[CJefferson]

Do you think, in most of these cases, master/slave is really the most precise terms we can come up with?

[bsaul]

i think a "master slave" architecture has become a very clear pattern in distributed systems, that anyone in the field recognize (as something opposed to a peer to peer for example).

this is precious, because it saves a lot of explanation time and ambiguities.

Once again i wouldn't mind using a different term if it made things even clearer for a given case. But only for this reason, and not for PC.