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The word replacement game is simply that, a game. The etymology argument may not scale well. However, neither does "replace X with Y" scale.

Any word used will eventually be frowned upon. Example: a deny -list is discriminatory. It is, by definition, a non-inclusive statement. It is meant to be discriminatory because its whole function is to exclude. Another example: a subordinate is by definition non-free. The overlord to the subordinate is in control because it is meant to be a very strict hierarchical architecture.

What do we gain by replacing words today? Some will feel better, sure. However, does any of this word-swapping game change people's minds? Do we solve the actual problem ? As long as this is just a game hiding the symptoms, we are all worse of by playing this game.

The question is: is there an issue that should be addressed?

If 'Yes' then

Do something OR do nothing

If something THEN better it were done with grace and good will, so that we can all raise our eyes to higher horizons and get on.

Oh yes, the classic SOMETHING MUST BE DONE rallying cry so beloved of politicians and management.

What do we gain by replacing words today? Some will feel better, sure. However, does any of this word-swapping game change people's minds? Do we solve the actual problem? As long as this is just a game hiding the symptoms, we are all worse of by playing this game.

Agreed - I mean, getting upset about master slave terminology because people once bought and sold another is to miss the point: There are places in the world today where slavery is still happening, where one man may own another, such as Libya. This is a real problem in the present day, not some ephemeral ancestral possibility over which to naval gaze.

Slavery was happening at scale in Britain until at least the 12th century, so its wholly possibly most of us are of slave stock if you look far enough back, and yet the impact of that upon 99.999999% of us is absolutely nil.

While we have real problems in the world, we should not be devoting any time at all to worrying about terminology one ancestor may have used to describe another, and should instead be fixing the real problems of today.

If you think master branches are a problem then it is because you have too much time on your hands, too thin a skin, and too few actual problems to occupy your mind. I have a master today, who I accord with the title as a mark of the respect he has earned in the style of martial arts he teaches me - I'm white and he's black, for those obsessed by racial games, and neither of us considers me his slave.

Couldn't agree more. To virtue signal is to claim that you "care", but you are too lazy or selfish to do anything meaningful about the problem.

Call me cynical, but this sort of thing could also be used to deliberately divide and disrupt an open source community or organisation..

Oh well, I'm glad I am out of the nuclear remote handling industry, where I was working on a "Master/Slave Manipulator" (commonly abbreviated to MSM)

When BFR changed into a Big Falcon Rocket a few people called others falcon idiots. Egghead has swapped back and forth between compliment and an insult depending on time and place. It was once fashionable for block people to call each other with a word derived from the Latin for clean shiny black (Latin has another word for dirty disgusting black that Romans and racists never used for people).

I am sure horrible people will find ways to be offensive with the new words.

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,' it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.'

P.S.: Twitter to stop using sanity checks? Is there any evidence they ever started?

The circles I've moved in have usually talked about software client-server relationships for years, so no problem there, but the one word that nobody seems to be talking about is the term 'master', used to identify an item that exists purely to create exact replicas, such as the 'master' copy for producing commercial quantities of vinyl records and CDs.

From the article, I think that your "master", an original media entity to be copied, is going to be "source".

Because "prototype" has already been bastardized.

It seems to me that "master" is primarily a problem when paired with "slave". I doubt whether any but the most fanatical would wish to get rid of masterpieces, master's degrees or five master sailing ships..

any but the most fanatical

Sadly they are the ones that make the most noise, and any attempt at a reasoned rebuttal is shouted down with such violence that the sensible majority just give up, leaving the fanatics to crow that they "won".

I think those were five "masted" sailing ships. A sailing ship with 5 masters would be about as effective as a software project led by 5 different stakeholders.

stakeholders. Hmmm. Sounds a bit aggressive, violent even.

stakeholders. Hmmm. Sounds a bit aggressive, violent even.

Won't somebody think of the vampires!!

I think those were five "masted" sailing ships.

Nope. From the OED:

master, n.2

A vessel having masts, esp. one with a specified number of masts, as in five-master, seven-master, etc.

master, n.2 - A vessel having masts...

This cannot stand! It must be renamed immediately. From this day forth, a master shall be known as a primary. A five-primary and a seven-primary. They are now all primary. Front-seat vessels and no cargo is enslaved by the belly any more.

/s

Oh [wo]man, that coat must be sea-worthy, or else...

Shh, Remember: Vampire Unlives Matter

... and won support from other Linux maintainers including Chris Mason and Greg Kroah-Hartman.

I feel Chris Mason and Greg Kroah-Hartman could work harder at eliminating offensive words from the vocabulary. It is not just racist terminology, but sexist too.

For many, Mason is a reminder of the appalling Mason–Dixon line that marked the physical border between freedom and slavery, torture and death. For others, it is an abhorrent reference to Regular Freemasonry, a network of organizations that exclude women from their membership. And I don't need to point out the problems with Hartman.

