Who controls glibc? | Hacker News Reader

Who controls glibc?

lwn.net

339 pointsCJefferson506 comments

Lots of people seem to be rooting around like truffle hogs looking for the partisan politics embedded in this story, but you won't find any.

The conflict happening here is between maintainers, who don't want a dated left-leaning joke embedded in the glibc documentation, and Stallman, who does.

If there's "political correctness" involved, it's right-leaning. But, as a left-leaning pro-choice person: there's no "political correctness" here at all.

It's a story because Stallman has played the "I'm the boss, you can't outvote me" card, not because anyone's in a tizzy over the politics.

I’m much more concerned about him playing the “childbirth is far more traumatic than having an abortion” card in the discussion about the patch. Until this moment, I wasn’t even aware that was a card. It’s difficult to fathom the logic that would arrive at that statement making sense to someone typing it, particularly a person who will never experience the situations upon which he’s speaking conclusively.

You’re right, the conflict is elsewhere. However, something about Richard Stallman making that statement, which marginalizes the intense conflict women often feel over intentional abortion in their own lives, not to mention traumatic abortions brought on by rape or medical issues, really speaks to a yawning gap existing between him and empathy for other people. It seems to imply that he thinks women leveraging their right to choose are pleased or joyful that they can do so, and this distantly makes the joke worth keeping. He might be pro-choice, and keen to defend it, but the way he defends it models an entire cadre of people who look up to him. He’s speaking from a position with multiple layers of privilege, on account of his stature, race, and gender, and basically saying “abortion, no biggie, right?” How does that help us recruit women in tech?

Did my nose find it, or do we care more about who maintains a C runtime?

Immediate future prediction: -4 on this comment, a disengaging reply from you, a barrage of comments below me lining up to defend Stallman (likely calling him Dr. Stallman) or tell me I’m misinterpreting a direct quote and/or its context, and I sign out again and return to dormancy and lament this community’s symptomatic demonstration of this industry’s faults: it’s about who runs glibc! That matters! Ignore everything else, it’s a tizzy! Just look at the top thread. Not an abortion joke, an abortion law joke. That makes it all better.

Edit: Oh good, we are on to the apt-get cow.

I guess I understand the downvotes here, but I really do think you've hit on at least an issue. Maybe not the issue, but it's a pretty big problem.

RMS's conduct here is just... pretty inappropriate. Jokes about abortion, rape, race, sexual orientation, etc, etc, are not something you should be touching as the maintainer of a public project, no matter what your opinions are or how strongly you hold them. The glibc maintainers (completely reasonably) decided that the man pages weren't a good place for potentially-charged jokes like this, and removed it. RMS overruled them in a pretty childlike and insensitive fashion, and that's not appropriate when you're the public face of anything.

I don't give a shit about the politics of glibc - but I do care that someone who is a role model and a public figure acts like this.

I do care that someone who is a role model and a public figure acts like this.

Why? It's fine to be offended. It's his project. Just fork and move on, if necessary.

This ignores both the fact that RMS is much more than just the maintainer of glibc, and the fact that 'just forking' glibc doesn't stop the maintainer from having a significant amount of public influence.

The problem is not anything to do with glibc - it's the conduct of someone who, like it or not, is a role model for a lot of people in the community, and has taken on a very public role.

So?

Policing humor is a trope in dystopian novels for a reason.

If someone wants to make unsightly jokes, you're free to be offended. But implying that it's not acceptable to act that way is probably a bit far.

Counter to your glorious Fahrenheit 451 perception of either contemporary society or our future one, it’s just as dystopian to permit humor to be used as suppression of a marginalized subset of people. It is perfectly acceptable to expect that people not discriminate against others that are unlike them, in any way, lest that be a possibility. The key to humor that is actually funny is understanding that, particularly how the word I intentionally emphasized applies to comedy.

(Not saying that happened here, just reacting to your broadening to “policing humor.” Humor is also, you know, funny. That did happen here. Stallman should stick to his day gig.)

Isn't it a little hyperbolic to imply that an offhanded joke is suppressing a marginalized subset of people? Or that it was discriminatory?

Here's his full reply in context:

https://lwn.net/Articles/753654/

You guys both seem to really want there to be high-stakes politics implicated in this story, but there aren't, and pretending that there are looks pretty dumb. It is unlikely in the extreme that the maintainers who want to remove Stallman's dated, unfunny joke are pro-lifers. Presumably, they just think it's a cringey distraction, like this subthread.

The issue is whether Stallman gets veto rights on glibc commits. The maintainers say he doesn't. Since Stallman doesn't do much glibc work, and the maintainers do, presumably Stallman is going to lose this, unless they let him save face out of affection.

The disengaging prophecy is fulfilled! For my next trick, I shall make this subthread disappear!

(Focus, people. Stallman’s commit bit. Stay on target and let’s figure this thing out. Did we get closure on the apt-get cow, or are we tabling that?)

Because it hasn't been just his project since he began accepting patches. It's a reflection on every contributor and every member of the community. When a project is the product of many peoples work, dirtying the face of the project affects everyone.

> I guess I understand the downvotes here

You’d be surprised. It bottomed out at -3 and is now oscillating around 0 and -1. That’s a surprisingly encouraging sign.

I agree wholeheartedly with your assessment of a problem. I think the industry’s reaction to it is an even bigger one and it’s right here, in this thread. Or lack thereof.

someone who is a role model

But is he? Who considers rms as a role model generally? Barely anyone even knows his positions on anything other than software, and those are often derided. And that's on HN, where he's actually known. My colleagues wouldn't even know his name.

Why did you bring in "Jokes about abortion, rape, race, sexual orientation, etc, etc,". When the joke was actually about censorship?

> Immediate future prediction: -4 on this comment

Commenting on downvotes is discouraged in the HN guidelines. It's boring, it's trite and this isn't Reddit/Voat.

  > this isn't Reddit/Voat.

Indeed, sometimes it feels like Stepford.

It is discouraged yes, but also it's human nature to want to understand why ones opinion isn't popular. I have seen previously my own posts be downvoted with no comments given and no clear idea of what I was doing to displease the hive mind.

I've come to accept the occasional downvote as noise in the process.

It's probably not healthy to take them seriously.

Definitely. Agree with you on both points. Maybe I find it strange as commenting on your downvotes is shunned, but it's largely OK to downvote something without explanation. This is only HN after all and I'm very comfortable being different from the 'average-HN'er'.

> I’m much more concerned about him playing the “childbirth is far more traumatic than having an abortion” card in the discussion about the patch. Until this moment, I wasn’t even aware that was a card. It’s difficult to fathom the logic that would arrive at that statement making sense to someone typing it, particularly a person who will never experience the situations upon which he’s speaking conclusively.

It's a standard talking point in the pro-abortion (I am solidly pro-choice and I use pro-abortion deliberately here) crowd who feel the need not merely to negate but to invert everything the anti-abortion right argues.

Well aren't the majority of what rabid pro life considers abortions taking some pills and having a bad morning or in some loonies cases putting on a condom?

I agree with you. I think it's possible to ignore the content of the joke and examine the interplay between the glibc maintainers and RMS, and I think that's an interesting conflict all of its own.

But... there's also an unnecessary joke in the public documentation of an important free software project involved here, and I think it's also interesting (perhaps even important) to talk about the content of the joke, and if things like that are ok/productive/positive/offensive/bad/exclusionary in our world.

Unfortunately, I wouldn't really expect any discussion of this latter point to be particularly productive on HN. I don't say this with any amount of derision; I just feel that's the way it is.

(For the record, I say good riddance to that particularly unfunny joke, and I think it's worthwhile to remove dreck like that from our projects.)

RMS has always struck me as the kind of person you generally avoid, except when you can't because they're family, and when they say things you smile and change the subject. Where he's unusual is that the ranting isn't about minority groups or political parties, it's proprietary software.

"It’s difficult to fathom the logic that would arrive at that statement making sense to someone typing it"

In https://stallman.org/articles/children.html Stallman describes "Why it is important not to have children."

I can easily see "don't have children because it's a traumatic experience" as fitting on the list.

Among other things, btw, he says that his decision to not have children opened up time to work on GNU and free software.

Spot on. At the end of the day, nobody really cares about the joke, and nobody in the conversation indicated they actually were offended or upset by it, as far as I can tell. The joke will not be the downfall of glibc whether it stays or goes.

But RMS' order may be. He just reminded everyone working on that project that their authority ends on any given issue wherever RMS' whims begin.

Lets think how many hours RMS has put into GNU over the years. That should count for something, no?

I'm a big fan of RMS, but I've got to say "No". He's not a maintainer. He doesn't get a vote. If he wants to work his way back into that project, then I've got no problem with it. But he doesn't. It's like the CEO telling you that he wants a joke in the technical documentation for one of your libraries. They might get away with it because of their position, but it's an abuse of that position even if the CEO used to be coder #1 on the project.

Not that it doesn't happen all over the place...

If there is business justification of joke in documentation then maintainer has no authority to say no.

RMS is a CEO and he ultimately controls the project goals. If you think otherwise you fork.

That's not the way a company works. A CEO is not dictator, and there are more paths to resolution than simply following orders or quitting.

Why then should the dictatorial mode be the way a non-profit or volunteer effort works?

Moreover, in a company it's the Board of Directors which delegates authority to the CEO. And the shareholders could override even them.

So if we interpret glibc as as a cooperative where the shareholders are also the developers and others working on the project, then certainly the shareholders could override management.

>>> A CEO is not dictator

well, he definitely is for those under him (not those besides).

I've been trying to figure out an answer which was more concrete than "I disagree", and ran into the problem that I can't figure out what "dictator" is supposed to mean, other than "person in authority whom I disagree with."

I mean, people called Obama a dictator (https://www.marketwatch.com/story/americans-newly-see-obama-... ), Jeremy Corby (http://www.livetradingnews.com/jeremy-corbyn-turns-dictator-... ), a teacher's union (https://www.huffingtonpost.com/dave-stieber/i-am-a-dictator-... ), and more.

When I wrote that, I was thinking specifically of how a union could override a CEO's demands demands, eg, by (threat of) lawsuit over breaking an employment agreement, or by collective action.

Then again, a dictator also has to worry about a mass uprising.

Then again again, so does a president - the US president is the chief of the executive branch of the US.

Do you think a CEO is dictator by definition, or that there is no way for a CEO to be anything other than a dictator? If so, what do you mean by dictator?

People call all sorts of things, all sorts of words. It's common in discourse to use a little hyperbole. That does not make Obama, or Jeremy Corbyn, bona fide dictators.

Even as stated, you miss the mark. The president is chief of the executive branch of the US, yes. But the president is not chief of congress, or the judicial system.

Certainly. I was the one who wrote that "the CEO is not a dictator".

This is trivially true as the CEO is not the authoritarian head of a country.

So I must have meant something a little hyperbolic.

I just don't know how to define that in any meaningful sense so as to be able to talk about it.

I don't know what mark I missed. I objected to the llukas' proposition that the CEO in a business "ultimately controls the project goals." I agree that in the US government, the chief executive does not have full control. I think it's meaningful point that the chief executive does not necessarily have final control.

Personally, I think it's a simpler story to talk about the CEO as some sort of heroic authoritarian leader, which is why we end up with those sorts of stories.

I think there is no other way to be a dictator (as long as he's appointed byt the board).

Now what is a dictator to me ? A dictator is someone you can't disagree with. The dictator may be benevolent or not, may exercise his power or not, but in the end he's the one in power. And you can't disagree with him because you have much less power (he can fire you, he's got the money, he decides on what you work, you're the one who needs the job, etc.). Just try to contest the authority (not the ideas, the style or whatever, just the authority) of your boss, and you'll see what happens.

Now from the board of director point of view, the CEO is not a dictator, he's someone who's running the company and giving advice on how to make it grow, make it better, whatever. So he's definitely in a positive role.

Could he be something else than a dictator ? Maybe. He could be "secretary" and then the power could be given to a part of the company's personnel, like a union. Those people would attend the board of director. But that would assume the fact that the board is willing to do that... I guess it's easier to scream on the CEO than on a group of people :-)

The Roman office of dictator (which is the origin of the term) was elected with absolute power in order to deal with a crisis -- generally speaking, a major war, and that usually involving an invasion of Roman territory by hostile forces. The term of office was limited to one year, though dictators were sometimes re-elected.

Roman dictator terms were generally either 6 months or until the task they were appointed to complete was finished. The Senate was capable of extending this term or re-electing the dictator depending on the circumstances.

You are right, I was relying on memory.

Thank you for your clarification.

I found an example of a CEO who fired an at-will employee and as a result the company was successfully sued for breaking an oral contract where the board of directors had promised that the employee would not be fired for speaking about workplace problems. https://www.jacksonlewis.com/publication/south-carolina-jury...

That would be an example of where the CEO is not a dictator, yes?

In some states, a CEO cannot fire someone without just cause, or for reasons motivated by malice or made in bad faith. And there are civil rights, disability rights, etc. which also prevent certain CEO actions. But these can also be viewed as dictatorial government actions overriding dictatorial corporate actions. :)

That's why I brought up union representation and employee contract rights which prohibit the CEO from certain actions.

I think there are also cases where the CEO is unable to impose demands because certain key staff would ignore them or leave the job, or the CEO fears the public reaction should that happen. Eg, http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UltimateJobSecuri... .

I think it's important to distinguish between limitations on power imposed after the fact, and limitations on power that prevent one from exercising their power. CEOs are not dictators in that they answer to a board, shareholders and, ultimately, the law. But those limits tend not to prevent CEOs from exercising their power, but are rather consequences of exercising their power. On a particular day, when CEOs say something should be done (such as firing a particular person or saying something publicly) it tends to happen.

Whether or not we call a CEO a "dictator" is perhaps a distraction - although I think the word usually fits in the colloquial way people tend to use it. The important thing, I think, is the recognition that CEOs orders tend to be followed, sometimes even against the desires of people executing those orders. The controls placed on CEO's power tend to be consequences rather than immediate limitations.

Is there really a clear line of authority between the glibc maintainers and RMS? It certainly doesn't seem like it. Authority decays, and RMS's is gone, over glibc at least. Compare with GvR: Guido is involved day-to-day, talks to people, makes decisions. No one questions whether he has power, because he uses it, although they certainly question the way he uses it.

I think the monarchy of the United Kingdom is good way to look at RMS's position here. On paper the monarch has a lot of power, but the reality is that they don't and trying to use it would provoke exactly the kind of crisis we're seeing here.

I have a hard time imagining the monarch insisting on a joke. Not just Queen Elizabeth, but any hereditary monarch from the modern age. Monarchs retain authority because they're good at politics... RMS, not so much. That's not to say his political positions are wrong, just that the man is impolitic at times.

Monarchs exert soft power pretty much constantly, with public appearances, knighthoods, and recognition of great deeds. They often end up as the most popular political figures of their republics. So while monarchs are a fossil species in modern governments (since WWI), they retain enough of the royal prerogative to exercise those paper rights it when it actually matters. I think we're all second-guessing RMS here because he's using the perogative in a situation where it truly doesn't matter.

Case in point: In Japan Prime Minister Abe wanted to change the constitution to allow Japan to engage in external conflicts if allies were in danger. The emperor of Japan suddenly said, "I'm old, you know. I think I want to retire, but there is no constitutional law that will allow me to abdicate. Please write this law ASAP". Prime Minister Abe does not have resources to do both constitutional changes at the same time...

The emperor of Japan is really awesome.

I guess they learned from the last few times when military juntas took control of Japan and burned everything to the ground, in the end.

> Monarchs [...] often end up as the most popular political figures of their republics.

I can't quite put my finger on it, but I think there's something wrong with that statement :p

I'm going to... stick my neck out... and venture that republics have usually got rid of their monarchs.

