick McManus and Jyrki Alakuijala. :)

Please don't knee and try to appeal to those SJWs. This is ridiculous. "Bro" isn't offensive. But "br" is offensive in a similar sense some Japanese find "jap" offensive.

@jonathanbruder More like consistent with short-sightedness perhaps and disregard for the future of tech projects at large. I'm sure a lot of deaths and even entire wars could've been avoided if some people had given in to Islamist demands to limit free speech slightly and stopped talking about certain things. But they didn't. The idea of "do not negotiate with terrorists" exists for a reason.

I know it's a really extreme example, but we're talking about a group of people here who is equally unwilling to stop. Whenever somebody gives in, the next time they'll try to get people to do something even more ridiculous. Every time somebody bends, the next time they'll try bending them further. And further. It never ends.

@pjdelport This has nothing to do with "technical leadership" whatsoever. Please do not confuse tech (which consists of pure logic) and social things (which consist of emotions and irrationality).

@mvirkkunen:

Please do not confuse tech (which consists of pure logic) and social things (which consist of emotions and irrationality).

The pure technical logic here, as @jyrkialakuijala already pointed, out is that br saves one byte over bro for every request that has to negotiate usage of this compression algorithm.

The emotional irrationality here is being so overly attached to the word "bro" that people continue to debate it even after project members have finalized the decision, implemented it, and ended further discussion of the matter.

If everyone was being rational here, we would simply move on, but instead, we have a crowd of offended bros proclaiming that this is some kind of phantom attack on their masculinity, oblivious to the grand irony that they're a living example of precisely why a technically-focused project would want to avoid a term as poisoned and compromised as "bro", in the first place.

@pjdelport - we already have .vag files, .man files, etc - they are nothing but technicalities, just like this one. I personally do not mind if the extension is br or bro at all, but I feel we are setting a worrying precedent if we feel that social issues should somehow be reflected in how we abbreviate content types.

A whole slew of abbreviations may or may not be offensive to some group of people, but the issue is that there is nothing to be offended about in the first place - it is a content type, nothing more. Understand what it abbreviates, and leave it at that. If someone takes offense at it, it is because they are more or less looking to be offended.

"we have a crowd of offended bros proclaiming that this is some kind of phantom attack on their masculinity"

Who here has said that this is a phantom attack on their masculinity? Just turning the argument into being about some perceived personal defect of the opposition is missing what most people take issue with. I don't see any attack in this at all on any gender,

"a term as poisoned and compromised as "bro", in the first place."

Again, this is entirely about context - in some settings "bro" may be offensive, but in a great many it simply isn't. I have female friends who refer to both themselves (and me) as "bros". You cannot take the negative connotations present in some cultures and apply it everywhere - there is pretty much always someone who will be offended no matter what you take. Again, the issue is simply that there is no reason to be offended to begin with.

it would be ironic to have a long file name .brotli for a format which aims to compress.
Even .brot would send a wrong message since the Swiss german "li" in brot makes the bread smaller.
Why not take it to the extreme and suggest .b
That would certainly not offend anybody and make the file names even shorter!

@csvan: This change is not about "being offended" or not, it is about side-stepping the problematic behavior associated with bro culture (of which you can find numerous examples just in this thread), and not making the project a magnet for it. I'm sure the project members don't want to have to deal with more of it. I certainly don't.

@oliverknill: This change is not about file extensions, but about the identifier used in the HTTP Content Coding Registry. To be accepted, it must pass the IETF Review process, which is highly unlikely to accept just b as the identifier.

@pjdelport it became an issue only because people who found the word problematic (in their own social context) brought it up - had they not done so, I am fairly certain nobody would have cared about it, whether men or women. This is for the same reason that none of us (at least that I am aware of) have a problem with other possibly triggering abbreviations I mentioned earlier. We all understand that they are nothing but technical abbreviations, completely divorced from any social issues. We should leave it at that.

