USB gadget vs slave

I respectfully disagree with the term being technically accurate. For me the relationship between master & slave has two connotations: one is a question of rights (as in the slave doesn't have any and the master can order it/him/her around to do whatever) and one is who's doing the work (as in the slave does all the work and the master only assigns, supervises, punishes).

However, there are many situations where us admins speak about master/slave in technical environments and where those connotations don't really fit:

1. Databases. Here the master is often simply the single point where data can be changed. However, it's not like the master is not doing any work — often enough the work is divided somewhat equally between all nodes in the cluster.

2. High-availability clusters. Here the master is the one actually doing all the work, and it isn't even telling the slave what to do all the time. Usually the slave machine verifies that the master is still alive and takes over if that check fails — but that's usually not initiated by the master but by the slave's own will — and the nodes suddenly switch their roles, too. They're more often called active/passive clusters, and that's a much more fitting term to me; it's much more of a relationship between equal partners than any kind of hierarchy.

3. DNS servers. Again the masters may or may not do a significant amount of work depending on whether or not it's listed as a NS for the domain in question. Additionally it doesn't instruct the slave to update its files, it only notifies the slave. The slave decides based on its configuration if and when to update its zones. On top of that master and slave servers are often run by different entities (companies).

We use master/slave for so many different cases in tech that I'd prefer not to use them even without considering the historical context of those terms.