Har har, yeah, point taken, but many constitutional monarchies are de facto republics. The UK, Sweden, the Netherlands, Japan, Norway. I was trying to distinguish from the hereditary monarchies that aren't republican, like the People's Democratic Republic of Korea.

> Har har, yeah, point taken, but many constitutional monarchies are de facto republics.

No, they are just representative democracies. Which aren't coextensive with republics: you can be either without being the other.

> Is there really a clear line of authority between the glibc maintainers and RMS?

Obviously, yes. RMS is currently the president of the FSF and glibc is a FSF project, created and directed and maintained and funded by the FSF.

Just because some developer parachutes into a project that doesn't mean the project owners lose their rights over the project, or that the developer becomes the new owner.

If you want to contribute to a project, you do so by respecting and complying with the wishes of those directing the policy. The FSF started the glibc project and manages glibc's development and establishes the policies followed by the glibc project. It's the FSF, and not any random developer who just so happena to have commit access to a repository.

They should. Glibc breaks its interface every few years. I’d love to see all the GNU tools migrate over to the Linux foundation, where they would be stable, safe, and free from autocracy.

He might not be the maintainer, but he is the BDFL. It's about respect. See what happened to Drepper who violated his respect.

I like the joke, and I sympathize with RMS to let it in. In any case he opposed it so there is now a power struggle about the control of his project. I would love to see a better maintained glibc btw. Too much politics, not enough competence.

The dictator in question certainly doesn't seem Benevolent to me in this case.

It's not like he is not benevolent either.

He certainly is. He tries to protect the project from morons, which invaded most bigger projects which are not cultured in technical discussions anymore.

Compare that to the education of doctors. They need to persist on proper terminology and are hardened in a long process. PC is absolutely counterproductive there.

Many obviously did not get the reference in this paragraph, but it still relevant, as this episode showed. Abort vs kill is loaded by a long fight, hence the reference about future censorship attempts.

> PC is absolutely counterproductive there

A. No, the terminology used by medical professionals is constantly shifting to do things like acknowledge that people with issues are still people.

B. Your reasoning is presumably about confusion and lack of clarity, yes? How exactly is a reference to a law that has never been proposed serving that?

> The dictator in question certainly doesn't seem Benevolent to me in this case.

I don't see the point. RMS directs the organization and establises the policy it follows. I fail to see how a maintainer could feel entitled to dictate that policy just because he has access to the repository. That would be like a printing press janitor feeling entitled to censor what he feels a newspaper should not publish.

Well see what Drepper did. CTRL-f for "Stallman" in these glibc release notes:

https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-announce/2001/msg00000.html

While I agree with Ulrich, it is pretty brutal.

Yes, that was what I was referring to. It backfired big time.

See what Drepper is doing now: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ulrichdrepper He went from Technical Director at Redhat (i.e. glibc maintainer), to VP at Goldman Sachs (i.e. booted and being called an asshole), and now he is Engineer at Redhat.

Well, let's not forget that "CEO" wrote that technical documentation. And probably also wrote (at least an older version of) the code, too.

Which counts for absolutely nothing. A CEO running around the floor of the business telling programmers what jokes belong in what docs is a shit CEO no matter what he didn’t years past.

I fail to see why, if that joke is actually a clear statement of the fundamental message that the project was designed to convey, and the whole reason why the FSF exists.

not quite true,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_C_Library#History

Alright, so where is that line drawn? RMS is the project lead, but it's a community project and at some point the consensus will be that he is just wrong. Clearly that line must exist somewhere, or eglibc would never have been. But the existence of a fork isn't the minimum point since that takes quite a lot to overcome the inertia of forming a new project.

The point I keep coming back to is: What is the purpose of the documentation? What goal does it achieve?

The benefits of the doc is purely subjective (obviously) so asking what purpose it serves is a dick move.

And it specifically says not to remove. RMS only objected when they tried to introduce a change he specifically said not to remove. Calling this an unwarranted exercise in authority is also a dick move.

It isn't even a code change. Let's talk priorities: glibc could see improvements preventing y2038 bugs and fuzzing, but we fret over a joke.

Also there is no evidence that the joke could be traumatic to anyone.

What is the point of the project? What goal does it achieve?

There was a gcc frontend/backend clean architecture dispute: some wanted it so that gcc could be used for more things that clang is being used for. RMS argued against it, on the basis that GCC technical architecture should deliberately avoid it working with proprietary non-GPL backends.

The official story is that a technically worse compiler than loses market share is still superior for the FSF goals of pushing free software: they are willing to accept people moving to clang to avoid GCC from being the front half of a non-free compiler.

That goal is inherently political. It isn't obvious whether drawing attention to harmful suppression of information by the government is also in the projects mandate, but it is obvious that the projects mandate isn't just to make the best technical and professional result.

https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2014-01/msg00209.html

https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2014-01/msg00178.html

Those arguments don't work.

Just because a goal of the project is an inherently political one doesn't mean that any outcome or action even remotely political is inherently the goal of the project. That's an absurd hasty generalization.

Further, just because one of the overall goals of the project is political doesn't mean that every goal of the project is political. That's a composition fallacy.

What arguments don't work?

The truth is that FSF is primarily a political organization. It is more of a political organization than any other open source foundation, eg they do things like refuse to endorse any OS that distributes any piece of non-free (read: GPL) software. They advocate against non-GPL open source as harmful. They guide their projects to be technically worse if it supports the political mission.

There is confusion here about what Stallmans role even is since he isn't an active technical contributor: his role to make sure the political vision is being enforced in the projects under FSF/GNU stewardship and that is exactly what he is doing here.

Basically, if something is not advancing the goals of the FSF then it shouldn't be a part of the FSF. It isn't news that the goal of the FSF isn't to make high quality software and they just think free software is the pragmatically best model to achieve that:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/compromise.en.html

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/when-free-software-isnt-pract...

> The truth is that FSF is primarily a political organization.

So what? That doesn't matter. What part of the FSF[0] or GNU[1] project suggests that abortion is an issue relevant to their mission or goals? Why is abortion a software freedom issue? How about we say RMS does adopt it. Does that benefit the other stated goals of the organizations? How?

What happens when the FSF runs a fund raiser, and they hear, "I'd love to give to your organization because I support free software ideals, but I can't because I disagree with your stance on abortion." Does that benefit free software? What happens when they're working with legislators on bills to re-enforce net neutrality, and the legislator says, "I'd love to help you on net neutrality, but I can't. My constituents are overwhelmingly pro-life, and I've gotten hundreds of voters contacting me since Fox News ran a piece on how your organization is pushing this bill to promote pro-choice laws. The National Right to Life and National Pro-Life Alliance have been calling to lobby against this bill as well. I'm sorry, but it seems that people think net neutrality is a pro-choice issue." Does that benefit free software?

So, is the FSF and GNU willing to sacrifice their software freedom goals in order to further pro-choice goals? Should they be?

0: https://www.fsf.org/about/ 1: https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.en.html

The issue at hand seems to be about suppression of information (information that happens to be about abortion), not pro-abortion.

People sometimes overlook the fact that the FSF is clearly a political organization, the GNU project places politics over technology, and Stallman himself is a political activist first and foremost. Yet people forget this and treat GNU stuff like technology-driven projects.

Personally, I'm much more comfortable with the approach Linus Torvalds takes, where writing good, functional software takes precedence over purity concerns, and where technical limitations would not be introduced with the purpose of complicating interactions with proprietary software.

> but it's a community project and at some point the consensus will be that he is just wrong.

No, that's just your prejudice talking. The consensus can just as well be that RMS has a point and that a lone maintainer has no legitimacy to dictate policy, let alone override executive decisions. RMS is the founder of many GNU projects and is also the president of the FSF. Just because some dude has access to a repository of a FSF project that doesn't give him the right to hijack the project to suit his fancy. It's a FSF project and the project's driving policy is set by the FSF.

Count for what? Should it excuse his behavior? Should we excuse the behavior of famous and notable people because of their accomplishments?

I don't think it's a matter of excusing, it's whether he has ultimate authority based on the fact that he created glibc and he's the head of GNU. Talking about excusing assumes he did something wrong, which is jumping the gun, since that's exactly what's being discussed.

I have a hard time seeing where he did something right here. He is behaving like a petulant child because people didn't find his joke funny two decades later.

He is the "boss". No doubt about it, he is the copyright holder, everyone working on the project has surrendered copyright over to him. I've got my strong reservations on BDFLs and the way their egos get stroked, but it is what it is.

But he is not a "leader". Because a leader does not cut the legs out from under the people he delegates to run things. He has every right to insist that GNU maintains his dumb joke... and everyone who's put in all of the hard work and effort into the project over these more recent years has the absolute right to leave over it.

Oh, I don't disagree. I just don't think we have anything to excuse, that's between the maintainers and him.

If RMS wasn't the project lead, but any other maintainer, then his behavior of making such a big fuss about this particular thing (which, very importantly, _is not a very important thing!_), against the consensus of many other maintainers, is something.

If he were on the same level as other people, this behavior wouldn't be accepted. So the question then becomes:

Does the fact that he's "the boss" excuse his behavior of fighting against the consensus on an issue of this level of importance?

> Lets think how many hours RMS has put into GNU over the years. That should count for something, no?

In terms of personal respect, sure.

In terms of attention given to an argument, maybe, but that's also how you end up with a narrow bubble.

In terms of retaining a unclear joke designed as backhanded political advocacy on an issue that isn't central to the shared ideology that defines GNU in the technical documentation of a GNU project? I can't see it, no.

There are a lot of other people who have spent countless hours on glibc, also.

I thought the whole point of Free Software idea is that contributing to a software project does not make you its exclusive owner (after you released it under Free Software license) and its users subject to your whims. It is ironic that at the top of this project is a person who would very much like to subject the project to his whims, and for quite a trivial reason at that.

No. Free software is about respecting the four freedoms not about what you say above. If it counts to anything, you get the choice to fork the project at any time.

Glibc spent over a decade under Ulrich Drepper, who many viewed as a dictator. This resulted in forks and major linux distributions no longer using glibc. About 6 years ago, Drepper was removed and glibc moved to "cooperative community development"[0].

The community spoke and said they did not like dictators in development of glibc. Since Drepper's removal, many would agree that the quality of glibc has increased significantly. RMS is well aware of this and the delicate political situation. He should recognize that coming in and declaring himself in charge would not play well with a community that stated about their maintainers following Drepper: "This does not confer any extra ability to make decisions for the project; community consensus is what matters there."

[0] https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2012-03/msg01040.html

I beg to disagree. The quality post-Drepper certainly did not improve. Bugs are getting worse, needed features are still not implemented, needed performance improvements are sidelined (bsd libc still 20% faster with modern CPUs), crazy but useless ASM optimizations are being added, where e.g. proper loops written in C gain much more. Just not on gcc.

Same as with stdlib++ btw, where strings are now uselessly bloated and most data structures are getting useless also.

Where are utf8 strings? u8"" constants only is for nothing. Everybody needs an u8 api.

Where are the secure _s extensions? Pickering about callbacks and Microsoft is all they can do. But they rather add env hooks. __bos/alloc_size support is getting better, but gcc still cannot do proper usable const expressions in C. It's a nightmare.

You still cannot compare strings, even not with the crazy wchar_t strings (size 2 or 4), nobody uses anymore. wcscmp only compares buffers, but not strings according to the unicode rules. I believe strings would be pretty important to support, not?

What about a fast malloc? Not even ptmalloc3 went in, there's still stone-age ptmalloc2.

double-close leads to crashes, really? Similar to freopen with NULL.

This is your great community consensus. BSD or even musl are far ahead.

> (bsd libc still 20% faster with modern CPUs

You have a source for that? it wouldn't surprise me, GNU code tends to be more bloated than a similar BSD licensed project.

My own benchmarks. The trick is SSE support. darwin/bsd has that builtin, esp. since darwin can guarantee that their chips do support SSE. Generic linux builds do not, and -march-native or switching to sse optimized shared libs is rarely used.

But recently also bos and align_size support got better in other libc's, which do use clang and not gcc. gcc sucks big time with those optimizations. freebsd and darwin all use clang. This is in the ~60% ball figure.

oops: s,align_size,alloc_size,

The size of dynamically allocated malloc'ed structures, not just constants. The majority of pointers have an alloc_size, but no object_size (i.e. bos: __builtin_object_size).

Every 64-bit OS can guarantee SSE2 support, because it's baked into the x86-64 spec. Every single 64-bit Linux build can and does use SSE2 (unless someone explicitly turned that off for no reason). If there are performance differences, it's not due to chip support and crippled builds for compatibility.

>>He just reminded everyone working on that project that their authority ends on any given issue wherever RMS' whims begin.

The tech world is still largely based on prime movers. May be that will stay like that forever in engineering disciplines.

People who make it rain, call the shots. This includes their political positions too. I'm not sure why this is so surprising to people.

It's a story because Stallman has played the "I'm the boss, you can't outvote me" card, not because anyone's in a tizzy over the politics.

If you're going to pull the "I'm the boss, you can't outvote me" card, the best place to do it is somewhere trivial. Especially when you added it yourself a long time ago. Even though I would prefer some sort of vote for these things.

there's no "political correctness" here at all.

Of course there is, Is anyone trying to remove apt-get moo?

>> there's no "political correctness" here at all.

> Of course there is, Is anyone trying to remove apt-get moo?

If the joke only showed up in some joke manpage, that would be one thing. But the joke was in a real manpage, and I think it seemed out of place regardless of one’s political leanings.

it is mentioned in --help as super cow powers, and I'm glad it is.

Wow then we need to annihilate the Gnus manual...

It seems like a really silly hill to die on, but then this whole debate seems like a boring pissing match. My only thought on finishing the article was, “what a waste of my time this was,” and that was just reading it, not living it. Maybe there’s some strategic value to making a big deal of something trivial like this, but I don’t see it. I just come away from this thinking Stallman is a controlling, thin-skinned, dick. If that was his plan, then as they say, mission accomplished. I couldn’t care less about the politics, it’s the personality that’s offensive.

* I couldn’t care less about the politics, it’s the personality that’s offensive.*

Fair enough, though for me the personality is what I like. It's the same way I feel about ESR, even if I don't agree with whatever point is being made, I enjoy intelligent outspoken brashness.

I enjoy that when the intelligence and brashness has a point other than stroking its own ego. Linus for example, is an example of the positive (imo) face of what you’re talking about, because it’s not about something petty from nearly 30 years ago and his desire to be in some kind of control. You know that even when he’s harsh and outspoken, odds are he’s making a really good and relevant point.

I’m not seeing that here, just a lot of heat and no light.

Really? To be honest, Linus also comes across as an egomaniac. Sometimes, he says what must be said. Mostly, he's just extremely abusive. The problem with BDFL positions is it removes the sort of checks and bounds that people need, to stop them growing into assholes.

The advantage is, for better or worse, they tend to have the kind of vision and consistency that allows a project to thrive.

I think it'd be nice if they had a HR department they had to answer to, or something like that.

I don't think Torvalds grew into anything; the Tanenbaum–Torvalds debate from '92 already had quotes like:

your job is being a professor and researcher: That's one hell of a good excuse for some of the brain-damages of minix. I can only hope (and assume) that Amoeba doesn't suck like minix does.

How is moo related to political correctness? Doesn't it just ask if you've mooed today? That's an innocent joke that you never need to stumble upon.

Joking about social/religious/political topics in deep technical docs is something else entirely, unless I'm missing something about moo.

I brought up moo because it is not related to political correctness.

EDIT: If you're not a native speaker, I'll try to explain it better. First I quoted the statement that it was not about political correctness. This indicates that the next line is in direct response. Then I wrote "of course there is" Which is to say that of course the comment in the original post was about political correctness. Then I gave the example of apt-get moo as a joke that is very public, and not political at all, to point out that nobody wants to get rid of it.