Again, I have no problem with the extension being changed, and I do not feel attacked in any way. I just hope you can appreciate that the core issue here is self-censoring in the face of potential offense. For example, should we avoid ..alah as a potential abbreviation because members of the Islamic faith find it blasphemous, or .jsus because Christians may feel the same way? Where do we stop? Reading things into places they do not simply exist does not help in addressing actual social issues.

I hope you don't feel any of my responses have been hostile (I certainly did not intend them that way). At the end of it all, I guess we will just have to agree to disagree.

For the record, I personally think that .bro should be tried as it is the best abbreviation
for brotli. Other alternatives like .tli which emphasis the "little" in the german "li" usage
would be too remote. Cryptic names like .bz2 are terrible. Like .tar or .zip or .man
the extension used or http content code registry name if one wants to be more precise
the .bro is good. One problem might be that the .bro file extension is already used:
http://fileinfo.com/extension/bro
But if it is not about file names but only http content coding, nobody should really care much.
A compressed data format usually comes with a file extension which has a similar name.
Virtually all do and it would be confusing if a file format (even maybe so not yet envisioned)
would have a different name than the identifier in the code registry!

@pjdelport if .bro is problematic so is .br, except if you consider that brazilian people are less worth of respect

@rt2022: None of the problems with bro and bro culture apply in the case of br and Brazilians.

Brazilians are not an insecure group of people prone to swarming this thread and this project over an imagined injustice to their "br" identity, and attempting to derail it with logical, cultural, and chemical non-sequiturs.

@pjdelport br is a racial slur for brazilian http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=br . If you consider that an abbreviation for brotli is bad because it's homophone of another word, which is not even a slur, you should also be sensitive the racist meaning of br. Anything else would be very problematic.

@pjdelport

Brazilians are not an insecure group people prone to swarming this thread and this project over an imagined injustice to their "br" identity

Again, neither are people here. Nobody has complained about having their "bro" identity or masculinity threatened. What people are responding to is that the move to rename the content type is reactionary to the point of being ridiculous. Important social issues are not serviced by actions which only serve to ridicule them in the long run.

Further, as stated before, being accepting of such a culture of trigger-awareness really pushes the boundaries of expression. It's one thing if we talk about the use of words where they have an actual social implication, but we are not. We are talking about the purely technological use of an abbreviation which unambiguously refers to a compression algorithm, and was never ever intended to refer to anything else. Nothing more. Nothing less. Nothing else. We are in very deep waters indeed if we need to take care that something like that does not potentially offend anyone or connotate something negative.

@csvan:

Nobody has complained about having their "bro" identity or masculinity threatened.

Really? The comments call this the work of "social terrorists", "radicalized feminists", and a Google "convinced that anything male is bad", and even call for forking the project to put back the "bro", and you don't see this as the response of people who perceive their bro identity or masculinity as under threat?

@mvirkkunen

1. Does freedom of speech protect you from criticism?
2. Is this action actually in response to the outpouring of people that perceive offense?
3. Does empirical evidence support that some genders are underrepresented in the tech industry?
4. Are the underrepresented people present in the industry ever treated as outsiders?
5. Have those who find the underrepresentation problematic been treated with aggression?
6. Have you ever been the subject of catcalls due to your gender?
7. Have you ever been the subject of negging due to your gender?
8. Has your gender ever influenced presumption about your skill, value, utility or "team fit?"
9. Have you been the subject of unwanted sexual advances from within your industry?
10. Have you been subject to attempts to legislate your access to birth control?
11. Have you been subject to attempts to lower your barriers to sexual consent?
12. Have you been excluded from, or imposed upon by, workplace banter due to inappropriate sexual content?
13. Have you been the subject of inappropriate correlation, (in either direction, between your job performance and perceived fitness as a partner?
14. How does the inclusion of underrepresented people challenge your normal behavior?
15. How would you define dissent?
16. How would you define authoritarianism?
17. Where along the spectrum from dissent to authoritarianism does rejecting the enforced norms of an entrenched and aggressive majority fall?
18. When was the last time you discussed any of these issues with someone affected by them?
19. If your answer to any of these was "the header extension for a compression mechanism is not on the scale of any of these things," then why do you even care?

