OpenZFS removed offensive terminology from its code

Enlarge / Replacements for outdated master/slave terminology tend to be considerably more accurate, as well as less offensive.

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On Wednesday evening, ZFS founding developer Matthew Ahrens submitted what should have been a simple, non-controversial pull request to the OpenZFS project: wherever possible without causing technical issues, the patch removed references to “slaves” and replaced them with “dependents.”

This patch in question doesn’t change the way the code functions—it simply changes variable names in a way that brings them in conformance with Linux upstream device-mapper terminology, in 48 total lines of code (42 removed and 48 added; with one comment block expanded slightly to be more descriptive).

But this being the Internet, unfortunately, outraged naysayers descended on the pull request, and the comments were quickly closed to non-contributors. I first became aware of this as the moderator of the r/zfs subreddit where the overflow spilled once comments on the PR itself were no longer possible.

Updating terminology is technically sound

There are several valid answers to the “Why patch?” question. For those who refuse to think of anything but clarity, there is no good descriptive relationship between any technology and human slavery—and the human term far predates any engineering or technical use. Replacing “master/slave” terminology generally results in a more precise, easily discoverable technical description.

OpenZFS is not on the leading edge of this disambiguation effort. Some notable projects that have discarded and replaced master/slave terminology include the BIND DNS server,

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