> Of course there is, Is anyone trying to remove apt-get moo?

If forced to choose, I would actually prefer touchy political jokes in the documentation over non-political easter eggs baked into the code, because IAGNI.

I think there is a difference. Not so much because of political correctness, but because it is an inherently political joke.

Secondly, the joke is extremely US centric, and might make no sense to somebody now familiar on the US stance on abortion and its political impact.

I think it's misplaced for those reasons, and I am left-leaning and pro-choice. So while i agree with the political viewpoint in the joke, i don't think it should be in the software documentation.

That being said, i think easter eggs are fine, but this feels misplaced to me.

Why is the joke dated? It refers to a current (and recently expanded) US government policy.

In fact that was one of rms' points. The broader story is about the joke. TFA's take is TFA's take, it's part of the story but the joke also matters.

Current US poitical debates run in the other direction. Some states like Hawaii and California are mandating that anti-abortion preganacy counseling centers post prominent instructions on where their clients can get abortions.

So there is concern about free speech and abortion but the government is compelling pro-abortion (or at least anti-anti-abortion) speech this time.

It's also horribly written and essentially a bad joke. I don't have anything against Apocrypha in an otherwise serious document, but this is so badly written that I know people who only understood what it was talking about on the third read of it, specifically looking for the meaning.

It's so low quality that I suspect many people simply don't care about keeping it in, especially as it comes out of left field and not, let's say, general snarky tone (which can be great as anyone in the trenches can recall from time to time).

It's just RMS continuing to be an authoritarian, as he's always been. He's always been unwilling to compromise on big things, he's still unwilling to compromise on small things.

Being uncompromising in your politics and values is hardly authoritarian. RMS runs the ship and these people knew it when they started working on a GNU project, especially since it's well known RMS has shot down things he didn't like before.

> Being uncompromising in your politics and values is hardly authoritarian

In general, yes, but in this particular case it is clearly "I am the Law!" case - he's being authoritarian. And your next two sentences pretty much confirm that, even if you dismiss it with "they knew he was an authoritarian when they joined" and "he's been an authoritarian for a long time". Maybe true, but doesn't make it better.

I don't remember confirming his authoritarianism, I'm not sure why you think that's what I'm doing. If you think any exercise of rightful power is authoritarian than that's a childish definition and waters down what actual authoritarianism is.

"RMS runs the ship", "RMS has shot down things he didn't like before".

> If you think any exercise of rightful power is authoritarian

No, not any - this particular one, and in general one that is done "because I want it so, and your opinion doesn't matter because I decide here".

So vendor lock-in, but instead of the evil corp it is RMS this time? The irony.

This isn't the first time he's pulled this. I remember the hostile takeover attempt against Ulrich Drepper back in the early 2000s.

Bottom line: Don't make your project a GNU project if you want control of it. Benevolent dictators aren't always benevolent.

The good news is that the devs can fork Glibc, which has happened at least twice before IIRC.

I've gone into a bit of detail on my view of the cultural/generational gap here: https://lobste.rs/s/ei9fcf/who_controls_glibc#c_lfucpv - but the bottom line is that RMS' values are very different to those of the project, and he's not going to change them. GNU's values were founded in the counterculture movements of the 70s, and the social issues of those times, which are different to those commonly adopted today.

As always, the Simpsons did it best: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMqZ2PPOLik

Drepper's take on that takeover attempt: https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-announce/2001/msg00000.html

Starts at "And now for some not so nice things".

No, even though this seems like exactly the kind of thing which should offend right wingers, the "political correctness" involved isn't right-leaning - that's the most astounding thing about this. The objections to including this are fundamentally feminist, left-leaning ones about how it could be "triggering" to women. This doesn't even seem to be a case of the right adopting feminist language as they sometimes do - its removal is backed mainly by left-wing campaigners like Matthew Garrett, some of whom are implacably opposed to the idea that free software should even be welcoming to people with right-wing views.

Somehow, using the glibc documentation to attack US anti-abortion policy offended not the right wing, but the modern feminist left; ironically enough, the same folks who believe that everything must be political and that any developer who doesn't care about politics is an active enemy of the cause.

It’s also a reaction against political correctness culture and social justice warriors.

No, it isn't. It doesn't even make sense in that light. The "reaction" here was to remove a political statement. This is what I mean people people rooting like truffle hogs for a political faction to cheerlead.

So what annoys me about this discussion is that both sides are not being very honest. Calling it an "abortion joke" is to me highly misleading. It's an "abortion law joke" & has nothing to do with the procedure of abortion! The people arguing against it seem to be implying its much more inappropriate than it is.

Anyway, no where in the article is the actual "joke" mentioned. So I'd like to include it here just so people can judge for themselves.

"Proposed Federal censorship regulations may prohibit us from giving you information about the possibility of calling this function. We would be required to say that this is not an acceptable way of terminating a program."

As someone that was not aware of the gag rule before the mailing list thread brought it up, I thought it was an abortion joke, especially with the "we would be required to say this is not an acceptable way of terminating a program". It is in the man page for abort(). The context clues are there, but the wrong ones.

So, on that level, it fails as a joke: if you aren't aware of the policy it's trying to criticize and make people aware of, it reads like a clunky abortion joke, and one that isn't very funny.

Yes, it's vague enough that you can probably find what you want in it. For that reason alone, there probably is a legitimate case to remove it.

I think it's interesting how one's background can affect this too. I think everyone agrees that GNU & FSF are left-wing projects but where the "left" falls on different issues depends on where you're from. For RMS & most American lefties, "freedom" includes things like abortion rights. I think in other countries like Latin America & Catholic Europe the "left" generally favors restrictions on abortion. Lots of people that have become involved in the free software movement recently are from Latin America & RMS probably doesn't pick up on what his core audience believes on these things.

I don't know why you say the left in Latin America favors restrictions on abortion.

I am a Latin American and can say it's just not so - at least in the countries I know, the left is usually pushing for more sex ed, and more availability of abortion.

It'd be interesting to know _where_ in Latin America the left favors the restrictions on abortion - at least to document that perspective and share it around.

I was predominantly thinking of Hugo Chavez & Venezuela. Maybe I am not understanding his positions, but he was extremely left-wing (at least in the American context) on almost every issue except abortion. IIUC all countries in Latin America with the exception of Cuba & Uruguay have really bad abortion rights records. Maybe the left supports abortion rights, but at the least, it's not been enough support to effect changes to these laws.

Thanks for explaining.

Cuba & Venezuela are not within the normalcy of LatAm - different economic models, different politics. Mexico has good abortion laws - at least in the capital.

There are awful abortion rights records. Agreed - even in my own country, where we're fighting to have it allowed at least for extreme cases (nonviable fetus, or situations that put the mother at big risk, like ectopic pregnancies). Most LatAm countries at least allow abortion to save the mother's life.

Agreed that there's not been enough support to effect changes to the laws. It's an uphill battle; most of America is historically very right-leaning; military dictatorships and rights infringement were the norm for most of the 20th century in much of the subcontinent, and people who lived - but mostly those who _grew up_ - through that have the lingering effects of those predispositions.

But - yeah, the left is generally out of the circles of power in LatAm, and the laws - in particular abortion and other religion-endorsed observations - are very right leaning.

You can add Romania to that list even if it's not part of Catholic Europe. It's part of Orthodox Europe. Abortion was outlawed under communism, but after the fall of Iron Curtain it was immediately legalized.

> Abortion was outlawed under communism

It was also fully legalised under communism.

The USSR was very big on getting women into the workforce (to help fill some of the enormous manpower shortage caused by WW2 casualties); improved reproductive health & choice obviously let women contribute more to industry & helped post-war rebuilding efforts.

Abortion was fully legalised in 1957 (after being controlled by communists since 1947): it was Nicolae Ceaușescu (the second Communist leader) who criminalised it in 1966, as part of his totalitarian autocrasy.

>GNU & FSF are left wing projects

What?. You'll have to explain to me how you've come to such a conclussion.

And yet, you're now aware of the gag rule and GNUs opposition. So, on that level, it's succeeding.

Yes, after the original writer had to explain it when it came up through a heated mailing list discussion about removing it partly because some misinterpreted it. That's not the excellence in communication you probably think it is. And it doesn't belong in a manual.

Even the term "gag rule" is a political position. The law was originally intended to keep national policy out of abortion, so consciences of abortion objectors won't be violated. It's commonly referred to as the Mexico City Policy. Similar rules have been in effect in the past on other highly controversial subjects like slavery.

I agree with RMS on this. People need to grow up. It's ok to be offended, but not ok to try and correct everyone just because you are offended. A line needs to be drawn somewhere and this is harmless.

I agree with RMS's pro-choice opinion, but I honestly see no reason a 20-something year old joke about abortion needed to remain in the documentation.

The consensus was that it be removed. It was removed. Just because HMS is a FOSS legend doesn't make him God.

Yes I'm 100% with you on this. I mainly dislike how the LWN article is framed.

> Just because RMS is a FOSS legend doesn't make him God.

According to RMS he does have ultimate authority over all GNU packages, including Glibc: https://lwn.net/Articles/753661/

He probably owns some root certs. Likely if he were to start exercising such authority without being an active developer, there would be a fork soon enough.

Isn't that what happened to emacs?

A few times, but so far GNU has held on.

It happened with GCC. Today's GCC is actually a fork of the original, which became the "blessed" version once the forkers and RMS worked out resolved some issues that led to the fork.

The unforked (for lack of a better term) GCC was set aside, and the fork became the official version.

Just for the sake of completeness: the EGCS fork you are talking about was alive 1997-1999.

Fork, take maintainers and contributors with you, convince others to use your fork.

Nobody who removed the joke said they were offended by it, they just said that they didn't believe it was the sort of thing that belonged in technical documentation. If anyone is offended, it is RMS, in the sense that he seems personally affronted that he doesn't carry the line-item veto power he thinks he had over all of GNU and people did not ask him before removing something he added 25 years ago.

Not everyone who disagrees with something is offended by the thing they disagree with. Shall I say that someone who prefers writing documentation in man pages instead of Markdown is offended by Markdown? Is Project Zero offended by buffer overflows?

> they just said that they didn't believe it was the sort of thing that belonged in technical documentation

I've been dreading the day OSS projects became as soulless and boring as corporate ones. If we can't have jokes in technical documentation then it seems that day has come.

Next the FOSS HR department will be asking them to rename the abort function.

There's certainly something lost here, I won't deny that.

But glibc, and huge other parts of the FOSS ecosystem, has been a corporate project for years. Maintenance comes from stodgy companies like Red Hat who install glibc on the sort of extremely stodgy companies who are Red Hat customers.

And for those of us whose day jobs involve using glibc and reading its documentation, we deserve the benefits of free software as much as everyone else. If it is an ethical imperative (as RMS says!) for all software to be free and for proprietary software to die, it follows that the primary battleground is the servers of soulless, boring corporations. Your hobbyist laptop is important, too, because everyone deserves free software. But if free software weren't around, you would have installed a pirated copy of Windows with a keygen with some hentai as its background image and enjoyed the non-HR-compliance of the process, and Microsoft would have been quite okay with it because you would be locked into their proprietary software.

If free software is an ethical imperative - or even if it's not, but even if open source is simply a better way to develop software - then everyone who wants a job in software engineering and is qualified for it should be able to have a job in writing and maintaining FOSS. Human society has determined that if we want everyone to participate in an activity, things work better if everyone agrees to uphold a few norms. They don't have to be the same norms as boring corporations uphold (and you can quite easily argue that the norms of boring corporations aren't that good, actually, at making sure everyone is welcome to participate on equal terms). But the fact that we open our shared infrastructural work to accountability and public judgment is sort of how civilization works.

Hobbyist projects are still as possible as ever. Twenty years ago, you wouldn't have been able to get inappropriate jokes in the technical documentation for Solaris libc, or into MSDN, or whatever, but you could work on some upstart free software project with your friends and do whatever you want. You can still do that. If you want to be the young, upstart libc with some off-color political jokes that's being an alternative to the boring corporate libc, more power to you. Not everyone will participate, but that's what you want. Meanwhile, the libc whose goal in life was to displace the corporate libcs has won - and needs to step into its role.

You see it too in people going around telling people to stop saying master/slave for clusters

https://github.com/antirez/redis/issues/3185

I think you're looking at the wrong axis. This isn't an order-vs-chaos question, it's one of constructive vs destructive. This particular joke makes the manual worse, not better, at being a manual. Cut it and move on, and always keep an eye out for places it could be improved, whether that be through better descriptive prose or a good, understanding-building joke.

Technical documentation isn't the place for a joke full stop. Documentation is for people who are typically busy, uncertain and potentially dealing with something that is going wrong.

They want clear, concise and accessible help. They don't want or need tasteless jokes. It is disrespectful to their time to include random garbage.

This is supposed to be read by people who need it, not people who know what is going on and want to enjoy a good laugh.

The TexBook was a technical documentation for TeX written by Donald Knuth. The book had a lot of jokes, and I enjoyed reading it.

Leaving aside the question of the nature of its jokes, the TeXBook is the sort of thing you read straight through. It's a narrative about how some code came to be. It's not the same sort of reference as the glibc manual, and I think a narrative form of documentation benefits from a casual tone and a four-sentence standalone reference about a function (especially where one of those sentences is "Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Unsafe corrupt | AC-Unsafe lock corrupt") benefits from a terse tone.

Knuth is actually funny.

What is and is not funny, is highly subjective. (Just to be clear, I really like Donald Knuth's sense of humor.)

Knuth has a great sense of humor in his books and exercices. I also like Stallman's jokes, but I can concede that they are sligthly less funny than Knuth's.

We're humans, not robots. We don't run on information alone.

Hey meatbag, even robots like a good joke

Yeah, Python docs need to stop using variable names like 'spam' & 'eggs', Monty Python's too jokey, no room for it in docs

I think that's a little different. Even with the fun variable names, the Python docs are pretty damn professional.

They haven't always been that way. The Python docs back around 2000 were not that great. A lot of work has been put in by people in the community to get them to the state they're in.

Python docs are very good and professional, but somewhat chaotic unless you have pretty good grasp on what belongs where.

Just last friday I tried to find authoritative definition of the leading underscore mangling behavior in the docs and was not able to do so.

If you genuinely believe that these are comparable situations (and you're not just making a strained comparison to argue in favor of the side you favor), I'm not sure how to explain my position to you.

Although I think I would start by saying this: where "spam" and "eggs" is used in Python, it is in the place of any other word, usually a nonsense word like "foo" or "bar", and its presence does not distract. I doubt anyone thinks of actual SPAM or actual eggs when they run across it, and I seriously doubt the documentation authors intended or expected anyone to.

The (so-called) joke in this glibc discussion is a) essentially a pun on the name of the function, i.e., introducing mental confusion; b) a political subject; c) an ill-explained reference to a political subject (did you know it's about the global gag rule? do you know what the global gag rule is?); d) intended to make you think about that subject instead of tuning it out.

Python's use of "spam" and "eggs" adds some character, that's about it. (Python's insistence on "eggs" and "wheels" and "cheeseshop", on the other hand... I find the names cute but if you wanted to get rid of them all in favor of slightly more descriptive words, I'd honestly be in favor.) This joke serves no purpose other than, at best, to distract the attention of the person looking up documentation onto a completely different subject.

Not the same thing. "spam" & "eggs" are very neutral. If they used politically charged terms, and inserted example code like "if brains(republicans) == 0 # always true!" then the situation would be similar. The difference is between neutral light-heartedness and non-neutral political message.

How do you know which words will and will not become politically charged in fourty years?

