Re: Diversity and offensive terminology in RFCs

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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 <ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Petr Špacek
Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2018 13:29
To: ietf@xxxxxxxx
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.





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