Re: Renaming the FTP Masters
Am Wed, Nov 03, 2021 at 02:27:08PM -0700 schrieb Felix Lechner:
>What do you think about the text below, please? Thanks for reading!
[...]
> PROPOSED TEXT
>
> In recognizance of the awful history of slavery, the Debian project
> will rename the "FTP Masters" team. For a long time, the word "master"
> has been associated with the grave injustices of slavery. [1]
>
> While there is a tradition in computing to label primary equipment as
> a "master" and replicated equipment as "slaves" [2] the use of the
> word "masters" for a group of people with special privileges [3]
> shocks the conscience.
>
> Within that context, the team's use of the title "wizard" [4] was also
> problematic. The Ku Klux Klan and its spinoffs used the title "wizard"
> to style high officials. [5] The team will likewise discontinue the
> use of the term "wizard" to designate any current or former members.
>
> Nothing in this resolution shall impair the continued use of the
> "master/slave" analogy for technical equipment.
Hello,
renaming the ftpmaster role because of associations to slavery
sounds completely strange to me as in my view there are no
grounds for such an association. The term ftpmaster is in line
with terms like postmaster, newsmaster or webmaster in which
master has the meaning of the german-language "Meister", with
e.g. postmaster being the english version of the german/austrian
historic "Postmeister". This "Meister" has absolutlely nothing
to with slavery, a "Meister" is somebody who has a high level of
knowledge and abilitites in his art or profession, as in the
english "master of arts", and who due to this high level of
knowledge and abilities can be in a deciding/leading position
within his realm of work.
The english wikipedia defines the term postmaster as follows: "A
postmaster (male) or postmistress (female) is the head of an
individual post office responsible for all postal activities in a
specific post office". The german wikipedia defines
"Postmeister" as "Der Postmeister (englisch Postmaster) ist der
verantwortliche Beamte oder Offizier, der für die Zustellung und
den Transport von Briefen und anderen postalischen Nachrichten
zuständig ist", translated to english: "The Postmeister (english
Postmaster) is the responsible agent or officer tasked with the
delivery and transport of letters and other postal messages".
This maps well to the digital world for the role of a postmaster
on a mailserver, a newsmaster on a usenet newsserver and a
webmaster on a webserver, and a Debian ftpmaster is responsible
for the contents of the Debian package archive (that was
traditionally distributed by the ftp protocol, hence the
designation ftpmaster). All of this has absolutely nothing to do
with slavery, and hence renaming the ftpmaster role because of
alleged references to slavery makes absolutely no sense to me.
Not wanting to use the positive designation "wizard" - which is
like the word master used to describe somebody with a high level
of knowledge and abilities in a certain field ("he is a real
wizard with the paintbrush") - just because some group of racists
happens to use the same word as an internal rank designator also
sounds completely strange to me. If you are an engineer and some
racists should decide to use the word "engineer" as a rank
designation, would you then stop referring to yourself as an
engineer just because of that?
Regards,
Karsten
--
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