You update the docs in forty years as needed.

In any case that question seems wildly unrelated to the question at hand, which is about a joke that's intended to be a present-day political reference.

The same way you know what technical details will be needed in forty years: By actively maintaining the documentation, as they're doing.

They're probably just trying to give wide berth of the world's most dangerous joke.

I'm not that hardcore about it, but I still agree this really shouldn't be in the official docs. Maybe in a tutorial or a set of slides.

I do agree with some professionalism in things that want to be taken seriously. I don't even really like the "Apt with super cow powers."

I do agree this isn't about political correctness. At one time GNU tools were just a bunch of devs trying to write open source tooling for fun or to learn. But with it being such a huge part of our industry now, it does need to grow up.

If you're working on your own small open source projects, have fun with the docs and comments. But don't be like Stallman. Realize if your tools are really successful, those quips might get cut out one day. c'est la vie

My feeling is that most of GNU manuals in texinfo format are borderline useless because the structure is simply wrong, the random jokes are somewhat tangential issue.

I Don't know if we're talking about the same thing but I've found the format of man pages to be absolutely useless for me. Maybe I'm too dumb/noob to understand them, but then what's left for the folk who just switched to linux and wamts to learn about commands.

Texinfo and man are different.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texinfo

> "Notably, man is not available as an output format from the standard Texinfo tools. While Texinfo is used for writing the documentation of GNU software, which typically is used in Unix-like environments such as GNU/Linux, where man pages are the traditional format for documentation, the rationale for this is that man pages have a strict conventional format, used traditionally as quick reference guides, whereas typical Texinfo applications are for tutorials as well as reference manuals. As such, no benefit is seen in expressing Texinfo content in man page format. Moreover, many GNU projects eschew man pages almost completely, referring the reader of the provided man page (which often describes itself as seldom maintained) to the Info document."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_page

They can take some getting used to if you're not familiar with them, but given how much documentation is available in these formats, it's worth taking a few hours to become accustomed to them. A lot of it is duplicated online as well, so you can often use your favorite search engine.

Word. GNU texinfo is so fucking confusing that I only ever invoke it as

  info --subnodes -o - $PROGRAM | less

That dumps the entire manual for $PROGRAM into `less`, where I can then use regex-searches like a normal humanbeing.

It's wonderful to use in emacs, and back before I started using emacs ISTR that pinfo was a great way to read info.

I used to hate how GNU manpages would point me at the info docs, but honestly nowadays I prefer info. It really is nice — like a pre-CSS, pre-JavaScript HTML, only it can be beautifully typeset too.

Yeah, I hate info, but the problem is info(1), not the entire texinfo stack. The html output is pretty good and I already know how to navigate it, so I usually use that

The early days of computing was very informal and full of jokes. Didn't stop people from creating some of the most long-lasting and technically successful tools.

Maybe even helped them. Those tools create in informal atmosphere seem much more robust and useful than what the present day brings.

I think a large part of this is survivorship bias. We just don't see all the crap that was created back in the day because it didn't stick around.

Come to think of it, I guess you're right.

"Technical documentation isn't the place for a joke full stop"

This is a bad take. When wading through dry technical documentation a little humor can make it much less laborious.

As long as the humor doesn't result in ambiguity, there's no problem.

Something like "You can tune a filesystem, but you can't tune a fish." at the end of a manpage may elicit a chuckle but doesn't reduce understanding.

Yeah, it should probably be more

"your technical documentation should have a consistent tone"

I appreciate light-hearted asides in documentation. But more if I expect it than when it's unexpected. Like you wouldn't want to end up confusing some ESL programmer who goes ask a lawyer whether they should be worried about this?

Or if you're really ambitious, make all your docs super funny! But if you mix the tone it's disorienting and maybe bad writing.

For what it's worth, at least one member of the glibc steering committee appears to agree:

"I agree with removing this joke. A bit of humor is fine - indeed, the manual could use a bit more than it has - but this attempt at humor does not work. The manual should be high-quality, and that includes high-quality jokes."

https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2018-04/msg00604.html

For what it's worth, that only high quality jokes bit made me laugh more than Stallman's joke.

> a little humor can make it much less laborious

Here, here!

I would even go so far as to say that Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby directly contributed a great deal to Ruby's popularity because of the witty content alone.

A well-constructed joke can make documentation more useful. I can't think of an example off the top of my head, but there've been plenty of times that something made me laugh and go "NOW I get it!" to the technical material.

This isn't a well-constructed joke in that sense - it's likely to cause confusion, not increased understanding.

Agreed with RMS in spirit

Disagree with his application in this context

I don’t give a damn about your politics when I’m trying to solve a problem unrelated to them

The main justification for why it shouldn't be there is that it was offensive. The idea that software should not be political is, in fact, itself just as offensive to the community of campaigners who've joined the calls to have this removed as this joke is. The last big controversy I saw was the entire console jailbreaking community being declared a bunch of bigots because someone mocked the idea that code could have views on LGBTQ rights.

> The main justification for why it shouldn't be there is that it was offensive.

This is simply untrue; you can look at the patch's commit message and the review thread. The primary justification was that it wasn't appropriate, and the secondary one is that it wasn't actually funny and was tasteless. Nobody said "offensive". You can read the thread yourself.

https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2018-04/msg00595.html

(The April history shows the conversation between maintainers regarding the patch itself; if you want to see RMS' reply, go to the May index. RMS and Alexandre Oliva, the two people defending the joke, brought up the concept of "offense", and people repeatedly say in reply that they're not offended. Oliva later says he's offended by other people in the discussion.)

Of course, you're also welcome to believe that everyone who disagrees with you must be offended; you're entitled to your opinions.

I disagree with RMS because I don't think the joke adds to my ability to understand the usage of the function.

Then you didn't read the fine line. He was making a subtle reference to power politics how to abort a process. Properly or abrupt. A certain fraction of the group wanted to forbid this abrupt termination and only go through signals, so that everyone involved can have their say and be informed. This particular function sidestepped it, and as such was politically loaded. Removing this reference would remove the questioning of proper usage and the politics behind. But since current glibc maintainers are more worried about their profile than good documentation RMS vetoed.

The proper term for the first variant is "kill all children", which is equally loaded. Next would be to change kill child to something worse, and go away with master slave.

The joke doesn't really make sense to non-Americans

This is harmless - probably true, nobody would die or suffer harm from having irrelevant content in the manual. We could splice full seven books of Harry Potter into it, and provided it is clearly marked up, it won't cause any serious harm. But glibc technical manuals are not exactly the place for RMS - or anybody else - to wage political advocacy campaigns, criticize US federal government or joke on the topics unrelated to the technical content. It's not harmful (which is a very high bar), but it's also not appropriate. Do we want to see political debate and advocacy in glibc manuals, commit messages, code comments and other places? Probably not. There are ample venues for this - and especially for a person with the name recognition RMS deservedly enjoys - to advocate anything he likes. He doesn't need the venue of glibc manuals for that, and shouldn't use it.

Try reading GPL license... is a political statement itself.

Is joke in documentation useful? Probably not...

True (which is one of the reasons I don't use GPL for my personal projects) but that doesn't mean GNU technical space should be a venue for every other political discussion in the world. There are far better venues out there.

Maybe, maybe not. I think the core issue is that RMS doesn't believe in that strong "technical" vs. "political" separation - to him, the whole GNU project is a political endeavour, including all the tech in it.

> that RMS doesn't believe in that strong "technical" vs. "political" separation

I do not believe that for a second. RMS is completely capable of seeing it, and he himself on his own site has this separation, and in there's no indication he is incapable of distinguishing between UNIX API and political advocacy. He just wants to use his considerable technical capital to promote his political agenda. In places, where such promotion is not appropriate.

That's up for the people in the "GNU technical space" to determine.

I doubt anyone cares hugely about political messages in commit comments.

Not hugely, probably, as one doesn't care hugely about stepping in dog's turd while walking on the street. Not the end of the world. Still better to have turd-less streets?

>But glibc technical manuals are not exactly the place for RMS - or anybody else - to wage political advocacy campaigns, criticize US federal government

What I write or not write in my manuals is not for you to decide. If I want pro-choice or pro-life advocacy in there, that's my decision. If I want "I'm with Her" or "MAGA" in there, still my decision. If I make a sucky hoke, you cannot and should not be able to force me to stop telling it.

Of course, you're free to criticize me, or offer feedback on how to improve, or just go with or create a competitor to my stuff, or even just resort to call me a "poohead" if you prefer. But don't ever presume you can just dictate to me what is OK, or "professional".

Same goes for RMS, whom I agree with in his argumentation in favor of his joke, but utterly wrong for trying to dictate to the actual maintainers of the glibc to keep it in against their wishes.

I wish I could make RMS, and you, and everyone who agrees with you, live in a sort of reverse-Kantian world, where whatever you advocate for as acceptable behavior when you do it becomes a universal law of conduct for other people to use when interacting with you.

No matter how much of a "thick skin" you may think you have, I'd lay money that in a world which truly worked this way, you'd last under an hour before abandoning your position and calling for stronger social norms against being an ass to people.

I think RMS has been "attacked" quite a lot of times since he founded FSF and even before it, yet look at him, he's still advocating for what he believes in.

You should practice what you preach, because your statement doesn't make me feel very welcome or safe right now. You seem to make a lot of assumptions about me and the world I live in.

I just said I agree with RMS on this, and you straight up attacked me personally.

I just said I agree with RMS on this, and you straight up attacked me personally.

The worst thing I would wish on you is for you to live a while in a world run according to your own espoused values.

If you feel that's an attack, it's a problem with your values.

(at least, that's how I think I'm supposed to respond here, since people aren't supposed to "feel attacked" or "get offended" by such things, apparently)

You're basically saying his values are wrong without any explanation of how you came to such a conclusion. You're also making wild statements about how he would react to some imaginary world.

Probably not the right way to have a discussion.

The comment was "People need to grow up", accompanied by blaming people for being offended.

I do think that's wrong. And I do think having to live in a world where everyone operated by those values would quickly cure the original commenter of believing this sort of thing. In fact, I think it's a very easy way to communicate what's wrong.

> I wish I could make RMS, and you, and everyone who agrees with you, live in a sort of reverse-Kantian world, where whatever you advocate for as acceptable behavior when you do it becomes a universal law of conduct for other people to use when interacting with you.

You want to transport me back to the 70's MIT AI lab? I'm so there!

Considering the stories of the breakdown of MIT AI Lab, you might be... surprised.

(No, Levy's book was not honest to the facts)

I don't know the context of this, explanation?

"Hackers: Heroes of the Computing Revolution" is probably the most common source for those who "weren't there" about AI Lab, and it paints a story of the lab being destroyed by Symbolics, proprietary software etc. - I have personally seen the meme of "AI Lab hackers got bought out" with referrals to the book itself.

What a lot of people don't know is that one of the descriptions used by RMS to talk about how "AI Lab lost people", the story of how he couldn't meet people at lunch, isn't because they left AI Lab for "evil corporations". It was because a lot of people avoided RMS, especially after lawsuit often considered more crucial for the creation of GNU than the Xerox printer story (Stallman violated Symbolics-MIT source licensing deal).

From better sources, I have met two AI Lab members from 1970s - one even claimed to have been RMS' supervisor back when RMS was Harvard Undergrad working part-time (and if certain war story is to be believed, is indirectly responsible for Emacs happening) - the impression left was that a lot of RMS' AI Lab contemporaries wouldn't shake hands with him since 1980s.

Heard also interesting stories on RMS' mismanagement of early Hurd initiative and how it resulted in close to 0 work being done.

Ah, but aren't you pretty famous yourself for being just that?

One thing that may not be well-appreciated:

This is walking very close to the line of outright political advocacy. If you read the entire email thread, one of the examples [1] clearly crosses that threshold. Once that threshold is crossed, it is illegal for a government employee to contribute to glibc in an official capacity, or even a private employee contracted by the government. This includes things like people who need to modify glibc to get them to run on government supercomputers.

[1] Someone suggests blocking out code with #ifdef REPUBLICANS.

Actually, GNU is a 501(c)(3) organisation. They can’t really be politically active and maintain such a status.

501(c)(3) can support issues but not people in election for office.

Most worthwhile things are political. If there really is such a rule in some country, it should not condemn organisations to self censorship & apathy.

Yeah, this is one of those spots where RMS is stubbornly and stupidly standing up for principle in a context where the rest of us just clearly see that it shouldn't matter and he's just being a jerk.

But... damn if he's not right about this. The joke has meaning. It still means what he meant when he wrote it. The issue is an important one (to RMS, at least). And no one else has a real argument here other than "it's unprofessional and embarassing and we want it gone".

Same old, same old. The crusty bearded guy is a jerk, but he's right.

>The joke has meaning

Only if you're American and also have the requisite background knowledge to understand it, which many don't.

If you don't know the context, it's meaningless. Which is not a good thing to have in technical documentation.

> Only if [you...] have the requisite background knowledge to understand it, which many don't.

It's literally the C library reference manual. That's true of the whole thing!

The point is that it has meaning, however obscure, and reflects a particular principled intent of the author. And the request to remove it is cosmetic. And you resolve that by holding to the author's intent and not just polishing it to fit your sense of aesthetics.

Your argument would be an excellent reason to reject a submitted joke that didn't reflect a consensus of the active maintainers; not so much to remove one decades after the fact.

>It's literally the C library reference manual. That's true of the whole thing!

You have to know about the global gag rule prohibiting health providers that receive federal funds from discussing abortion with their patients to understand the entire C library reference manual? News to me.

No, the manual is a dry retelling of software capabilities without tutorial content, so its readers might reasonably be expected to be familiar with the idea of a section or two requiring some external context to interpret.

All you're telling me is that you'd prefer to be googling for strftime() examples on StackOverflow than reading an explainer on US abortion rights policy. Which is fine. But it's not like it would hurt you to learn a little extra stuff along the way, and RMS thinks it would be good for you. And he wrote the manual.

I find your line of reasoning vague and...I don't know the word, it seems very one-sided.

what do you mean by the "C library reference manual"? The glibc man or something else? Cause to me glibc is just GNU's implementation of the C standard.

RMS can decide what goes in the GNU manual, sure. But you didn't even address the fact that the joke is not understandable unless you're from a very specific background (how many people are familiar with US imperialistic politics and the global gag rule?)

> (how many people are familiar with US imperialistic politics and the global gag rule?)

Many of us are, more or less. RMS's intention may be to inform more people about such rule(s), since US politics affects the whole world and it is good to be informed.

Laws seem to be the main export of the US these days, so you probably have the context. You definitely should have it if you work in computing, as almost everything in this industry is defined by how US of A sees things.

I am not American but get the joke. Also, I can think of only a handful countries w/o any significant amount of opposers to abortion, and even those probably have quite a bit of them.

I'm European and we learned about the global gag rule in HS.

You really have to be clueless to not get the joke.

'Clueless' is an offensively derogatory word in this context. An incredibly niche piece of legislation that applies to 5% of the World's population?

I had no idea it related to abortion . I have no knowledge of or interest in abortion laws. I assumed it was something related to US munitions export laws.

> And no one else has a real argument here other than "it's unprofessional and embarassing and we want it gone".

No one needs any better argument. It's unprofessional, and it's embarrassing (both as poorly executed joke and as political advocacy bolted onto the technical manual). RMS has a perfectly good personal site and lots of speaking engagements where he is very welcome to advocate whatever he likes and people are happy to see him to do just that. And nobody has a problem with it - nobody ever, as far as I know, demanded to close his site or protested him speaking anywhere, let alone demanded him to be banned. His advocacy (the fact that he's doing what he's doing) is very accepted even among people who disagree with him. However, he insists on doing in in the place where people don't want it. That's just being annoying and stubborn for no other reason but "because I want it so".

