[slipheen]

One thought that I had seen elsewhere on this subject really stood out to me.

When these phrases are being replaced, their replacements are almost always more descriptive terms for that specific project, and the way those servers interact.

For example- In Jenkins you run a "master" which schedules jobs, and "slaves" which run the jobs. After they updated their terminology, they referred to the job-runner as a "Agents."

This makes it much clearer what the relationship is between them, and clarifies that the "Slave" servers aren't some sort of failover server, which is how a DB might use the same terms.

I've seem other projects use primary/replica, and several other variations, but they almost always seem to be much better fits for what the software is actually doing.

[dingaling]

One has to be careful though, because in espionage the 'agents' are non-professionals bribed or coerced to do the dangerous dirty-hands work. They're expendable and deniable.

Many, many words hold additional meanings that aren't obvious to the mainstream.