I care because there is no silver bullet solution for inclusion. Yes, this is a tiny decision. But only a trillion tiny choices made right will undo the mess we have made. To connect, we must unravel our shibboleths. As @pjdelport mentioned, this is not a response to outcry. It's just two people erring on the side of harmlessness, and that's fine.

@pjdelport I see two comments by @lineber and @cybrangl above which fits that description, and the latter has nothing to do with masculinity. I don't agree with either of them, and it is hardly a summary of what people in general are feeling. The gist of the majority of reactions I have seen both here and elsewhere is simply that the move is overly reactive, and that is the point I am making.

I agree with @jonathanbruder that this is really a trivial issue in and of itself - there are real and legitimate concerns about the position of women in the tech industry and society at large that are vital to address, and this really just detracts from it. My problem is not that this particular abbreviation in any way has to do with women (or men), but simply that it is endemic of a slowly growing trigger-culture where offense needs to be avoided at every turn - even in places where it simply should not be possible to find in the first place. Further, the observation that "bro" is somehow inherently "misogynistic" screams of Western (especially North American) cultural chauvinism. Where I live we use "bro" all the time, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the deprecation of women - it is simply a more endearing form of "dude". Words are very much relative to their cultural context, and that context really has no relevance when it comes to something as trivial as abbreviating a content type name - a string primarily meant to be read by machines, denoting a computational element rather than any kind of human expression. It is also not a context which gets to be judged by Western cultural standards, especially not when it is written for a global entity like the Internet, which spans all cultures.

Anyway, I feel like I am wasting both our time, so I will just leave the last word to either of you if you want it. There is an interesting discussion to be had about language, cultures and triggers, but this really is not the place for it. All the best.

@csvan You apparently did not read my post beyond a few words. There should be no reason where the tech community caves because someone makes a vague threat about being offended. This seems trivial (and the whole topic really is) but it becomes a slippery slope. Had they changed it for some other reason there would be no outcry. However, they have chosen to set a poor precedent of giving in because someone might get offended. This should never be the case.

My comment about social terrorists is against the people complaining that .bro is somehow "offensive" They look to gain power by making everyone too afraid to offend people. This work is not something that should have even been on the radar, let alone giving into from vague threats of how an extension might offend people. I very much want to see the work continue, but we should never let such social trivialities dictate the process. What happened next? Do we need to change the compression because it creates files of 666 bytes and we can't have that or fear of offending someone else?

This would have been a non-issue had they stuck to their guns and left the extension.

@cybrangl if I misunderstood or misconstrued your comment I apologise.

However, they have chosen to set a poor precedent of giving in because someone might get offended. This should never be the case.

Agreed, this is pretty much my argument as well. Especially since this is a case where a certain culture is given an unreasonable prerogative to determine what people from other cultures might (or should be) offended by. The fact that they sealed the deal by consulting by somebody from "the North American sphere" just drives it home - it's Western cultural chauvinism.

What happened next? Do we need to change the compression because it creates files of 666 bytes and we can't have that or fear of offending someone else?

This was basically what I was arguing earlier re: avoiding extensions like .alah or .jsus because they may be deemed blasphemous by adherents to the Islamic or Christians faiths (not limited to religion of course).

I believe in "do no harm", and that we should avoid offense where it is reasonable. Extending this to content names and file extensions is ridiculous and plain harmful to that cause - it simply opens related social causes to ridicule and charges of extremism.

This is a minor annoyance as downstream projects like mine https://github.com/fxfactorial/brozip have to change code. That said its pretty sad that outside cultural forces, many of whom have nothing to do with tech at all, are outright influencing technical decisions.