> No one needs any better argument. It's unprofessional

I do. If you want professional, there are plenty of professional proprietary vendors out there. Or if you insist on Free Software, probably the BSDs are more professional.

GNU is a social project first, with quality and professionalism being secondary considerations.

The whole argument is about the removal of a statement against censorship (interpreted by some as an "abortion joke"). Of course a GNU project shouldn't remove such a thing for reasons of "being professional". I agree with rms here.

On the other side is the scope. Why is rms being so difficult here? Even though I think he's right, why not shrug it off? Why even bother?

I would disagree with rms here, were it not that in the past he's often been ridiculed for being quirky and irrational about minutiae, and yet here we are, with Facebook and Google controlling the internet, each one of us carrying a personal tracking device and loving it, and e-books being deleted remotely from devices we thought we owned.

So maybe this silly, trivial disagreement about some documentation is more important than I give it credit for at this moment.

rms is known for being difficult, not for being wrong.

> If you want professional, there are plenty of professional proprietary vendors out there

I do not see existence of other professional vendors a valid reason for behaving unprofessionaly. Nobody says RMS should behave professionally because otherwise there would be no professional vendors left. He should behave professionally because it's the right thing to do in this context, not because of availability concerns.

> GNU is a social project first

No, not really. Almost all effort is dedicated to code and surrounding matters (yes, GPL too), and very little is dedicated to societal change as such.

> with quality and professionalism being secondary considerations.

If it were true, GNU projects would die long ago. Nobody needs a compiler or a shell that is social project first and quality software second. Nobody would use it (ok, maybe a dozen or so of people would, but that's it). Fortunately, it is not the case at all.

> rms is known for being difficult, not for being wrong.

He's known for both. He has been wrong plenty. He also has been right plenty, including in many important things, but that doesn't make him infallible.

It's never helped anyone understand the technical material and it's caused at least one instance of confusion (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48445031/why-would-it-be...), that's reason enough. Jokes in documentation are good, but only if they serve the documentation.

I read it the other way around, with RMS being the one offended and trying to correct everyone: the people maintaining glibc agreed to change part of the documentation because it wasn't serving a useful purpose, either as technical material, core philosophical material, or as material reinforcing one of those two (which can include a carefully-crafted joke, don't get me wrong). RMS got offended and tried to force them to keep it.

This is absolutely an abortion joke, in that it's taking a function that has nothing to do with human reproduction at all and treating it as the same thing as having an abortion. The object of mockery of the joke itself is in fact law, not the act of abortion, but that doesn't really matter.

It absolutely does matter.

The notion that making mockery of law that prohibits one's freedom of choice being the same as mockery of the said choice itself is astoundingly absurd.

The first, mockery of law-- specially one that imposes restrictions on citizens is a political consideration, while mockery of a personal subject outside the context of politics is an ideological concern.

To make it more clear, please consider that it is possible to be against prohibition of any choice while simultaneously find said choice unfavorable.

This isn't about "freedom of choice", and the fact that you're even suggesting that means you've missed the point. This is about the fact that a joke that has anything to do with a sensitive topic like abortion is wildly inappropriate to have in technical documentation. Even if you ignore the abortion angle, this is still a political joke, which is also inappropriate for this context. In fact, most jokes are fairly inappropriate in this context, but I'm having trouble thinking of anything more inappropriate than an abortion joke.

Edit: I'm really curious what kind of people are downvoting me. To those who are, I'd really like to know what your rationale is for believing that an abortion joke belongs in technical documentation.

God forbid there be any politics in GNU software. Oh, wait, GNU software is inherently political.

The politics of GNU is not only completely separate from the politics of abortion debate, but we're also talking about technical documentation here, which is an apolitical thing. Someone reading technical documentation is not doing so because they're trying to be involved in the politics, they're doing so because they're looking for, you guessed it, technical documentation.

"talking about technical documentation here, which is an apolitical thing"

There's no requirement of that, just like there's no requirement that technical documentation be stab-your-eyes-out dry and boring rather than having an occasional bit of humor.

Apolitical technical documentation is a style choice, saying that you want to emulate a certain style of documentation.

I didn't say the technical documentation has to be completely dry and devoid of any humor. But when you're putting humor into technical documentation, you need to avoid any kind of divisive or political topic. The worst response to the humor you put in there should a groan.

I would argue that the texinfo documentation is not only technical documentation, but also political documentation with a cultural legacy.

RMS started the FSF for political reasons, as a reaction to the sudden intersection of code sharing, business and copyright law. Not only was it not in any way separate from RMS' political views, but it is in fact entirely an expression of them down to texinfo and his uncompromising views that helped spawn an entire culture around Free Software.

There are those that would like to separate and divide these from what they see as purely technical matter, but I would argue the mistake they are making in this case is in looking at it as merely technical documentation. It is that, but it is also more than this.

Maybe I'm old fashioned in my sensibilities, but whether I agree with someone or not is immaterial, I will always appreciate being able to catch a glimpse of the human face behind their work. RMS may not be the most agreeable man on the face of the planet, but I'm inclined to respect the man's legacy and how he sees fit to leave it, particularly as he still maintains an incredibly active role in the policies of the culture he helped to shape through his Foundation.

As already pointed out, the whole FOSS movement and so GNU project is a political enterprise, technology is only the means to an end.

In fact, it could be argued that the core principal and objective of FOSS and GNU project is reinforcement of liberty by protection and promotion of freedom of choice in the digital age.

As others have said, the glibc is part of a political organization. If the Chinese government had forbid GNU from speaking on forks and required the exclusive use of chopsticks, you'd see a similar joke on the page for fork. Nobody is trying to deny that abortion is a sensitive topic, politics is always about sensitive topics, and it's sensitivity might have something to do with why the US government legislated on it.

'abort' as word is more offensive/triggering than the joke.

The discussion is a proxy for how executive decisions are made for glibc, and in particular by whom.

The merit of a stale joke from the 90s is meaningless, and posturing about its appropriateness is disingenuous. Open source principals have always been eccentric (Torvalds, Raymond(!), etc.), and the FOSS community tolerated it not only because of their technical contributions, but because the open source community itself is an expression of tolerance based on shared objectives.

Of course others would like to wield their influence in the generation of the DNA of the internet, and there is a tremendous amount to be gained by scandalizing, discrediting, and isolating its core maintainers.

Perhaps eventually RMS will come around and remove the joke himself, after finding it does not stand the test of time. But it would go a long way to resolving this if they could demonstrate they aren't just using the joke as a pretext for scandal to undermine the decision making structure of a project.

It's clearly not about the joke.

This seems to ascribe a high amount of ill will to glibc maintainers who have been faithful and productive GNU maintainers for many years, and I don't believe there's any other evidence that they wish to undermine RMS' authority.

However, if those maintainers find that their faithfulness is rewarded by being told that they don't actually maintain the project, they're just tending it while RMS is busy, it seems entirely reasonable to me that they would become upset at RMS trying to undermine the decision-making structure of glibc. The principals here, the people making the technical contributions, are the glibc maintainers.

Except that perhaps RMS's approval and veto are no longer legitimate?

It's not ascribing ill will at all. They've stumbled on a canary or a "brown M&M," where regardless of how good they think they are, they've transgressed a boundary of the implicit agreement of who has final say.

They would have to be good and faithful to have contributions approved to glibc, so I would argue that's not the point. As the principals age, the question of succession and governance in key open source projects will become more explicit. Seems they walked into this one.

Yeah, I think they stumbled into this, and having realized where they were, decided that having a proxy fight about RMS' authority in general is something they were needing to do at some point. I just don't think they set out to end up here because they were looking for the fight, and I read your comment as accusing the glibc maintainers of being non-core maintainers who were looking for a way to cause a scandal. If I misread it, I apologize.

I could have been more clear and less punchy. It's a sensitive topic and perhaps my pen leapt from its scabbard a bit. :)

> It's not ascribing ill will at all. They've stumbled on a canary or a "brown M&M," where regardless of how good they think they are, they've transgressed a boundary of the implicit agreement of who has final say.

I dunno, is it fair to call it an "agreement" if one side doesn't think they agreed to it?

zwol says:

> I don't think I did anything wrong procedurally. RMS may be the project leader, but he is not a glibc maintainer. His wishes regarding glibc are perhaps to be given _some_ more weight than those of any other individual, particularly when he is also the author of text under dispute, but we have never, to my knowledge, treated them as mandates.

Seems pretty clear he isn't party to this agreement, implicit or otherwise.

> However, if those maintainers find that their faithfulness is rewarded by being told that they don't actually maintain the project, they're just tending it while RMS is busy

Someone or some group/process has to be in charge, be the final decision-maker for a group. In the case of the GNU Project, the Free Software Foundation is likely that decision-maker as the owner of the trademark for "GNU". The FSF as a non-profit organization has articles of incorporation and bylaws [1] describing its process for making decisions - but it is a corporation, just like any corporation, and its decisions concerning its assets are binding in the same way as if Google made a decision about one of its products.

I haven't read the FSF bylaws in detail, but it sounds like RMS believes that he has decision-making authority over the FSF and GNU Project, which he probably does. Someone has to - what's the alternative? In organizations like the FSF and Wikipedia, someone or some process has to have the authority to make decisions. There is no way to delegate actual decision-making to the "community" at large. A person has to have it, either individually or as the executor of a process.

I suppose the alternative is having no trademark nor legal organization in charge of a project, but in that case, a disagreement could result in two different projects contending for the same name. Besides, someone or some organization ultimately has to be in control of properties such as domain names and source control accounts. The moment that a project manages any properties like this, there has to be a formal decision-making process or the project is at risk of chaos. The person who has legal control over project properties like the project domain name, or IP like its trademark, is in de facto final control over the project itself.

There are undoubtedly options for going over RMS's head, such as convincing the directors of the FSF [2] to take a vote on the issue, or take a vote to remove him as president or as a director. Alternatively, people who feel passionately about this issue could lobby the FSF directors to put pressure on RMS to reverse this decision or delegate it, without using the mechanics of a formal vote, such as by threatening resignation. Furthermore, donors of the FSF could threaten to pull their funding over the issue.

Alternatively, project maintainers can fork the codebase and carry on under a new name, managed by a new organization, which is their right to do since the code is open source and free software. To the extent that an open source project or any project is operating under a specific name, managed by a corporation, we should all understand that someone is always "in charge", though that person or group may act with a light touch or operate largely behind the scenes.

[1] https://www.fsf.org/about/financial

[2] https://www.fsf.org/about/people/board

P.S. This comment is not an endorsement of either side of the issue in a normative sense. It is intended to be a positive comment concerning the expectations we should have in working with corporations.

When Django started out, the original two biggest contributors were "BDFLs" (i.e., had final decision-making authority).

They stepped back from that years and years ago. If for some reason there's a decision that desperately needs to be made, but for which no decision is coming out of the normal processes, there's a technical board, elected by committers, rotating every release cycle, that can be asked to make the call (disclaimer: I've served three terms on Django's technical board).

But in both the BDFL era, and the current technical-board era, the people with final decision-making authority only exercised it when asked to, as a last resort when other mechanisms had failed.

For the final decision-maker to actively step in and veto something the normal decision process already has consensus around, or just pre-emptively declare something decided against what seems to be a consensus buliding the other way... is unthinkable for me. I'd treat it as a sign that it's time either to fork away from that person, or to remove that person's decision-making authority and put the authority in the hands of someone more responsible.

> For the final decision-maker to actively step in and veto something the normal decision process already has consensus around, or just pre-emptively declare something decided against what seems to be a consensus buliding the other way... is unthinkable for me.

Especially on so trivial an issue. This is what RMS wants to throw his weight around for?

Sadly, I very much agree. I think RMS has done an incredible amount to protect software freedom, and virtually every single person in the world benefits in some way or another. However, this is an authoritarian response and assertion of control where one need not be. We have plenty of power-hungry dicks out there, we don't need them to have a famous example to emulate.

Note: I am not convinced yet that RMS was serious. I'm waiting for him to come out and say, "lol jk wuz troll." My opinion stated here assumes he was being serious.

I don't think you can have one without the other. GNU was successful in large part because of RMS's uncompromising position on issues both big and small. RMS is not, and never was, a "power-hungry dick". He just has strong and well-defined political views, and the GNU project was created to reflect those views.

Unfortunately, at times I look at GNU and see that it's a project whose success is in spite of RMS. He gave a good basis in the original manifest, gave generally good inspiration, but that's what it is - inspiration. Said inspiration made people work on the projects that over time somehow managed to end up under GNU umbrella. But a lot of RMS-managed, top-down GNU projects? Never got anywhere.

See also the discussion mentioned by Ulrich Drepper back in 2001, regarding RMS' behaviour back when Ulrich started to port glibc to linux.

> Someone or some group/process has to be in charge, be the final decision-maker for a group.

That is certainly true. And if this were a situation where, say, some subtle techno-political decision about the codebase or the license threatened to split the community, you'd expect a leader from high-- like Stallman-- to come in and lay down a prudent decision.

But in this case, the leader from high has come in and created a problem that would require a higher leader to come in and resolve. AFAICT that higher leader doesn't exist.

That's a weird situation to get into. I can't fathom why Stallman would force the issue when the stakes are so low.

Then again, perhaps it's serendipity that this puts a spotlight on governance on an issue nearly nobody cares about. There's much less possibility of splitting the devs than there would be if there were a big technical feature at stake.

I just finished reading The Dictators Handbook and it's crazy how these same principals seem to apply to OSS organizations.

This is more about politics than anything else, and hopefully everyone involved will learn it shouldn't be.

> Open source principals have always been eccentric (Torvalds, Raymond(!), etc.), and the FOSS community tolerated it not only because of their technical contributions, but because the open source community itself is an expression of tolerance based on shared objectives.

I think you're confusing two separate issues.

Torvalds' acidic method of communication is certainly eccentric. But from my casual reading of LKML what he communicates is not. Like:

* some patch is prone to bugginess and not suitable to merge

* some patch shows that the submitter doesn't understand some fundamental aspect of C and thus isn't suitable to merge as written

* some patchset looks similar to some previous subsystem that caused massive problems and should therefore be avoided

* the patch was measured to break things or perform poorly

* the patch is shoehorning in a feature that doesn't belong in the kernel

* some non-technical proposal would cause future problems for Kernel devs and should be avoided

In the case of Stallman's joke, we can certainly say his method of communication-- popping in to make a surprise decision by fiat-- is eccentric. But we can also say the content of what he is communicating is also eccentric. What possible rationale could there be to tying up volunteer glibc maintainers' time for a bike-shedding session about a decades-old joke?

It's the difference between someone with a Penguin fetish favoring Penguin-based metaphors, and someone with a Gnu fetish forcing you to sit through 125 "funny" videos of Gnus.

Scratch that-- there are 10 more "Abortion Joke" messages from April. So make that 126 "funny" videos about Gnus.

Regarding standing the test of time, one of Donald Trump's first acts in office was to reinstate and expand the global gag rule:

https://www.apnews.com/868c8211b4f948d8b7f7ce58ab08a78b

That isn't a comment on whether the joke should be removed or retained, but it's worth noting that this "stale joke from the '90s" is actually very relevant to contemporary politics.

Should they also faithfully maintain the pretense of every damn pointer he initiated? Their the ones doing the work of maintaining the project, removing no-value jokes in the documentation should not warrant this amount of weight throwing nomatter who put them there.

I am one of those people who subscribe to some of Stallman's crazier ideas, and one of those people who thinks trigger warnings are often misused[1].

That being said, I am really for professionalism in code and documentation. This might have been a fun joke for a pet project at one point in time, but I totally agree it should be removed.

