Why does KDE use slaves?

By Jabari Zakiya

KDE will soon be releasing version 4.0 of its desktop environment. But
KDE has a deep, dark secret – it engages in slavery. Actually it's not
a secret, they tell you straight up, they use slaves throughout its
infrastructure. And since February is Black History Month in the U.S.,
I feel compelled to speak out against this injustice. Slavery anywhere
is a threat to freedom everywhere, even in software.

For those of you who don't know KDE uses routines it calls IO-Slaves to
perform various interface tasks. When I first heard (about 3-4 years
ago) that KDE named these routines "slaves" I thought to myself, here
we go again. I went onto some KDE forums to get them to use some other
terminology for these routines. I (and others) obviously couldn't
convince them to change this terminology then, but maybe I can tweak
their consciousness now to reconsider the message they are putting out
behind the use of the slave paradigm.

While writing this piece I didn't have time to search and find some of
the discussions I remember, particularly from the 1970-80s, carried out
in various trade magazines letters to the editors, articles, and usenet
forums, about the need to abolish the master-slave terminology
paradigm, prevalent in electronics and software then. It seems the
developers at KDE need to see these discussions, and understand why,
almost universally now, you no longer see hardware and software
processes and relationships referred to as master-slave, but rather as
parent-child, client-server, and other such more socially acceptable
(and functionally accurate) terminology.

And for those maybe too young (or insensitive) to remember what the big
deal was be about why there was a push to have this terminology excised
from the fields of electronics, software, et al, well it was simple.
During the '70-80s there was a large influx of Black and women students
into colleges then, which caused to be challenged virtually everything
about the status quo paradigms in existence. And a lot of that centered
on attacking language constructs that were demeaning and oppressive to
non-whites. For ultimately, the power to define is the power to control.

As more non-whites entered the sciences and engineering (as I did) we
were confronted with the legacy of offensive terminology which most
whites never stopped to think about as being offensive. The
master-slave paradigm of labeling hardware boards and interactions was
virtually ubiquitous, which was then passed along to the software
world, especially after microprocessors and digital electronics began
to replace analog systems. So the language constructs used with
hardware was mimicked for the new software driven systems.

So it was deja vu to see the reemergence of the term "slaves" to
represent KDE's IO API, which tells you something about the
mono-culture of the people who make up the KDE community. How? Well,
it's hard for me to imagine any self-aware Black person sitting in a
room of people trying to come up with a name to refer to their IO
routines, and someone says, "hey, let's call these routines slaves" and
the Black person wouldn't say, "uh, I think we should come up with a
better name." But you needn't have to be non-white to recognize the
destructive legacy that word conjures up.

For really, what is KDE trying to project by calling these routines
slaves. After all, enslaved people are people who can be arbitrarily
abused, demeaned, and killed, who have no value beside their capacity
to provide uncompensated labor, who are denied all rights of person
hood, and have no protection under the law. At least that's what it
meant to be enslaved in the Americas.

But the KDE io-slaves seem to be a very important and essential core
elements of the KDE infrastructure. They possess highly specialized
functionality, are designed to provide an efficient and ubiquitous set
of tools for application developers to interface to, and thus are
valuable components which enhance the utility of KDE. These qualities
seem to be the antithesis to those of "slaves." Maybe KDE can hold a
contest to choose a better name for these routines, but it should
absolutely act to free its "slaves" now.

Human slavery is still a scourge mankind hasn't been able to eradicate,
as we now enter the 21st century, because it's a concept too many
people still condone. The enslavement of humans will end only when the
concept of slavery ceases to exist. Thus, people who produce "free"
software should not promote its concept to characterize anything about
the nature of their code. While we might not be able to eradicate
slavery in the world of human interaction, we absolutely should be able
to prevent it from manifesting in the world of free software. Tags:
kde, masters, slaves

Copyright information

This blog entry is (C) Copyright, Jabari Zakiya, 2004-2007. Unless a
different license is specified in the entry's body, the following
license applies: "Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire
article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice
is preserved and appropriate attribution information (author, original
site, original URL) is included".

http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/node/2075