The moral of the story is that its easier to just bend over than deal with the annoying and distracting noise makers.

We already have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.sys and no one cares.
Having .bro would be just fair.

@fxfactorial

The moral of the story is that its easier to just bend over than deal with the annoying and distracting noise makers.

That is one of the reasons why myself and others are making a big stink. While the choice of extension really has not technical issue, I think it is important that we make it known that simply "giving in" is not the right choice. If they give in because it "offends" or "annoys" people, they should understand that you will always find people "offended" or "annoyed" and simply giving in will not suddenly make it all better. You only give fuel for the next person to interject their personal agenda into something that has nothing to do with social issues. Normally I would have sat back and just watched the process, but now I feel I have to keep us from setting a precedent that will haunt, this and many more projects, for a long time.

Just a note: if you are going to "consult" about this nonsense, at least take the time to get more than a narrow viewpoint of the subject.

I have asked a patriotism friend from Brazil, and she advised against br. We have found a compromise that satisfies us, so we don't need to discuss this further. Even if we don't understand why people are upset from our cultural standpoint, they would be (unnecessarily) upset and this is enough reason not to use it.

Lets just use .b or .brotlithefriendlyfilecompressionalgorithmnotthederogatoryterm

(With apologies for the snark. I don't want to keep repeating the same comments.)

@cybrangl:

That is one of the reasons why myself and others are making a big stink.

Translation: I don't understand that this change was made to side-step bros who make big stinks, so I am joining the bros in making a big stink.

While the choice of extension really has not technical issue, I think it is important that we make it known that simply "giving in" is not the right choice.

Translation: I can't imagine that the project maintainers would willingly make a decision that does not put bros first, so I'm going to imagine they were threatened into it somehow.

If they give in because it "offends" or "annoys" people, they should understand that you will always find people "offended" or "annoyed" and simply giving in will not suddenly make it all better.

Translation: I intend to keep offending and annoying people until I have my way. I sense no irony in this.

You only give fuel for the next person to interject their personal agenda into something that has nothing to do with social issues.

Translation: When bros interject, it's a social issue. When other people interject, it's their personal agenda.

Normally I would have sat back and just watched the process, but now I feel I have to keep us from setting a precedent that will haunt, this and many more projects, for a long time.

Translation: It haunts me to imagine a future where projects don't prioritize the feelings of bros above others.

Just a note: if you are going to "consult" about this nonsense, at least take the time to get more than a narrow viewpoint of the subject.

Translation: In a conversation dominated by men, a single female voice makes me feel excluded. We should consult more bros to get a balanced viewpoint.

Someone said above « if everyone was being rational here, we would simply move on, but instead, we have a crowd of offended bros proclaiming that this is some kind of phantom attack on their masculinity ». I think the commenter so totally missed the point his/her argument becomes ridiculous, it's a lobbyist's argument and certainly not a rational interpretation of the situation. I don't see any reaction of that kind in any comment above. I see people shocked by a decision made based on extremely limited input and the assumption that, potentially, maybe, in the worst case, the .bro extension would be refused by a registration authority that has not expressed any reaction yet. I see an intrusion of lobbyists inside tech about something totally harmless. Even a feminist like myself who hates machos and misogynists does not understand how one can perceive ".bro" as offensive. If these three letters came from "Brothers", ok, well, in the last resort scenario the bro file extension would be let's say colloquial, not offensive. But no, it comes from "Brotli" that comes from "Brötli", a small bread!
All in all, an extremely limited set of people (apparently countable on one single hand), who would probably have never found .bro offensive or annoying because hey that's the abbreviation of Brötli and people do have a brain don't they, are proactively protected based on so minimal input it's laughable while much larger AND non-segregationist feedback is neglected. So my gut feeling is that this is a counterproductive decision based on the potential harm a lobby could inflict - and then a decision probably based on fear -, this is not a decision based on sanity.
In CSS, we dismissed the "finger" value for the cursor property because pointing a finger is strongly offensive in well only half of the world... That was non-negligible input. I don't think it's the case here.
We're software developers, and good software developers don't care about sex, gender, or any other personal detail of other software developers. We care about skills, efficiency, good design, good code and rough consensus. In that light, .br does not seem to reach any consensus and neither does the dismissal of .bro, as the abbreviation of a word meaning small bread. Draw your own conclusion.
As a final note, cul and mst files are from the Windows world, the former from the old IconForge software, the latter are configuration files for packages. In French, cul means ass and mst is the common acronym for sexually transmitted infection. Certainly badly chosen in an international environment but nobody here cares because hey, they're only file extensions!