I really feel like Stallman is lacking some serious maturity here as well. It nothing to even do with being offended about the joke, it's just a basic idea of professionalism around documentation.

It'd be different if the joke was in a comment, or even in a tutorial on how to use a library (if it wasn't an official tutorial or was intended to have a humorous tone).

To be clear, I don't even like the stupid "Apt has super cow powers" at the bottom of apt-get. If you want to make jokes, put them in your blog, or your YouTube screencast, or at most in the comments.

[1]: Trigger warnings came from the idea of post traumatic stress. But you don't know what can trigger memories of trauma. A rainbow could invoke a PTSD episode for someone who associates that with a loved one that was killed. I think a better approach is the old TV saying, "Viewer/Listener discretion is advised" if something might be offensive.

I don't see the difference between "viewer discretion is advised" and trigger warnings. "This show contains scenes of domestic violence, viewer discretion is advised" and "Trigger warning: domestic violence" are just different ways of saying the same thing. A lot of people are using "content warning" or "content advisory" these days anyway, partially to avoid the impression that it's strictly about PTSD.

Actually it has nothing to do with joke or professionalism, it's pure political power play through and through.

Never been a big fan of the "Code of Conduct" wars that seem to be going on. On the surface, yeah, it seems great. Everyone be nice and get along. But for some odd reason, the enforcement always tends to favor one side.

Case in point, the pointless NodeJS TSC drama [1] from yesteryear. I don't like JS to begin with, but that makes me want to avoid the project like the plague.

The problem with letting thin skinned people decide what you can and can't say, is they have a very long (and often contradictory) list. Suddenly, you find yourself in the middle of a kangaroo court facing charges of high treason, guilty until proven innocent. The sentence? Public crucifixion.

Stallman made the right call.

https://www.reddit.com/r/node/comments/6whs2e/multiple_coc_v...

One, there was no public crucifixion here, no court, no treason, even as an analogy. Had Stallman not replied on the list to insist on his own personal veto over glibc changes, the project would have moved on, nobody would have asked about whether that veto makes sense, and if he showed up on some technical thing two months later people would have absolutely listened to him with extra weight. And even so, nobody is questioning him as a person, nor attempting to care about what he says or police his project participation based on his views - multiple people in favor of the removal have quite clearly said that he can say what he likes on stallman.org and nobody cares. They're just questioning his veto.

Two, what is the "one side" being favored here? It's not aligned on political axes - Stallman is a left-leaning person making fun of a right-wing policy, which is the opposite of many accusations I hear about codes of conduct. If it is aligned in favor of the consensus of the active maintainers of a project and against individuals, no matter how important, that seems like a very good thing that projects should be aligned on.

Three, I don't know what "thin-skinned" means here. I'd call the project maintainers who are holding to a consensus decision in the face of threats by their own project leader thick-skinned, and the man who can't admit that his irrelevant, unfunny joke from 25 years ago is irrelevant and unfunny thin-skinned.

> there was no public crucifixion here, no court, no treason

Yes, you're correct. In this instance, there was no crucifixion, because the CoC/inclusivity crowd didn't have enough political capital.

See the NodeJS TSC drama I referenced. That's the "one side" being favored. That's the end result of pandering to people who take offense at the drop of the hat. This is simply Stallman refusing to concede to the notion that everything must be unoffensive.

OK, the "one side" is the side that believes that open source projects should be offensive?

And being overruled by the people actually maintaining the project. In other words, you have the people actually writing the code saying something doesn't belong, and someone who isn't really involved in the project saying "no, we must keep this offensive thing".

It's literally an outsider trying to force the actual maintainers to do something they disgaree with. But you appear to support the outsider.

That's also what happened with the Node.js stuff - it was outsiders trying to engineer a situation where the board's own rules would require them to push Ashley off the board.

The "SJWs" would have no power if we were not the people actually doing the work; if nothing else, in a year or two's time, we'd stop producing anything and users would jump ship. But it's the people who scream about "SJWs" who are generally outsiders who think that their use of a project entitles them to overrule the project's own maintainers.

Something more recent... CoC caused one of the top 5 LLVM developers to leave:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16980841

Unfortunately, this got censored heavily on HN.

Also, Rust-lang has CoC "cops": https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/team.html (scroll down to "moderation team").

>Responsibility: helping uphold the code of conduct

That's pretty crazy!

I mean, I understand that. HN usually weights controversial things down to focus on the tech aspects. It keeps the place fun to browse.

This is something I'm particularly interested in, so it's a little frustrating that it lasted all of 20 minutes on the front page. Ah well.

IMO, when a controversial issue such as a certain CoC change causes a top 5 contributor to such a large project such as LLVM to say "fuck it, I'm out," that is entirely relevant, and should be upvoted, not flagged to oblivion. You may not agree with the contributor's decision to leave, but it's worthwhile to try and understand why they came to that decision and to reflect on whether the change is the right thing to do or not. By down-voting or flagging into oblivion, dissent is being quieted, freedom of speech and thought is lost, and diversity of thought and inclusiveness in the community is actively being destroyed. We don't all have to agree, but when one group can actively suppress the participation of another, you've effectively killed free speech/thought.

The people that flag that sort of thing don't actually want diversity and inclusiveness, these are newspeak terms that mean the opposite.

If they actually wanted diversity then they would have to recognize that the majority of the world (and the diversity in it) has some very non-PC beliefs and their policies are excluding those people.

I always find these discussions weird, as a Christian who believes in the literal reality of hell. (I hope it will be empty, but I have no reason to believe that other than hope, and I must realistically admit that plenty of people appear to die in a state of mortal sin.)

Being respectful of others, even in a codified way, is in no way an affront to my non-PC beliefs. I'm not going to start having opinions about whether my co-maintainers are going to hell, and if you want to make a policy about that, I'm not harmed in the least. If you want to ask me about my beliefs you're always welcome to do so privately, but I have enough faith in the internet to believe that nobody I'm working on an open source project with is in dire need of hearing the Good News as if they haven't thought about it before. I'm not excluded by someone saying that proselytization is off-topic.

And if you think that my beliefs nonetheless make me a poor representative for some group of people who don't share those beliefs, well, I will be sad privately, but I don't think I am losing anything I deserved if you kick me out of a position of leadership or responsibility over it.

I will admit that there are people who share my beliefs who also have a belief in excluding a group of people in an arbitrary category or in being disrespectful of others as a matter of policy. I disagree (theologically!) with them, and I also very much have no interest in working closely with them on anything. If you craft a set of rules that excludes those people on the grounds of their exclusionary behavior, you'll likely find that I'm the most empathetic towards them when others want me to cut them off, but you'll also find that I have no fundamental objection towards those rules, implemented as a defense mechanism.

I think you're ignoring that witch hunting that has been going on in recent years. As a hypothetical, let's say that you believe all homosexuals will go to hell. Of course in a project or a workplace their will never be a need to bring this up and being respectful of others you never bring it up in those environments. But what about other environments? Should you be able to express your belief on your personal twitter? At your church?

The answer lately is that you aren't free to express that opinion anywhere, by doing so you could lose your job or be kicked out of a project. Being respectful to others will not save you, you have to keep your opinion completely to yourself.

None of this has anything to do with what's going on in this story.

Again, I totally do not feel that pressure. (And I tweet perhaps too much about my faith.)

I admit that certain people with public prominence might feel the pressure of public scrutiny, but I have never seen that pressure be aligned in any particular way, whether left vs. right, or religious vs. atheist, or "politically correct" vs. "politically incorrect," or whatever. Every US presidential candidate of every party felt this pressure. Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote about it yesterday (in an aside in his essay about Kanye West). I've seen /r/Catholicism accuse the actual Pope of virtue signaling. If I become a prominent person, I don't think there's anything about my particular beliefs that will make me more of a target of people looking for a reason to knock others down. Maybe they'll find what they're looking for more easily, but they'll look, regardless.

There are certain jobs I wouldn't be well-suited for. My denomination teaches that abortion should be legal, but should also be avoided. If you appointed me as a leader of a pro-legal-abortion group, I'd like to think I'd be honest to the people I represent and as effective as I can, but if you believed I'd be fundamentally compromised because my denomination isn't unequivocally pro-abortion and that there are better candidates, I'd say, yes, you can find better candidates. If I actually believe in the group's mission, I'd like to see the best person in the job, and if I don't, I certainly shouldn't have the job. I'm not qualified for all things, and part of the nature of having beliefs is that they influence your actions and worldview.

But that's about public prominence. The simple fact of the matter is that I feel completely welcome as a random contributor in projects with codes of conduct and among "SJWs," and I openly talk about my religion in casual conversations, and you are the one telling me that I should keep my opinions to myself.

> But that's about public prominence.

I don't think you realize how precarious your position is when we've had things like opalgate: https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941 . This person wasn't president, wan't a celebrity, wasn't high profile at all, merely a contributor to an OSS project that had some non-PC views.

> The simple fact of the matter is that I feel completely welcome as a random contributor in projects with codes of conduct and among "SJWs,"

You will be welcome right up to the point where your not, when someone like Coroline takes an interest in your profile and gets you removed from a project. It's also been known to happen in workplaces, low level people with no public prominence being fired for not having social acceptable opinions.

The whole point of a code of conduct is to promote good conduct and dissuade bad conduct. What's crazy about having moderators or having their moderation standards be the code of conduct?

Problem is selective enforcement. They have a member on their core team who has advocated violence in the past. It's just that it's violence against white people so it's "OK". They also have another person who is advocating violence against men. But again, their 'thought police' cops haven't done a thing.

I want to defend Rust project here. You should realize that Rust CoC is scoped to official Rust project space.

> They have a member on their core team who has advocated violence in the past. It's just that it's violence against white people so it's "OK".

As far as I know, the member you are referring to never advocated violence in the official Rust project space. That's enough for Rust.

And you are sure that any code of conduct violations will not include anything out of the official Rust project space, like an unrelated twitter post?

Yes, I am 100% sure.

This directly contradicts other CoC enforcement cases:

https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941

>publicly calling trans people out for "not accepting reality" on Twitter.

>His Twitter profile mentions that he is a core contributor to opal.

>Is this what the other maintainers want to be reflected in the project?

>Will any transgender developers feel comfortable contributing?

There is no reason to believe these people are impartial.

That's a different CoC though.

Is it?

https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/942

The author of the issue suggests the adoption of a certain Contributor Covenant. Here is the latest version of the text:

https://www.contributor-covenant.org/version/1/4/code-of-con...

And here is the Node.js CoC:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nodejs/admin/master/CODE_O...

Here is the diff:

https://www.diffchecker.com/2Lj88IT6

The only substantial difference is located on the very first paragraph:

- education, socio-economic status

+ race

It is clearly the same CoC.

Nowhere in that text does it say that Twitter is some kind of private space where you can freely express unpopular opinions without consequences to your good standing as a contributor to software projects. The scope section actually says this:

>This Code of Conduct applies both within project spaces and in public spaces when an individual is representing the project or its community.

>Examples of representing a project or community include using an official project e-mail address, posting via an official social media account, or acting as an appointed representative at an online or offline event.

As evidenced by the Opal issue I cited, the mere mention of a project on your Twitter profile causes people to assume it is an "official social media account" and therefore subject to the CoC.

>His Twitter profile mentions that he is a core contributor to opal.

>Is this what the other maintainers want to be reflected in the project?

So why were there no consequences following this report?

https://github.com/nodejs/TSC/issues/324

The Twitter in question clearly is associated with Node.js:

https://twitter.com/ag_dubs

>@nodejs director. former @npmjs.

These facts were enough for me to form my opinion about CoCs and their enforcement.

Rust is not Node, so I'm not sure why you're looking at nodes CoC.

I don't get this. And by "this" I mean probably your entire worldview, but also whatever led you to make that comment. Here's how I see this situation:

People who actively maintain a project, and have done so with success for many years, notice something in the documentation that they think is outdated and perhaps a bit tasteless, hold a reasonable discussion about it like adults, and make a decision.

Someone who's at best an inactive emeritus contributor sees this and gets so worked up about it that he decides to risk severely alienating the actual technical contributors in order to override their decision in favor of his personal politics, and when asked to participate in the project's usual decision-making process pulls a Louis XIV ("le projet, c'est moi!") and invokes absolute authority while expressing an unwillingness to listen to any contrary opinions or arguments, resorting to clichéd insults about "trigger warnings" and such.

If you really feel you must argue that one of the parties involved here has "thin skin" (and I don't understand that, either) I do not see how you can, with any rational basis, come to the conclusion that it's the first group. I also do not see how there's anything admirable in the second person's response or actions.

To call it a joke is a bit of a stretch, more like a turn of phrase or wink to the reader.

As far as explicitly inserting one's politics into communal tools, this case is so mild it's hard to fathom any grounded person wasting time on it.

However, there is a case at the moment of the author of the BFG tool for git adding a paragraph of text about fighting trump at the end of his tool's output. He won't get rid of it until he's out of office.

Another case where Atlassian was putting in LGBT rainbow stuff into the output of a successful push.

Really obnoxious stuff. I don't mind devs having a personality but develop a sense of decorum.

As weak as the RMS line was, best keep any snifter of politics out of your tools. It's just lame at the end of the day.

Or, if you're going to be subtly political (as GNU often is), at least be current.

That joke was 20-something years old. It ran its course.

Also, as far as calling LGBT rainbows "political", I would have to disagree. You either view LBGT people as equal, or you can be a hateful person. There's no good reason to pander to the latter, but plenty of reasons to stand up in unity with the former.

There are some concepts that need to be aggressively viewed as truths rather than opinions. The civil rights movement was won by people standing up and putting their own enrichment aside to say "You are wrong and we stand up in unity with the people you view as subhuman". No reason to shame anyone from doing that again today.

It's kinda evergreen, as the global gag rule is, to notable controversy, retracted or reinstated with each change in Presidential party since Reagan, most recently reinstated last year by the Trump Administration.

Of course, it's still inappropriate for glibc docs.

What's the global gag rule you are referring to?

The US government does not fund overseas organizations that provide or promote abortion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico_City_policy

(The fact that this reference is so unclear is probably a reason that, everything else aside, the joke is not very good. The glibc maintainers have offered to replace it with some clear text about censorship in the US.)

Thank you for the explanation. This indeed is pretty obscure, and if that it what it is aimed at, the joke is also not well constructed - US govt does not ban anybody from promoting abortion with this rule (I assume we accept the joke's premise that talking about this function is "promoting abortion") - it just withdraws US governmental financing. But that would imply that otherwise GNU project is financed by US federal government? Not sure this is the impression RMS would want to make... OTOH, given RMS's politics (as I understand it), maybe he wouldn't mind it at all if that were true.

LGBT* is most definitely political - I think you just proved that.

I don't understand your logic. You say that putting LGTB rainbows in a tool is not a political act and then go on to compare it with the civil rights movement, one of the major political storms of its time. Is it political or is it not?

As to political activism in computer tools... there is a time and place for everything (almost?) and I personally disagree that a computer tool is a place for some random political activism.

> There's no good reason to pander to the latter

"Pander", no. Avoid offending when "offending" would require active effort and "not offending" would just require doing nothing, yes.

Let me talk about professionalism for a moment. The whole concept of "professionalism" is that it's a set of artificial etiquette that allows people who absolutely detest one-another to get along for long enough to complete a joint venture.

I think we forget what professionalism is; a relatively-isolationist country like the US (in terms of where its citizens go on holiday, not in terms of its foreign policy) has little need of it. For most countries through most of history, though, professionalism is the thing that you're expected to show when your country decides to ally with that country you were just at war with, and you have to work with people who had just been shooting friends of yours.

