RE: Diversity and offensive terminology in RFCs

["Roberta Maglione (robmgl)" <[e-mail]>]

I agree with the comments made below: in my opinion there is nothing wrong in using terms like master/slave, white/black lists, man-in the middle, etc.
In the context of IETF we are using them as part of technical discussions: if you don’t take them out of the context in my opinion there is nothing wrong with these words.

Thanks
Roberta


-----Original Message-----
From: ietf <[e-mail]> On Behalf Of Petr Špacek
Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2018 13:29
To: [e-mail]
Subject: Re: Diversity and offensive terminology in RFCs

On 20/09/2018 13:25, Stewart Bryant wrote:
> The problem with the many proposed alternative versions of Master/Slave that I have seen over the years, is that they fail to express the technical importance of the absolute relationship between the two entities.
> 
> The term master/slave is used when it is technically required that the instruction is executed without equivocation. Indeed in hardware-land, dithering over what to do (metastability) is so catastrophic that many technical measures need to be taken to avoid it.
> 
> If all the master-slave flip-flops in the Internet were replaced with do-it-if-I-feel-like-it flip-flops, we would not have an Internet.
> 
> In RFC-land we are mirroring the long-standing language of the hardware designers, and having a common terminology that transcends all aspects of logic design seems to me to be a net benefit to the internet as a whole.

Yes, we always need to take context into account!

I fully agree with with Stewart and Riccardo (previous reply) on this.

-- 
Petr Špaček  @  CZ.NIC