Hector Martin

When you booted a virtual machine in Virtual PC - for just a moment, under a second really, the BIOS screen showed: Primary Master: HDD Primary Slave: None Secondary Master: CD/ROM Secondary Slave: None /4

The legal team told me that this was racially charged language and had to be removed. We were flabbergasted. "It's industry standard terminology" "It's only on the screen for a moment" "It's in code that we licensed from another company - that is shipped everywhere". /5

Fortunately, the legal team were resolute. Shipping this language was not acceptable. We spent some time debating - and made a code change so that the BIOS screen showed: IDE Location 0:0 : HDD IDE Location 0:1 : None IDE Location 1:0 : CD/ROM IDE Location 1:1 : None /6

And we shipped, and it was fine. And, to be honest - I had forgotten that this was even a thing. Until a couple of years ago when I started getting into Kubernetes - and came across the "Kubernetes Master". /7

My immediate reaction in that moment was "Ugh, people are still doing that?". So please - keep up the good fight. It is worth it. And to the people arguing that these terms are "technically accurate" - let me say this: /8

Technically accurate =/= appropriate. Technically accurate =/= the only way to say things. A term can be technically accurate - but there can still be a better way to say it. As an example - /9

I have a wicked sense of humor, love word play and innuendo (people who know me are horrified when they find out that I am the Hyper-V language cop). So - when the legal team told me that I could not use "Master/Slave" in 2003 - my first response was: /10

What about "Dominant / Subordinate"? Amusingly the legal team had no issue with this - however, my engineering team did (good thing). But it is a good example none-the-less. Technically accurate, not appropriate. /11