During the Black Lives Matter movement protests, many tech companies, such as GitHub, Twitter, Google, Apple, and even Python and Go developers tried to revise their technical documentation to avoid racism accusations.
The trend of eliminating dubious terms remains one of the topical trends this year. The companies IBM and Microsoft have joined this flash mob.
Microsoft has been thinking about changing the dubious terms for several years, but after the Black Lives Matter protest, the company has become even more concerned about this issue. For example, the terms "master" and "slave" were replaced with "primary" and "secondary."
And also, the IBM Academy of Technology began looking for neutral alternatives to the following terms:
- master
- slave
- blacklist
- whitelist
- white label
- white paper
- man-hours
- Chinese wall
IBM Vice President and Chief Data Officer Tim Humphrey said some of the terms have already been removed, and in the future, the company will think about revising gender-biased terms. In this case, any developer can declare the discovery of a controversial term, and IBM will change its name.