Translation: In a conversation dominated by men, a single female voice makes me feel excluded. We should consult more bros to get a balanced viewpoint.

You had bad coffee or caught a speeding ticket on your way to office this morning or what?
It's far more "Equidistribution being a principle of the world, there are stupid ideas and stupid voices everywhere in all communities and maybe one single voice is far from enough. Gathering more input before decision could not harm in any way since we do consider the issue seriously".

We're software developers, and good software developers don't care about sex, gender, or any other personal detail of other software developers.

It depends on your definition of "good". The facts show us that the software industry is terrible at behaving with women and other minorities. Accept it and deal with it.

Also, it's not about a file extension but a "content encoding type" passed over HTTP.

Even a feminist like myself who hates machos and misogynists does not understand how one can perceive ".bro" as offensive

Because it's not your native language? Because you don't live in the US? There's a cultural connotation about "bro" and it is quite misogynist.

The point is, even if here "bro" does not "brother", it will eventually be used that way by morrons to make sick misogynist jokes.
By using "br" you avoid that.
It's a simple modification which will avoid tons of crap to women inside and outside the industry.

The call is simple to make. And the developers did it right (and by themself, no threat).

All actions taken "pro"-women always dig up threads like this one, saying it's "useless" or "over-reacting" or "we can't say anything anymore!" "censorship!"... It just shows how hard the society don't wanna change toward more equality and make efforts to not discriminate against women.

Thanks to the developers who made that change!
It's small but ... lots of small changes can help!

Why not use .brö for Brötli? I am offended by the bias against non-anglo alphabets! ;)

@fallen

Because it's not your native language? Because you don't live in the US? There's a cultural connotation about "bro" and it is quite misogynist.

This is at the heart of what many people are taking real issue with here - the fact that something may have a negative connotation in one culture (a particular brand of American culture in this case) should not be generalised to imply that it has the same connotation in other cultures, let alone is offensive to people from these cultures.

You are talking about the naming of an HTTP content type, an element of the most global piece of technology ever invented by humanity - the Internet. No single culture has a prerogative in determining what is offensive in that context, especially not when it concerns something so banal as a content type abbreviation - a string which is not even primarily meant for humans to read(!!), and which carries no cultural or social implications in itself whatsoever.

it will eventually be used that way by morrons to make sick misogynist jokes.

Everything can be exploited by malicious people for malicious ends, no matter how benign the intentions behind creating it were. Deal with it, and don't let it get in the way of purely technical decisions. There will be morons as long as there is a human species.

If you are going to censor a word like 'bro' because it might offend or lead to harassment, because of what it may connotate in a single culture (and I am not even convinced it is unambiguously sexist even in that culture), you seriously need to ask where this censorship will ever stop. Hint: it won't. You are almost certain to find an abbreviation which is offensive in some context. People have already pointed out that br is an offensive slur against Brazilians. I don't know if that is true since I am neither Brazilian nor much of a gamer, but that should not stop the abbreviation from being used either. It's an abbreviation for a piece of tech - nothing else. You only see deeper meaning if you want to, because it was never there to begin with.

It's a simple modification which will avoid tons of crap to women inside and outside the industry.

