Let me start by saying that I do not want to start a political war here, and will not be rendering any judgement of the choice of technology terms which predate my time on this planet.

Having said that, there is an industry-wide trend to move away from the terms "master" and "slave". This recently became an issue for me since I cover configuring NUT in a video course I did. As part of a company-wide move toward more inclusive language, the transcript of my course was flagged for re-evaluation and update. I have explained that since I didn't write NUT, there's not much I can do about it apart from injecting an acknowledgement of the troublesome language into the course. It brings up a problem we all may face in a future though, where tools and technology choices may be evaluated and possibly rejected on criteria other than their technical merit.

As a software developer, and part of the IT world, I realize that the terms are an industry standard, and while they may be considered in poor taste in retrospect, they were not chosen specifically to hurt or injure anyone. Having said that, the entire IT industry has started moving in the direction of shedding these terms and replacing them with main/secondary, leader/follower, or server/client where appropriate. Even uses of the term "master" without an associated "slave" such as with git branches or "master recordings", are being frowned on and replaced.

To maintain backwards compatibility, the existing terms will need to be supported, of course, but can additional terms such as primary/secondary or leader/follower be added as synonyms in the configuration system so that people may choose these alternate terms and achieve the same effect?