> We’ve decided to rename the Master role to the Maintainer role. It removes the negative connotations that may be associated with the term “Master,”
Good lord...
Good lord...
In this context, though, the subject is the repository, an inanimate piece of property, not any other user. In that context, I'd argue that both "owner" and "master" are descriptive and very difficult to interpret offensively unless you're going out of your way to interpret them as such.
There are subtle differences in connotation between "master" and "maintainer", too - think "king" and "steward", apologies to Tolkien - it's not like they're synonyms and a swap is just being done in-kind. I think there's actually a case to be made that "maintainer" is a better label for the role, given the existing context of a project maintainer being one who has administrative control over it (and the existing "owner" root role), but to change the label with the reasoning that "master is exclusive, so we picked up a thesaurus" isn't going to pass the sniff test for a lot of people. A slightly more tactful approach of "we decided this better describes the role as it already applies to modern team organization" would have worked just fine.
This sort of overoptimistic "inclusiveness" is the kind of thing that makes the people who doubt much more certain of their skepticism and should be considered harmful.
Have you considered the possibility that people other than you do find the terms offensive, and have asked for them to be changed?
> This [...] is the kind of thing that makes the people who doubt much more certain of their skepticism and should be considered harmful.
Those of us who live in the US are painfully familiar with this line of thinking... "you better change your ways if you want to convince me about this whole human decency thing! I'm still on the fence about being an asshole, and it's all your fault".
Guess what, nobody cares about your skepticism, because you're not in a position to decide on this issue, thankfully. Nobody is trying to change your mind, either. All that we ask, as a society, is that you keep your intolerance within the scope of the law, and refrain from killing or beating people as a result of your bottled up anger and sense of entitlement.
I have considered it. I would indeed be eager to speak with someone who actually was offended by the term. That is not someone who is offended because they believe it might offend a third party, someone who themselves feel hurt by the prevalence of calling a computer a "slave" or a person a "master" in this context in a way they believe is _significant_ and _important_.
I would love to talk to such a person and understand their perspective, but the point I am trying to make is I seriously doubt such a person exists.
I would also like to know if such a person would also be offended by the word "robot" which is a loanword meaning literally 'slave' in Czech.
There is a rising problem in society of people who ally themselves with straw-men and make moral issues in support of dubious claims of oppression. To be fair, it isn't a new problem. Virtue signaling or boasting of one's own moral superiority by shaming others is as old as society. In the last century in America most of this was about being a good Christian. This century we're in a transition towards greater irrelevance of religion and conservative morals, with the new most popular moral boasting point being about who can be the best liberal.
My point is not that issues of tolerance do not exist in our society, it is that increasingly, many people talking the most about tolerance seem to be doing so to further their own feelings of moral superiority and to display that to their communities. There is a disconnect between their actions and actual empathy for real people they encounter.
That is, to come back to the original point, nowhere can I find evidence of this change being attributed to empathy towards a real person who experienced grief. Just a lot of talk about people expecting the change will make people they suppose to exist feel better. That sort of empathy for the strawman is harmful because 1) it distracts from actual issues and 2) it diminishes the position of people talking about actual issues.
Agreed, yet I'm kind of concerned about those context-free word readings and absolutisms, which can deviate into a form of thought policing, censorship, and sometimes, bigotry. While it is important to take care of the weight words carry and be humane and respectful, words do not make sense without a context thus I have no problem with a process being "slave", because it has a very precise meaning in CS/IT nowadays entirely remote to the origin and history of the word, and not entirely encapsulated by "secondary" which is somehow more fuzzy. By that metric we should probably soon stop killing processes (oh, my! parents killing their own children!) and having daemons and so on.
Trivia: for maximum shock value about how context shapes word meaning and your perception of it, in French the n-word means both "a person of African ascendance" and "ghostwriter", and for the latter synonyms fail to capture the essence of what a ghostwriter is. So, yes, "nègre" is definitely used without offense when the context of literature is made absolutely clear, although it is tentatively replaced by "prête-plume" or "écrivain fantôme".
Maybe Leader Follower is the best (zookeeper and kafka uses it also usually any distributed system, that has dynamic election).
"Los Angeles officials have asked that manufacturers, suppliers and contractors stop using the terms 'master' and 'slave' on computer equipment, saying such terms are unacceptable and offensive."
(This should really not need a sarcasm disclaimer. But maybe it does.)