Tell me, has the existence of man pages and vag files resulted in waves of misogyny? No? Exactly. Why? Because people are not stupid - they do not read social commentary into abbreviations unless they have clearly malicious intentions behind doing so (in which case abbreviations do not matter, they will find a way to be malicious anyway).

There are real and pressing matters which pertain to the state of women in both the tech/IT sectors and society at large, issues which we who are male in particular have a responsibility to acknowledge and address. The abbreviation of a content type has nothing to do with that, but is rather endemic of a wider cultural problem of trigger awareness. It will do nothing to help address the issues that are most pressing (gender-based pay discrimination, interview bias, skill assumptions, etc). Rather, it merely offers ammunition for those who would trivialise and mock these concerns, as you can already see plenty of on SlashDot and Reddit regarding this case.

Hi, i think the .br is incorrect to. Becaouse in the chemistry br is the bromine symbol. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bromine) Who discoverd this? Antoine Jérôme Balard, and he was a male.
And what about the national anti bromineant organization? I as a NABO member, extremely freak out.

I think the .b is more correct, but the .b like bisexual so i don't know....

Guys, it is serius????

While I think the decision to rename was a bad one, your behavior is extremely childish @thelordofcheese ...

@thelordofcheese

1. That's not me you are quoting.

2. Post with your main profile, trolling coward.

Bruh....

@fallen Do you have a technical reason for this or is it simply a way for you to pressure someone into falling into line of your personal agenda. Should we force your to change your name because some Christian may find the idea of a fallen (angel) offensive? At this point you are getting offended simply to be offended and dragging the world down with you. When I tossed out the idea of social terrorist, you are the type of person I had in mind. You are trying to assert your personal feelings as the only reasonable way and threaten a social hellstorm if people don't fall into line. This type of reasoning is fallacious and has no merit or place here. Had the developers decided to change it for any other reason (Bromine being a developers favorite chemical, etc.) I would have not batted an eye. But for someone to come in and pressure change for no other reason than for them to feel superior, it has got to stop. I don't want to see logical decisions changed because you can't seem to have the good sense to separate the extension from some misplaced gender identity crisis you are having. Your outlook and pressure on the group is not only not warranted by childish and immature.

@pjdelport

I love how you decided you had a single clue about what I was saying. You have twisted my words and the very meaning of other words to fit your egotistical view. You have shown you have no concept of the ideas I presented and are willing to make up things to attempt to your point across. Forget the idea of logic and discourse, you would rather put words into people's mouths to make a strawman because you cannot fathom someone would disagree with you. I am not "for" bros or men. I am against egotistical social ostriches like yourself who would rather put your head in the sand and cover your ears yelling "la la la, I can't heard you" than try to understand why your "adjustment" is not appropriate here. This whole subject is inappropriate and people like me, and the others making fun of the issue by complaining they have had their bro feeling hurt, are trying to right a sinking ship. I am sorry you have such a thin skin and cannot for the life of you see any other person's point of view, but you really have no place in this, male or female. You have completely failed to understand the point because you are too busy listening to the sound of your own voice.

Why not just call it BCDF for brotli data compression format to avoid both confusing and negative connotation?
Or just B if you need to keep it short?

There seems to be 3 general lines of thought here:

1) I read this on slashdot, so I came to complain and insult, even though I may have never heard of brotli before

2) I have valid opposition to making technical decisions based on unfounded political correctness

3) I made a pragmatic sidestepping of a can of worms, and nipped the issue in the bud by making a compromised name change

I think we can all agree that people in category 1 should just be ignored.

It comes down to figuring out if the reaction taken by those in 3 sets off enough of precedent as proposed by 2, in order to merit a continued discussion.

I think issue suffers very much of the "streisand effect", had the developers never made an issue by changing the file name/header, chances are that this would have gone largely unnoticed by 99.99% of the tech world. Not a single person would later complain that ".bro" insults them, as much as no one complains about other coincidental silly name occurrences. (e.g. http://www.openthefile.net/extension/ass)

I can definitely understand @pjdelport 's point of view, in wanting to avoid connotations, but I must say that the name change itself is what declared the connotation where none existed before. In other words, it created the kindling for this discussion to flame on...

