Re: Diversity and offensive terminology in RFCs

[Michal Krsek <[e-mail]>]

Hello,

I understand those words may be inappropriate in some contexts, but they 
are fine in other contexts.

Not touching the IT area, how we teach history?


I'd say - our master/slave act means something else than enslaving 
people, man-in-the-middle is a system not a male person, debugging means 
something else than disinfection and so on.

We do have our jargon for long time and I'm not sure if it is a clever 
idea to start building a Tower of Babel 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel .


                     Michal


On 20/09/2018 14:15, Roberta Maglione (robmgl) wrote:
> 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.
>