Respectful Code

Inclusivity is central to Fuchsia's culture, and our values include treating each other with dignity. As such, it’s important that everyone can contribute without facing the harmful effects of bias and discrimination. However, terms in our codebase, UIs, and documentation can perpetuate that discrimination. This document sets forth guidance which aims to address disrespectful terminology in code and documentation.

Policy

Terminology that is derogatory, hurtful, or perpetuates discrimination, either directly or indirectly, should be avoided.

What is in scope for this policy?

Anything that a contributor would read while working on Fuchsia, including:

Names of variables, types, functions, files, build rules, binaries, exported variables, ...
Test data
System output and displays
Documentation (both inside and outside of source files)
Commit messages

Principles

Be respectful: Derogatory language shouldn’t be necessary to describe how things work.
Respect culturally sensitive language: Some words may carry significant historical or political meanings. Please be mindful of this and use alternatives.

How do I know if particular terminology is OK or not?

Apply the principles above. If you have any questions, you can reach out to fuchsia-community-managers@google.com.

What are examples of terminology to be avoided?

These lists are NOT meant to be comprehensive. They contain a few examples that people have run into frequently.

Specific terms

Term	Suggested alternatives
master	primary, controller, leader, host
slave	replica, subordinate, secondary, follower, device, peripheral
whitelist	allowlist, exception list, inclusion list
blacklist	denylist, blocklist, exclusion list
insane	unexpected, catastrophic, incoherent
sane	expected, appropriate, sensible, valid
crazy	unexpected, catastrophic, incoherent
redline	priority line, limit, soft limit

Idioms

Prefer descriptive and factual statements instead of idioms. Idioms can suffer from the same problems described above, and also they can be difficult to understand for people with a different cultural context than you.

For example, instead of “this is not black or white”, prefer “this is more nuanced”.
Instead of “this is the blind leading the blind”, explain what you mean, like “the reference you point to is inaccurate because ...”.

What if I am interfacing with something that violates this policy?

This circumstance has come up a few times, particularly for code implementing specifications. In these circumstances, differing from the language in the specification may interfere with the ability to understand the implementation. For these circumstances, we suggest one of the following, in order of decreasing preference:

If using alternate terminology doesn't interfere with understanding, use alternate terminology.
Failing that, do not propagate the terminology beyond the layer of code that is performing the interfacing. Where necessary, use alternative terminology at the API boundaries.