On Mon, Oct 30, 2023 at 09:54:58AM +0100, Jakob Meng wrote: > Hi Aaron, > > first and foremost: I am fully committed to make our OVS community more > inclusive. Replacing terminology that promotes racial and cultural bias is > one of many (!) steps in achieving that. For the objective there is a broad > consensus, on the practical implementation not so much, it seems. > > IBM Academy of Technology conducted a evaluation of IT terminology and > published a guideline on which terms to replace including rationale [0]: > > [0] https://github.com/IBM/IBMInclusiveITLanguage > > For example, it replaces {black,white}list with {block,allow}list because: > > "As a pair, "blacklist" and "whitelist" promote racial bias by implying that > black is bad and white is good. When the terms 'white' or 'black' are used in > a context where white is represented as good or black is represented as bad, > this usage reinforces a model that promotes racial bias." [0] > > However, for "white space" there is "No change recommended" because: > > "This term is not based on a good/bad binary and so does not fall under our > guiding principle for black and white terms (see "blacklist")." [0] > > > Precision of expression is part of inclusive language. In my commit message I > am using the term "white space" because that is exactly the technical term > used in Unicode [1], editors and our ecosystem. Using other words such as > empty-space or blank-space could be confusing for readers. > > [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_character > > Although disturbed at first, I appreciate that you brought this up. We should > discuss this with Simon and others to get a common understanding of what > inclusive language is in practice. I assume you do not advocate for banning > the words white and black completely from the English language, do you?
FWIIW, based on the above I using the term whitespace seems ok to me. _______________________________________________ dev mailing list d...@openvswitch.org https://mail.openvswitch.org/mailman/listinfo/ovs-dev