We expect—and depend on—our tooling enabling professionalism in this sense. That means obvious things like not having insults toward the French in ARM ISA references; but it also means not using religious iconography in a country with multiple religions; not including the Battle Hymn of the Republic as a default ringtone on phones; etc. We want to ensure that we don't accidentally, through coincidences of technology, destroy a negotiation or cause a diplomatic crisis.

I was raised in a country with very hateful views against LGBT. While I, personally, developed a tolerance against LGBT, a lot of people around me did not and those people often work as developers. Showing them any sign of LGBT propaganda is a great offence to them. I'm not lawyer, but I suspect that LGBT propaganda might even be against a law.

I guess, the same could be said about abortion jokes. Some people might take them too personal.

Fuck 'em. I'm not going to bend over backwards to coddle people who hate me for daring to exist. As for laws, I think the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said it best: "I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws."

Nope

The joke is confusing if you're not well-acquainted with US abortion politics, and, if you read the entire email thread, there were actually quite a few people who didn't get the joke properly (you can include myself in that list as another example).

RMS's stance is quite galling here. First, he's making it very adamant that the entire purpose of the joke is political commentary. Second, he's resisting any mechanism to actually make it clear that it is political commentary. Finally, he's effectively trying to use dictatorial powers to make his views go through over the strident objections of the consensus view of the maintainers.

Except, I don't think RMS intended this as a "joke". I honestly think he was dead serious, but worried that other people would interpret it as a joke and thus be inclined to remove it, hence his "do not remove" comment.

Technical documentation and reference is really not the place for political commentary. It adds nothing and is distracting. Technical documentation should be just that: documentation; not political diatribe. The politics would be better left to a blog post or something of the sorts.

If he was dead serious, he's an idiot. There was never any proposal to ban all usage of the word 'abort' in the sense of 'bring to a premature end because of a problem or fault' or as a noun meaning 'an act of aborting a flight, space mission, or other enterprise'.

While RMS has undoubtedly contributed much to the FOSS community, he seems to undermine some of his core points with trivial matters.

For example, his piece "Reasons not to use Facebook"[0] contains some great points, but I find them undermined by the unnecessary usage of the word "useds"

Similarly, this seems like an extremely trival case to "exercise my authority over Glibc very rarely" as he puts it.

[0]: https://stallman.org/facebook.html

I'm not sure I follow. What's wrong with his term?

Either people get what he's writing, and the term is irrelevant, or they don't get what he's writing, in which case I doubt that it would be because they were so distracted by a single word they couldn't focus on anything he's writing at all.

So you just don't like the term. This is fine! But you've failed to make any point.

Writing an essay to persuade someone means talking to them on their terms. If you start off with the "Micro$oft"s and the "Windoze"s you're going to lose the people you want to reach, especially when it reeks of childish namecalling.

> Writing an essay to persuade someone means talking to them on their terms. If you start off with the "Micro$oft"s and the "Windoze"s you're going to lose the people you want to reach, especially when it reeks of childish namecalling.

I can't say I'm mourning the loss of people who think it's childish, or that it's a bad thing--at most it's a silly distraction. If you care, why don't you rewrite his stuff to be more friendly? I'm gonna go ahead and guess he licenses his content liberally.

I gotta say, his essays don't come across as intending to be generally persuasive, and I'm not sure how you could come to that conclusion. His audience is fundamentally one that self-selects to think for themselves, and his diction is one way of achieving that.

What you are suggesting is making a non-compromising person into a compromising person, which we have far too many of already.

I have different opinions than RMS; that should hardly come as a surprise. As a former Linux and GNOME developer, I don't believe the FSF, the GNU project and RMS have chosen effective ways to communicate their talking points.

The final straw came when me and a colleague were discussion the implementation details of Linux kernel features on a mailing list that happened to include RMS, and he came in to correct me about how it's called the "GNU/Linux Operating System", and wouldn't listen to us when we told him that, no, we are very specifically talking about Linux in this case.

Nobody is arguing against his right to publish whatever sensationalist, childish, ad-hominem riddled nonsense he wants to.

We're just arguing that for such a great FOSS leader, he sure publishes some sensationalist, childish, ad-hominem riddled nonsense.

His writing style is absolutely awful, and reeks of selfrighteousness. He's within his rights to keep writing that way, and I'm within my rights to call him out for being ineffective and narcissistic writer.

> I gotta say, his essays don't come across as intending to be generally persuasive

That's a weird argument to make. Why write them at all, then? RMS has a long history of trying to persuade people of the benefits and virtues of Free Software; his writing on related topics is obviously meant to persuade, at least how I see it.

I agree with the parents' point: if the intention is to persuade, then the words used matter. It might seem dumb to you that some word choices will turn people off, but that's irrelevant. What's important is the actual outcome of "did you persuade someone or didn't you?" That's literally the only question that matters.

And if a writer doesn't believe that, then, frankly, they're a poor steward of the advancement of their cause.

> His audience is fundamentally one that self-selects to think for themselves, and his... diction is one way of achieving that.

It sounds like you're equating "being a 100% emotionless robot" with "people who think for themselves". I'm getting a bit tired of people who think it's possible to remove all emotion from every argument. Sure, some people can do that, but the vast majority of people cannot. And I don't really assign a value judgment to either kind of person... but I can certainly tell you which kind I think are more fun to be around.

> That's a weird argument to make. Why write them at all, then?

To fire up people who already generally agree (or simply need to know which problem their cult leader wants to direct them against and don't need convincing), not to convince people who have a different pre-existing opinion.

> Either people get what he's writing, and the term is irrelevant, or they don't get what he's writing

People are emotional animals. When trying to persuade them, disregard this fact at your peril.

> in which case I doubt that it would be because they were so distracted by a single word they couldn't focus on anything he's writing at all

Well, you'd be wrong then. It's like people writing "Micro$oft". No I can't focus on anything you're writing after you use terms like that because I'm picturing an immature child. And why would I listen to an immature child's arguments?

Put it this way, it's like giving a talk with your fly open. Your fly being open is technically irrelevant to the entire talk you're giving, but that's still going to distract people from the content. (Or, in the case of Richard Stallman, eating stuff from your foot. No I'm not making this up; google it, I won't link it here.)

I hugely respect what Stallman has done, in the past, for free software in general but I have a hard time believing that he is a net positive today. Between "free software champions" being associated with someone who's extremely antisocial, and his refusal of pragmatism, it's hard not to be grossed out. I know that the "Stallman attitude" has been a serious roadblock to getting people to adopt free software in general: I've very often seen people get turned off from talking about open source, for fear of dealing with someone who insists on prefixing GNU/ to everything, and scoffs at any license that isn't GPLv2.

In other words the character of a person affects the weight of their arguments. That’s pretty fundamental to society but not acknowledged a lot in the tech world, especially when eccentricities are involved. We like to pretend that life is a meritocracy where we’re all judged solely on our contributions but that’s emphatically not how life works. We can’t change the human nature and the nature of social signaling no matter how hard we close our eyes and wish.

Yeah precisely.

drb91's feigned confusion at how people are not ignoring an arrogant approach at argumentation may simply be an attempt at focusing on the "meat" of the argument rather than the wrapping. Noble, but ultimately incorrect. The argument isn't made to only one person, it's meant to be spread to the general population, and almost nothing from Stallman can really be shared with the general population because his ideas are wrapped really, really badly.

I just want to make it clear: acknowledging the reality of this doesn't mean you endorse it.

One of the most magical things on the internet is the meritocratic aspect of it. It just doesn't translate to real life. I know a lot of my guildmates from the very early WoW days would have been baffled to learn their raids were led by a 14 year old child. I also know I've seen similar experiences reflected on this forum (people recounting being treated as equal peers by others, despite their very young age, different genders, different religions etc). All this is possible because those differences don't come up in a limited context where you, for example, don't see each other face to face. I love that, and I wish it were like that everywhere. But it's not, and if you want your message to be heard, you can't eat your footstuff in public.

I agree. this paradox would seem to be exemplified with the current trend of "Codes of Conduct" in OSS whereby we seek to have a Open and Predujice free workspace -- yet ostricize segments of the IT workforce simply because by setting conduct boundaries, we create "inclusive doctrines" that by definition _cannot_ be unanimously agreed upon by all parties. And at that point the odd man out is stranded alone with their eccentric opinion waving in the wind.

I don’t think RMS is trying to cater towards your needs, though. You’re perfectly capable of understanding him; it’s an (understandable) choice that you don’t put the effort into getting through the distractions. I don’t see anything wrong with expressing yourself in a preferred way, damn if it actually persuaded anyone.

I mean, it’s the same deal with an open fly. You get out of that experience what you look for. Most people can’t see past the fly, and that’s fine.

It’s so silly talking about this Facebook essay like an argument or a persuasive essay when it’s so much more similar to art or entertainment. Either you get it or your grandkids do, and it doesn’t mean you have to marry them or even agree with them to appreciate the cultural expression.

I think most readers assume these essays are meant to persuade. I have seen them advanced as "arguments", and RMS seems to act like he expects people to be persuaded by them. What makes you think these are closer to performance art?

Nothing has to mean anything ever. You can read my comment as a comment meant to open a conversation with you and persuade you of a particular opinion, or you can read it as a piece of art, in which, whenever a disagreement arises, I can choose the easy way out by telling you "Yes but you see, you're meant to see past the things you don't like or disagree with".

My comment was meant as the former, and so were Stallman's. He has always tried to spread his word out and he seems to genuinely not understand why it doesn't take. Claiming his pieces are more art than work is revisionist at best.

I get your perspective, but just because someone has a red hair, it doesn't render their claims incorrect, or doesn't invalidate anything they say.

I have seen many people being dismissed by others merely because of their voice, which I find funny because they were supposed to focus on the content. It's the content that matters. If the presentation is not to your liking, that doesn't mean that person is wrong. On top of that, you don't need to be factually correct if you are convincing enough; sophistry anyone? Apparently people don't seek for the truth, it's enough if you put a pretty face on stage who has some charisma and you are all falling for it. Be skeptical. Focus on the actual content and ignore the irrelevant things, because they are, well, irrelevant. If you are easily distracted by the speaker's fly being open, that's on you, and yes, the outcome might be detrimental from the perspective of the speaker given the majority of the audience is easily distracted and ignores the actual argument because of the speaker's fly being open, or because he used the word "Micro$oft".

For the same reason we wouldn't need defamation laws if people had better critical thinking skills, as they wouldn't have mindlessly believed the defamation, and the person's life would not have been ruined.

Ultimately, it is your choice. Personally, I am not going to care about the irrelevancies because I focus on what is being said, and not how it is being said. I'm not going to dismiss you because I find your tone offensive, in fact, somehow I manage to not get offended nor care about the tone.

I respect Linus and Theo for their contributions, and I'm not going to judge their quality of code based on their actions unrelated to the code. Surely you, too, care about the quality of code and you won't disregard it when you find out it's been written by a transgender person, right?

If you genuinely care about the argument, you won't disregard it merely because of its irrelevancies, e.g. appearance or behavior you find obnoxious. If you do, then you certainly need to improve your ability to ignore those irrelevant things and focus on the argument.

P.S. I don't deny that presentation matters, but only because there are too many people who are way too keen on dismissing someone's argument because, for example, they find their hair funny. It sounds ridiculous to me, but that's just my opinion I guess.

You'll note I didn't talk about the substance of Stallman's arguments. I am not saying he is wrong or right. I am saying he is probably not a net positive though and that is because of form, not content. His arguments may not be invalidated, they're still not useful if nobody except a few cultish followers listen to them.

Just to elaborate on my earlier point:

As I said elsewhere in the thread, I don't particularly condone the requirement of modern society to care about superficial things. I find Stallman gross, and it's distracting, but I'll still listen.

However, what I care about more than Stallman is the causes he supposedly stands for. And Stallman hurts those causes because we're not in this fantasy world where almost nobody cares about appearances and those that don't "don't matter". 99+% of people care about form and appearances. Stallman hurts the cause with the current vibes he gives off, and the tone he takes.

I want to stress this point: There's always a lot of people in these threads who pop up, feeling superior that they "don't care" about Stallman's vibes. Good for you. But your inability to understand why it matters across people who aren't you is a failure, not a success.

It's kind of like when someone tries to talk politics, but they can't stop using terms like "libtards" or "conservatards" to belittle their ideological opponents. They can't effectively communicate their actual message to you because they're too busy denigrating everyone who hypothetically disagrees with them.

By referring to Facebook users as "Useds", he's trying to belittle anyone who happily uses Facebook by suggesting that they're just a hapless pawn of a megacorp. That is a terrible way to convince someone that they ought to rethink their Facebook use - it just makes anyone currently using Facebook without worry ignore you because you're being condescending to them.

And just because RMS is massively influential on the world of FOSS doesn't mean that his political musings get a pass for being childish and one-sided.

> By referring to Facebook users as "Useds", he's trying to belittle anyone who happily uses Facebook by suggesting that they're just a hapless pawn of a megacorp. That is a terrible way to convince someone that they ought to rethink their Facebook use - it just makes anyone currently using Facebook without worry ignore you because you're being condescending to them.

Adding to that, if someone persists in calling me names for using a product they don't like, I can safely conclude that they are not my ally and that they do not have my best interests at heart.

As a satisfied Facebook user, I interpret RMS's rant as him personally declaring that I am his enemy. I have no desire to support him, his projects, or anything he has to say. In fact, I'm likely to oppose everything the FSF does on general principle.

I decided a long time ago that if I publish the code to any of my personal projects, I won't use any GPL libraries, and the code will be under the MIT or Apache2 licenses and not any GPL variant. After seeing RMS continue to go off the deep end, I'm specifically going to find a license that's subtly nonfree, and if not I'll make one.

Just to be clear, this isn't sarcasm? The use of this word caused you to ascribe to him a multitude of opinions that can not be derived from his arguments, which has led you to boycott any project he's been associated with? And Stallman is the unstable one here?

Oh, I've detested everything Stallman stands for for a very long time. But every time he opens his mouth, and calls somebody names for not sharing his views, I want to oppose him just a little bit more actively.

Calling people names is a good way to make enemies, not allies.

> It's kind of like when someone tries to talk politics, but they can't stop using terms like "libtards" or "conservatards" to belittle their ideological opponents. They can't effectively communicate their actual message to you because they're too busy denigrating everyone who hypothetically disagrees with them.

I get the gist of your argument, I think - needlessly insulting people unrelated to your point just takes attention off of it. I'm not so sure it's the same thing. Usually, when people talk about "libtards" and "conservatards", they're strawmanning, which means their argument is not as logically coherent as they might think. I don't think Stallman is building a strawman here - he never speculates about what useds are doing, in fact, almost all his arguments are about Facebook.

It is precisely Stallman's argument that people are made into hapless pawns of a megacorp. The usage of the word is his point, and all the argumentation is to demonstrate why the usage of the word is appropriate. Think of a parallel to cults - it's definitely offensive and insulting to some cult members to be described as being part of a cult. However, when your argument is indeed "X is a cult", what words would you use? Would you shy away from using 'cult members' and 'cult'?

It's also not obvious that it is Stallman's goal to convince people who are happily using Facebook to stop using it - many of his arguments are about people being pressured into joining Facebook, through friends and relatives, and pressured into giving up their anonymity. His arguments could relieve some of the social anxiety those people are feeling("am I the only one that doesn't like Facebook? I should shut up and join..."), for example, and help them reject Facebook.

The wrong is an obnoxious manner of redefining communication protocols (in this case, language) in order to support the premise that the author is always right. In this example, the premise is that Facebook users (standard and accepted term) do not derive any benefit from Facebook but are only exploited by it. This is obviously false, since if people did not derive any benefit from it, they would not voluntarily flock to it in millions. But by refusing to even admit this possibility and constantly hammering this mistake into the reader, Stallman tries to reinforce his (weak) point by repetition, not relying on cognitive facilities of the reader being enough to get this point without it being repeated 60 times. I don't know about you, but for me it's annoying and obnoxious when even true point is repeated to me 60 times through a short text. Even more annoying if the point itself is so trivially weak.

