Updating Tech Terminology

Route 1337 LLC is not a political company by nature. In fact, we prefer to stay out of politics and focus on great open source code for the DevOps community. Sometimes you have to take a stand though. This is one of those times.
In recent events we have seen a push by those with a voice to stand up for the rights of those without one. Route 1337 LLC believes in equal rights for all human beings regardless of who or what they are. Sadly as a company with a donation-based revenue model we have very little money to effect change via donations. What we can do though, is avoid using terminology in our projects and services that have historically racist connotations.

As of the publishing of this post, Route 1337 LLC has replaced all outdated terminology in our GitHub projects, and our services. This new terminology not only avoids having a racist origin, but also better reflects what the service, code, function, or branch actually represents in our systems.

As a mostly code driven company you will see the following changes more than anything else:

1. The master branch in all repositories will be now be called main.
   This aligns well with the develop branch which has always historically been used to represent what is about to become main.
2. master and slave servers will be referred to in documentation as primary, or active and secondary, standby, spare, or passive depending on context. We’ve decided against leader and follower for historical reasons¹.
   Unfortunately for hosted resources we cannot control some legacy terminology appearing in code such as Terraform until the infrastructure providers make these changes as well. We will leave comments explaining the use of legacy terms in all code in these instances as we come across them.
3. whitelist and blacklist are hotly debated right now about the origin being unrelated to race². Here at Route 1337 LLC we don’t care. Even if these terms don’t have a racist origin, it’s not hard to change them.
   Instead of excuses we will use allowlist, or permitlist and denylist, or blocklist in all documentation. As for automation code we are still restricted to terms used by service providers, but we will leave a comment explaining why we are forced to use legacy terms in some places.

We must all work together for a better future, and changing a few terms is below the bare minimum we can ask of any company or person.
-Matthew Ahrenstein