On Friday, July 10, Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux and chief engineer of the Linux kernel, incorporated a Pull Request into the Linux 5.8 library.
Replace Master /slave and Blacklist/Whitelist with inclusive language in Linux kernel code and documentation.
The PR was submitted on July 4 by Linux kernel developer Dan Williams, who is also a member of the Linux Foundation’s technical Advisory Board and has published several articles on Linux development.
Williams pointed out that the Linux kernel is a global software project at a time when many countries are experiencing racist movements and the African slave trade has caused great suffering in Africa. In order to show respect for the developers of different races, The tech community should adopt more inclusive language.
See:
lkml.org/lkml/2020/7/4/229
Replacement hangover: Too many new terms and lack of standards
Linux developers will need to use new terms to replace master/slave and blacklist/ Whitelist in the future.
Proposed alternative terms for master/slave include:
primary/secondary
The main/up or subordinate
initiator/target
requester/responder
controller/device
The host/worker or the proxy
leader/follower
director/performer
Proposed alternatives to blacklist/ Whitelist include:
denylist/allowlist
blocklist/passlist
It’s worth noting that the Linux team didn’t recommend an exact alternative term, and instead wanted developers to choose their own.
According to official sources, the new terms need to be used in code and related documentation added to the Linux kernel; Master, slave, blacklist, and Whitelist are still used to maintain old codes and documents or to meet specific requirements of some hardware or protocol specifications.
Techno-political correctness is sweeping the tech world
Since the George Floyd incident in Minnesota at the end of May, nearly 100 cities across the United States have held protests and demonstrations. After the trend of equal rights was mentioned in the technology circle, many technology companies immediately came out and said that they would abolish racist terms such as “blacklist”.
Read more: Race Affirmative Movement Accelerates GitHub, Go Abolish Blacklist naming, Tech Politically Correct?
Companies and open source communities supporting the renaming campaign include Twitter, GitHub, MicroSoft, LinkedIn, Ansible, Splunk, Android, Go, MySQL, PHPUnit, Curl, OpenZFS, Rust, JP Morgan And now the Linux kernel is one of them.
Many in the academic community support the name change, arguing that the continued use of racially tinged terms will deepen and prolong racial discrimination.
On the contrary, some people in the tech industry take the opposite view.
What a pointless waste of time. I’ve been doing development for over 10 years and never once thought of black history when incorporating code into the master.
I don’t know where slave, blacklist, Whitelist came from, and I wouldn’t bother.
Ironically, the PR that required discarding master/slave ended up incorporating master.
We’ve written about racial Equality movement speeding up Github, Go abolishing Blacklist naming, Technological political correctness? In this article, I launched a vote to modify the name, and asked friends for their opinions on the modification of the name. The results are as follows:
What do you think of the impact of the master/ Slave and Blacklist/Whitelist disbanding sweeping the tech scene?
Welcome to talk with us.