>>13Apparently IETF banned that terminology in 2018:
https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-knodel-terminology-00.htmlMaster-slave is an oppressive metaphor that will and should never become fully detached from history. Aside from being unprofessional and oppressive it stifles participation according to Eglash: “If the master-slave metaphor affected these tough-minded engineers who had the gumption to make it through a technical career back in the days when they may have been the only black persons in their classes, what impact might it have on black students who are debating whether or not to enter science and technology careers at all?” [Eglash].
Aside from the arguably most important reason outlined above, the term set is becoming less used and therefore increasingly less compatible as more communities move away from its use (eg [Python], [Drupal], and [Django]. The usage of ‘master’ and ‘slave’ in hardware and software has been halted by the Los Angeles County Office of Affirmative Action, the Django community, the Python community and several other programming languages. This was done because the language is oppressive and hurts people in the community [Django2]. It is also no longer in use at the IEEE.
In addition to being inappropriate and arcane, the master-slave metaphor is both technically and historically inaccurate. For instance, in DNS the ‘slave’ is able to refuse zone transfers on the ground that it is malformed. The metaphor is incorrect historically given the most recent centuries during which “the role of the master was to abdicate and the role of the slave was to revolt” [McClelland]. Yet in another sense slavery is also not ‘just an historic term’, whereas freedom from slavery is a human-rights issue [UDHR], it continues to exist in the present [Wikipedia]. Furthermore, this term set wasn’t revived until recently, after WWII, and after many of the technologies that adopted it were already in use with different terminology [Eglash].
Lastly, we present not an additional rationale against their use, but an indicator of actual racism in the community that has been surfaced as a result of this larger debate among technologists, “I don’t believe in PC (political correctness), mostly because the minorities constantly use it to get away with anything” [Jansens]. This illustrates the need to, as Graves is cited above as saying, continue to raise awareness within our community for eventual, lasting change on the continued front of struggle against the racists amongst us.