I suggest changing "bro" extension to polish equivalent "ziom".

@pjdelport @jyrkialakuijala

What you are telling us, is that from now on, we should be very wary of naming technical things, because in a subset of some other culture it could offend a minor segment of the population.

Realistically, how many women, software engineers or not, would be actually offended by this name? I think it's very very few, if any. And if they do, I would question why can't they see the term is simply the first 3 letters of the product?

If this seriously would offend women, I'd be the first to speak against it, but I think you guys have gone too far here. It does matter, because it's Google, and what you guys do tends to have ripple effects across the industry.

Last thing I want is to get an angry email in the future from someone across the planet claiming insult on something which I wrote in a purely technical nature.

Lastly, I think your character assassination of calling anyone who disagrees with you: a hurt bro, seriously undermines your argument.

Do you really think a random programmer will one day find this project, see the "bro" file extension, and then go on a misogynous diatribe due to it? How many programmers do you think will actually feel identified by the term?

Those of us who are commenting in a moderate, respectful tone, are definitely not "bros". In fact, I actually hate the term in common parlance, you'll never hear me say that word to a friend. What I am here to help avoid, is the precedent that we must consult every single specific group in the planet in case we will inadvertently offend them with a simple header or file name.

.com offends me because .communist. Please change to .cap for .capitalist to appease my Western influence.

Agree on the point that the character assassination and ad hominems in this thread weakens the point. If you're in a professional environment and your tolerance is so low seeing .bro impacts your productivity or sensibilities in some way, you're going to have a long painful time in a professional environment.

And this is from a North American. People in this thread are saying "Well it's not just North Americans on the internet" but it's worth noting a great deal of us don't even take offense to the term bro to begin with.

A dumbass online gamer who also hails from Brazil but is ignorant of rules and disrespectful of fellow gamers. Uses his or her lack of knowledge of the English language to try and get away with breaking rules

What a great change!

@cyrrill

Great post. For the rest of the community, I apologize for losing my temper. I will admit, I would have been watching from the sidelines had this not happened. There are many talented people working on this project, both in the main project and the downstream forks. I don't feel I have the background to really contribute more than they have. However, this issue has broader ramifications and has made me feel I had to speak up or let us slip deeper into chaos. I really dislike the fact that a few people have manufactured a crisis for the sole purpose of coming to the rescue. I normally would like to see the tech discussion as far removed from the political spectrum as possible, but the very act of making the change, based on a supposed slight, sets a bad example. Google had a great deal of clout in the computer world, and this could be seen as a precedent and opening the door for others to insert their personal agenda into a technical discussion.
We must understand that just because someone is offended does not make the action or words offensive. While it is a good idea to avoid blatant slights, this is really pushing the boundaries. I think we should look at the technical and standards ramifications of this as well. The standard, for good or bad, has been to make the extension an subset of the program where possible. The most logical choice was picked as .bro. This was not done for the "brosphere" as some would like to make you believe, but because this was must effectively associated with the project name. If you believe there is some injustice in the naming convention, it should be brought up as such and addressed. So far I have only seen allusions to some form of harm that has no facts to back up the claim. Without any facts and debate we are in the realm of speculation and knee-jerk reactions. It is in poor practice to simply make technical changes because of some unfounded and unproven statements.
For these reasons, I would kindly ask the developers to reverse the decision. If you have a technical, or founded reason for future change, I am all for it. Ultimately it is the developers who have the final say, but I would implore them to rethink the basis for their decision.

I really dislike the fact that a few people have manufactured a crisis for the sole purpose of coming to the rescue.

This.

LOL at all the right wing hypocrites whining about Google's decision.

@jibal I'm actually left wing so that lol's

Fine, I LOL at the hypocrites regardless of their (claimed) ideology.

Okay, thanks for letting us know