I think any reasonable person will agree that the inclusive alternatives of Bricklayer and Kroah-Hartperson should be adopted as soon as possible.

As expected in a comments thread in The Reg, pedantry: The Mason - Dixon line had slave states North of it, all of them north of the line were slave states until the Civil War when the last one was Delaware. While technically to the East of most of the line, it was to the North of the southern part of the line because the line was the demarcation between it and the other states around it.

@smooth newt

I think the sarcasm in your post was lost on some people.

Should this icon be banned? And the one with the helicopter on it too, because the colour of the helicopter is associated with the negative emotion of impending doom

Though I'm not quite sure why "sanity check" is considered pejorative by any group.

I don't know anyone who, despite their mental illnesses, would be called insane by either themselves or others.

And I am struggling to think of any group who would consider it offensive... clearly my imagination isn't up to much - can anyone enlighten me?

The term that had me boggling was "dummy value".

As for "master" and "slave", replace them by "dom" and "sub" to be truly inclusive of the BDSM community.

> The term that had me boggling was "dummy value".

"secondary" is the one that got my attention. I cannot for my life come up with a possible rephrasing of, for example, "primary and secondary server". Honest question: can anyone here? Virtual pint for "thanks in advance".

"secondary" is the one that got my attention. I cannot for my life come up with a possible rephrasing of, for example, "primary and secondary server". Honest question: can anyone here? Virtual pint for "thanks in advance".

In these woke times, surely the alternative for primary/secondary can only be influencer/follower?

You have to wonder who is putting some of these things on the list.

Perhaps someone so militantly in favour of inclusive terminology that they want to bar any term that might have ever been used as a playground insult.

Or perhaps some opponent of inclusive terminology seeking to poison the well and support the "slippery slope" argument.

Both seem equally possible.

While I support the BLM movement, I think going back and refactoring a huge codebase to remove banned words that were used without any malign connotation, could have ununtended consequences. Such as serious bugs being introduced into the code, or API compatibility issues.

For example, grepping the linux kernel headers (just the headers, which all have API compatibility implications) there are 1645 lines containing the word "master" and 1550 lines containing the word "slave". Think of all the code reviews needed to expunge just two banned terms arising from today's moral panic. What about all the others, and what about tomorrow's moral panic?

I highly doubt that anyone was intending any malice when they used these terms, no more than the inventor of the "kill" command, which "kills" a process along with all of its "children" had murderous intent. Or perhaps we should expunge that too, out of solidarity for victims of mass murder.

I really don't see how borking the Linux kernel helps anyone?

How about doing something real and tangible to address poverty, race and class inequality instead? Donate to education charities, support minority ethnic inclusion in tech outreach programs, vote Labour...

Virtue signaling is one thing, but imposing it on the world's most well-established codebase is both worthless and self-defeating.

Yes if you go down the rabbit hole of being offended by daemons.

But I think it's reasonable to remove some examples such as where "white " is a synonym for good and "black" for bad

You mean whitelist/blacklist?

Even these terms I doubt had any malign intent when they were used or even coined. It's like with an optical filter - a white one lets through photons while a black one does not. A whitelist lets through the specified packet types, like a list of holes in a punched card, while a blacklist blocks the specified types, like a list of un-punched "black" positions on the card.

Are we to expunge all emotional reference to colour from our language then? Dark times ahead, I fear. (oops)

All sounds like Newspeak to me..

That's not what blacklists are. The term goes back centuries, and is a list of bad (hence black, because black is bad in English culture) people, such as debtors, traitors, drunkards, or whatever. Networking blacklists ban bad hosts or bad packets.

Do you really think BLM cares about this?

Do you really think a black person sering the word "slave" in a technical context will feel insulted that you're mocking all his murdered brothers?

Offered freely:

Master -> Pimp

Slave -> Ho

Kernel - Systemd

Linus -> Bill

What about when these are the appropriate term? "Slave" and "secondary, subordinate, replica or follower" absolutely do not cover the same relationships between things.

I mean if Slaves were just subordinates we wouldn't be having this conversation. I'm a subordinate to my boss. I'm absolutely not his slave. And Slaves were not replicas or followers of their Masters. They were Slaves.

All these words represent different relationship structures. That's why there are multiple words in the first place.

* Any point where there's a single master device with absolute control over others, that's master/slave.

* Chuck in things like "being able to finish one command before working on another" and you're getting a client/server relationship.

* A functionally identical failover or load-balancing system is a primary/secondary/etc relationship or a replica.

* A structure like Github where things derive from a root is Parent/Child.

Yes, some things should be renamed. But they should be renamed because they're /technically/ wrong or misleading. Having two servers where one is a functionally identical backup is not a master/slave. Something like a simple SPI device is.

