The company now “encourages the use of replica, standby, secondary, or follower instead of slave in code and in conversations, as well as deny/ allow lists rather than blacklists and whitelists,” a spokesperson says.ĭwayne Slater, a developer opposed to GitHub's decision to drop "master" In 2019, an employee of San Francisco software company PagerDuty suggested replacing slave with replica in code used internally at the company PagerDuty made the change. The Python programming language dropped both master and slave in 2018, which also generated some controversy among users. The Django web development platform changed master and slave to leader and follower in 2014, and the open-source content-management system Drupal went with primary and replica the same year. Other organizations have more recently revised language that could be seen as rooted in racism. The county agency declared the words “not an acceptable identification label,” Eglash wrote, which incited debate in the pre-Twitter internet era. Eglash and others point to a 2003 memo from the Los Angeles County Office of Affirmative Action Compliance, responding to an employee’s complaint about using master and slave in computer contexts. In the 21st century, the language is increasingly questioned. The words may have been chosen to emphasize the innovation, Eglash wrote: “The concept of a free master that did no work and a slave that followed the master’s orders made for a vivid, if ethically suspect, technosocial metaphor.” The “master/slave” metaphor in technology dates back to at least 1904, describing a sidereal clock system at an observatory in Cape Town, according to a 2007 essay by Ron Eglash, a professor at the University of Michigan. While learning Git, she remembers struggling to figure out how to change the default “master,” and she supports giving users an easy way to do so. “This didn’t have to be the language that we used,” says Karanja, who is Black. When she was teaching herself to code, she thought the choice of the words master and slave was both odd and specific. She is the founder of 26 Letters and the CEO of Hack the Gap, two organizations aimed at equity and inclusion in tech. Courtesy of Code 2040īut Caroline Karanja in Minneapolis sees updating these terms as an important piece of the effort to create more inclusive spaces in tech. Karla Monterroso is CEO of Code 2040, a nonprofit dedicated to racial equality and inclusion in tech. Since 1976 the US has issued more than 67,000 patents using the terms, from an antenna system to a data-encoding method to a “vehicle ramp assembly.” Sometimes the metaphor is less precise: A "master" may simply lead, serve as a primary resource, or be considered first. The words master and slave have been widely used for decades in computing and other technical contexts, as a reference to situations where one process or entity controls another. “And they’re like, ‘No, that’s just the technology. “I remember freaking out about it and going to the terminal and letting them know that I thought that’s really inappropriate,” says Monterroso, CEO of Code 2040, a nonprofit dedicated to racial equality and inclusion in tech. Instead, the screen showed the text “Master/Slave,” repeated at least 10 times from top to bottom. A few years ago, Karla Monterroso was at an airport when she noticed a glitch in a computer monitor that would normally display flight information.
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