No wonder they want to get rid of 'Sanity Check'. Presumably in that case it's the whole concept and not just the name?

Casual workday conversation in 100 years.

George: Mr Philby, what's a slave?

Mr Philby: Shut up and keep on pulling that plough George, or I'll give you a good flogging and sell you off to the salt mine.

George: "Mr Philby, you're treating me like a Replica! You're a complete Follower-driver, and a Primary of the art at that."

I was doing some hard core audio engineering last week, preparing a series of mixed audio recordings for production of CD disks as well as streaming services, making sure that the recordings are of the proper loudness levels and peak dBs for correct playback on those platforms.

This process is called "Mastering"

And per the naming convention standards of the P&E guild of National Academy of Recording Arts and Science (NARAS...Aka "The Grammys" )...Each of the final output files is labeled "SONG TITLE- MASTER"

I am a terrible person for using such derogatory and insensitive language.

Consider this my public apology.

Five years from now the changes will have happened, it will have turned out to be No Big Deal, 99% of people will have moved on to more important things, and forum posters will still be raging about it. At least when they're not raging about SystemD.

Kind of like Y2K was no big deal because a lot of people did a lot of work to make it "no big deal"? At least Y2K was necessary work - this is just make work to get triggered (oh no, is that a bad word now too because it denotes firearms?!?) people to move onto the next made-up issue.

“It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”

― George Orwell, 1984

The loonies will be tearing down statues next!

Yes, how dare Oxford have that statue of the evil Rhodes, who made his money out of colonialism. Tear it down.

Wait, give back his money and ask the the Rhodes scholars to leave? Now, let's not be hasty here.

If you can't see the difference in the celebration of someone who actually bought and sold slaves, and the removal of words which can happen to describe such events in other non-contextual circumstances, then you are part of the problem.

It was mentioned a few comments back, but ... and I apologise in advance if I am inadvertently insulting or causing distress to anyone... but what is wrong with "dummy value"?

The email includes:

The African slave trade was a brutal system of human misery deployed at global scale.

So: do slaves (past or present) from other places not matter ?

OK: I understand why Dan wrote that - he is reacting to the current brouhaha - but it is easy to lose sight of the bigger picture when under pressure from on group.

Yes, this is another show of ignorance, and another example of a chauvinistic US-centric approach. Slavery haunted mankind (sorry for the man?) for most of its existence. Actually, understanding its horror is a very late discovery.

I'm sure many of my ancestors were or slaver owners or slaves. Greek and Egyptians had slaves, Romans enslaved most people they conquered. Muslims set up a huge slave trade with the help of many others, and kept lots of slaves for themselves. Serfdom was a kinf of slavery. I may understand that in the "Land of Freedom" slavery abolished very late, so it's still a much more open wound then elsewhere, but reducing slavery to just the US one just shows ignorance.

And remember, many forms of slavery are still alive in many places. Just try to travel not like a wealthy Western tourist only, maybe looking for someone far less fortunate to exploit. Changing words won't fight that. But it's far easier to pretend to fight writing words, then renounces to live comfortably and letting someone else far away to keep on exploiting people for your comfort.

The limitations of Newspeak's vocabulary enabled the Party to effectively control the population's minds, by allowing the user only a very narrow range of spoken and written thought

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak

"ignorance is strength"

Orwell predicted it all. We're already seeing the "two minute hate" around the world - now.

> Williams stated: "Of course it is around this point someone jumps in with an etymological argument about why people should not be offended. Etymological arguments do not scale. The scope and pace of Linux to reach new developers exceeds the ability of historical terminology defenders to describe 'no, not that connotation'."

Except he's got it completely backwards. Etymological arguments absolutely scale, because anyone can go and read a dictionary on their own, and learn for themselves the alternative interpretations of words that bother them.

What doesn't scale is attempting to not offend anybody, since offence is entirely subjective, and anyone can be offended by anything at any time. So unless you remove every term every time someone claims it is offensive, you would need a person or group in charge of deciding who it's "okay" to offend, and who it isn't; which is a concept I find offensive.

Indeed.

"Why did the elephant paint his feet yellow?"

"So he could hide upside down in a bowl of custard."

THAT'S OFFENSIVE. MY HUSBAND, WHO WORKED IN THE FOOD INDUSTRY DROWNED IN A VAT OF CUSTARD AT WORK JUST LAST WEAK YOU INSENSITIVE CLOD

Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.

In my tradition there's a word that in approximate translation says something like "your tongue doesn't have any bones but can get some of your bones to be crushed".

No matter what words you use will be offensive to someone somewhere.

Therefore we should get the sha256 value of different sizes of the register logo file, and use blocks of 8 characters to form the function names.

Stuff readability or even getting programs to work....

Mind you someone would find an objection to 4cf67y62

How long before someone objects to Cisco config which uses NO in front of virtually every command to negate the effect.

I,e. Shut, no shut