Here is a mantra every programmer should repeat every morning:

>RMS was right.

It doesn't matter what the topic, or how insane what he says sounds. He is always right and you're just not developed enough to understand why that's the case.

I'm pretty sure this is sarcasm.

I really hope it is anyway, because otherwise it stinks of "long live the king"

If you look at his other comments in this I’m not sure it’s sarcasm.

There is no god but FOSS and rms is his prophet? This sounds like a religious argument on your end

I bet RMS would have something really heated to say about blindly following a leader's every word.

Unless of course that leader is him, in which case his narcissistic side will gladly welcome it

Poe was right!

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

A couple of questions for you:

1. What OS / distro do you use?

2. Do you have automatic updates enabled?

3. Do you use info pages in preference to man?

4. Do you use LibreJS?

5. Why did you link me to a YouTube video elsewhere in the thread? Did you wish for me to run non-free JavaScript?

"While RMS has undoubtedly contributed much to the FOSS community"

RMS would vehemently disagree with you: he founded the Free Software community, and has nothing to do with Open Source Software.

Regardless of whether he has the right to veto the consensus vote to remove the joke, by ignoring the general attitude that it’s not in good taste, he’s alienating everyone. That’s not a good position to put himself in, and I wonder if he’ll soon find himself the head of a dead project while a forked one lives in in his spirit but without his name.

This[0] is relevant. He's possibly alienating only a group of vocal people. It isn't clear form the article that it's the consensus more than it is the consensus of people in an email thread.

After clicking around the mailing list, it looks more like what [0] suggests than it being a clear majority of contributors to glibc.

That said, alienating anyone could be problematic.

[0] https://lwn.net/Articles/753720/

That group being the maintainers?

I'll admit I'm not big into the who's who behind glibc, but I saw 4 or so people speak against it. Are those 4 the only main maintainers of glibc? Do you know?

> That said, alienating anyone could be problematic.

Heckler's vetoes are also bad for the public.

It doesn't seem to be about good taste, but the purpose of technical documentation.

And, further, about project governance.

It’s certainly poor leadership. If you aren’t taking an active hand in shaping culture or driving norms in a team, you’re going to end up surprised when they don’t make the same choices you would. Once surprised, don’t try to right the ship with a mandate.

For the maintainers, this may be a proxy for how decisions are made. For RMS, this may be about realizing the world has changed around him.

Today we discover why EGCS required a way to appeal Stallman decisions as a condition of reunification

Email thread: https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2018-05/msg00001.html

That gets a bit whacky when RMS asserts control over glibc as the GNU project maintainer and asks them to add it back:

https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2018-05/msg00149.html

The email thread is far more interesting/informative. I would argue it would be a better link for the main headline.

HN won't let me edit the URL. I guess only a mod can do that.

@dang, can you do the honors sir^

I disagree. Neither one of those links actually show the 'joke' that was removed.

It's described in the thread a few posts in I believe, but I also don't think the text of the joke is the point. The LWN article linked elsewhere in this thread probably better highlights the real issue: That RMS has made an authoritarian demand that his joke remain in the manual despite most everyone who maintains glibc opposing that.

Is there a mirror somewhere? Sourceware seems to be getting HN'd

The documentation for the glibc abort() function had this entry, that was removed:

  @c Put in by rms.  Don't remove.
  @cartouche
  @strong{Future Change Warning:} Proposed Federal censorship regulations
  may prohibit us from giving you information about the possibility of
  calling this function.  We would be required to say that this is not an
  acceptable way of terminating a program.
  @end cartouche

And then re-added: https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=commitdiff;h=ffa81...

"If you would like me to change it, it is up to you to convince me to change my decision."

Was he convinced? Or was the change made against his wishes?

RMS needs to be removed from his dictator position in GNU. This is just one of many times that he has hurt a GNU project. He has held many projects back because he is so behind the times and stubborn, not to mention holding the FSF back. This behavior isn't limited to mailing lists, either. He breaks LibrePlanet conference rules every year to interject and rant during talks he disagrees with. I appreciate him for founding the free software movement and writing so much great software in the early days, but it's no longer the RMS show.

Basically, he started a political project that produces software furthering his political views. You like the software, but dislike the politics, so you want to take the software and get rid of politics.

The more I read the views like that, the more I understand GNU's insistence on GPL and copyright sign-offs for contributions. For instance, GPL's whole point is to prevent you from taking the software and removing the politics.

I like the software and the politics. I have completed FSF copyright assignment paperwork. I contribute to GNU projects. I worked for the FSF. But RMS is toxic to both GNU and the FSF at this point.

When "the politics" has become an ego show, there's sadly not much of a political project left...

> Basically, he started a political project that produces software furthering his political views.

A political software project that produces software furthering his political views about software.

> You like the software, but dislike the politics

I like the software & the software politics. rms's opinion on other political matters is irrelevant to the FSF or GNU. I find some of his non-software political views spot-on, and others completely abhorrent. I have no problem supporting the FSF if it limits itself to its remit; I cannot support it if it exceeds it and ventures into other territory.

>Stallman, however, replied that "a GNU manual, like a course in history, is not meant to be a 'safe space'". He suggested the possibility of adding a trigger warning about functions that create child processes, since childbirth is "far more traumatic than having an abortion"

"It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it."

-Michael Scott

RMS is pro voluntary pedophilia:

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2006-may-aug.html#05%20Jun...

If you don't know what libertarian means you're going to have a bad time trying to apply liberal labels to people who were around the internet before tumblr.

Wonder why the above is being downvoted... verbatim from Stallman's website:

>I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing.

I guess context is needed here. Does he mean... like.. 16 year olds? Younger? Having sexual encounters with someone from their school that happens to be 18, or older adults?

>Wonder why the above is being downvoted

I have fans that follow me around the internet and downvote everything I say. In this account I'm smart enough to not reveal any true personal information so I can't get doxxed again.

But to answer your question: he means anyone with the ability to speak. It is pretty shocking to the current generation of techies what was considered mainstream in the 70s [0], wherein every important French left wing intellectual of the period signed in support.

>Such a long time in remand to investigate a simple `vice’ affair, where the children have not been victims of the slightest violence, but have to the contrary testified before the examining magistrates that they consented — although the law at present denies them their right to consent — such a long time in remand we do consider scandalous in itself. Today they risk to be sentenced to a long prison term either for having had sexual relations with minors, boys as well as girls, or for having encouraged and taken photographs of their sexual plays. We believe that there is an incongruity between the designation as a `crime’ which serves to legitimize such a severity, and the facts themselves; even more so between the antiquated law and the reality of every day life in a society which tends to know about the sexuality of children and adolescents

[0] https://www.ipce.info/ipceweb/Library/00aug29b1_from_1977.ht...

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/17/remain-silent/

Though I can’t stand Ulrich Drepper, what he said in the glibc 2.2.4 release notes is true:

“The morale of this is that people will hopefully realize what a control freak and raging manic Stallman is. Don't trust him. As soon as something isn't in line with his view he'll stab you in the back. NEVER voluntarily put a project you work on under the GNU umbrella since this means in Stallman's opinion that he has the right to make decisions for the project.”

https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-announce/2001/msg00000.html

  This part has a morale, too, and it is almost the same: don't trust
  this person.  Read the licenses carefully and rip out parts which give
  Stallman any possibility to influence your future.  Phrases like

     [...] GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free
     Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of the License, or (at your
     option) any later version.

  just invites him to screw you when it pleases him.  Rip out the "any
  later version" part and make your own decisions when to use a
  different license since otherwise he can potentially do you or your
  work harm.

I never noticed this before. Whether it was intentionally conspiratorial or not, it's certainly an important legal and organizational consideration.

The legal landscape changes, if slowly. You have to decide up front who has the right to update the license, because otherwise with mixed copyright holders the answer is "nobody, ever".

It was what enabled the compatibility with the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license that the Wikimedia Foundation used.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentation_License...

It could seemingly be used for malice, eg, if there's a hostile takeover of the FSF and the new owners change the license.

However, the copyright contribution agreement that people make with the FSF essentially contractually promises that the contributions will only be used for free software, making that scenario impossible.

> I exercise my authority over Glibc very rarely -- and when I have done so, I have talked with the official maintainers. So rarely that some of you thought that you are entirely autonomous.

'I'm sorry, did you think you were free?'

Really, the only response to this is to fork the project and start flibc: Free libc.

Kind of late to the party: IMHO Stallman should not be the main decision point for GNU, as it stands. He should be in charge of an NGO which tries to raise awareness about Free Software, but he should not be involved in the day-to-day management of software projects, and definitely not ones with such huge visibility as GCC, Emacs, bash, etc.

Why not? GCC vs EGCS, Emacs vs XEmacs, etc. He has had a ton of huge contributions to the software world, but ask yourself this question: in today's networked world, where internet is widespread and cheap, where it is easy to organize software projects online and Open Source is quite well established, do you think that Richard Stallman would have the same visibility as he has now, as a sort of historical figure?

Also, before you answer, remember the FSF/GNU/Stallman were not the only authors of Open Source back in the day so even without him we'd have Open Source Software (MIT, Berkeley, etc.).

What an unexpected schism!

> "As the head of the GNU Project, I am in charge of what we publish in GNU manuals. I decide the criteria to decide by, too"

Interesting. Sounds decidedly authoritarian to cite (sole?) control of the content and criteria.

> "I exercise my authority over Glibc very rarely -- and when I have done so, I have talked with the official maintainers. So rarely that some of you thought that you are entirely autonomous."

That sounds puzzling. "It turns out my rank actually supersedes yours and always has, I've just never exercised it until now."

In general I've always thought that Stallman is to be admired. He's made a fantastic contribution to society. I don't really have a position on the issue at the heart of this manpage content debate, but on the meta-issue of what his role is/should be, his position seems like an odd one.

Ultimately, the copyright holders for the source code (and to some extent the manuals) have the real power regarding "who controls glibc?". I suspect that no one will care strongly enough about this particular issue in order to drive a real fork.

I know of one distro that uses muslc [0] vs. glibc and they have a wrapper that allows most build tools to work (mostly) as expected. Are there any other options?

[0] - https://www.musl-libc.org/faq.html

For open source libc? musl, glibc, dietlibc, bionic are the only I know of. The supported targets vary widely among these, though.

There is the freebsd libc; they run their own.

Which is in fact the most used, and arguably technically superior to glibc.

freebsd -> darwin, openbsd, netbsd and dragonfly bsd. openbsd and netbsd like to add their own stuff on top of it also.

The Open Watcom libc and bionic are also superior. bionic is getting better and better recently.

musl is in some parts better, in some parts worse. Same for Embarcadero C++ libc.

Worse than glibc are only: the two MS libc's, msvcrt and ulibc (which is getting on par), the wine libc, newlib (arguably with dietlibc the worst), uClibc, minilibc.

> Worse than glibc are only [lists as many libcs as are better than it]

Perhaps glibc isn't that bad...

Oh it is. I've listed more quirks here, from the testsuite I've written for all libc's.

https://rurban.github.io/safeclib/doc/safec-3.3/d1/dae/md_do...

Last time I checked, musl didn't support random important things. Consider dlclose: unsupported due to an unfounded (IMHO) assertion that it's not possible to implement such a thing safely. Nevertheless, people _have_ been unloading shared libraries for decades, so musl asserting that it's impossible makes me question musl's other technical decisions.

There's a lot of not-safe-but-works-99.9%-of-the-time patterns out there that have been used for decades.

Unloading shared libraries is safe. If you insist that it's not, even though it actually works in a real, robust, not probabilistic way, all you're going to do is make me question your technical judgement.

> the copyright holders for the source code

FWIW from https://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/Contribution%20checklist#F...

> The Free Software Foundation (holder of the glibc copyrights) requires copyright assignment for all legally significant changes by a particular author (read not a company). [...]

I'm reminded of the old comment at the bottom of the man page for 'su', where rms argues for why the implementation is deliberately less secure:

"Sometimes a few of the users try to hold total power over all the rest. For example, in 1984, a few users at the MIT AI lab decided to seize power by changing the operator password on the Twenex system and keep- ing it secret from everyone else. (I was able to thwart this coup and give power back to the users by patching the kernel, but I wouldn't know how to do that in Unix.)

However, occasionally the rulers do tell someone. Under the usual su mechanism, once someone learns the root password who sympathizes with the ordinary users, he can tell the rest. The "wheel group" feature would make this impossible, and thus cement the power of the rulers.

I'm on the side of the masses, not that of the rulers. If you are used to supporting the bosses and sysadmins in whatever they do, you might find this idea strange at first."

Calling it an "abortion joke" is a politicized headline.

It's a political/protest joke, maybe.

Either way, the glibc documentation is not the ideal place for it.

It’s a political joke. About abortion.

Seems fitting enough.

It's a political joke. About free speech. About abortion.

It kind of stretches the definition of free speech. Your speech would only be limited if you're taking US government funding. Is glibc taking US government funding?

You could similarly say that 501c3 tax code is a limit of free speech because if you take tax deducted money, you cannot make political speech.

The abortion gag seems a bit different to me, because it could limit what a doctor could say to a patient, even if for medical reasons the patient actually needs an abortion.

When did HN get so political? In the last couple of months I've noticed an increasing amount of argumentative political discussion. Both sides seem so convinced of their moral superiority, it was somewhat amusing at first but now I'm tired of it.

I thought this was one of the last places I could come to get away from it but not anymore.

100% agree

Everything is politicized now. /r/soccer used to be my favorite place, but since the whole Russia & Qatar appointment - even that place is not safe.

Interesting to see that a person like Stallman forces a stupid joke into a project.

I'm only 31 and write only stupid / unnecessary things into my code base for fun/home projects. I would love to add more easter eggs and little things into professional code but its unnprofessional.

Especially for someone so eager about GNU and principles.

It is sometimes a bit stunning to me that people look up to someone who is constantly willing to place his own opinion (and in this case, his own sense of humor) above everyone else. Perhaps RMS is the original real world House M.D., but I don't really think so.

IMHO, if he places his own joke over the views of all of the developers doing the actual work on glibc, those developers should leave/fork. If RMS was, indeed, right, then GNU's version will win.

If RMS thinks that dumb jokes in documentation are worth having, I say we wholeheartedly embrace it. For example:

* GNU/Hurd - almost as traumatic as childbirth.

* childbirth - if it takes as long as it takes to write GNU/Hurd, may God have mercy on your soul.

* RMS - I know how to program computers (maybe), so obviously I am an expert on female reproductive issues.

My wife and I were at a garden party in the early 90s where RMS was at also. We were talking about various things and somehow the fact that my wife was pregnant with our first child came up. RMS started talking about how maybe people shouldn't just be allowed to have children. In particular, he brought up that some towns require people to have dog licenses before they can own a dog. He pondered that the government maybe should require reproduction licenses before allowing people to have children.

Granted some people can make terrible parents, but I don't think allowing the government a voice in deciding whom can be parents is a better solution.

My son (now 26) is a EFF member and free software advocate.

I remember him complaining when the maintainer of some GNU project (emacs maybe?) was stepping aside to focus on starting a family. Stallman was writing about how being the maintainer of emacs is more important than having children, so this guy was making the wrong move.

If that's his belief, that's fine – I personally don't plan on having children, so I suppose I could empathize with his view – but he came across as a total ass. It seemed inconceivable to him that other people have different priorities in life than he does.

I don't really get this "joke" but man do I hate the trend of removing any personality from code. Programming used to be FUN and a way to express yourself. Easter eggs exemplified this. Now its cold and business only.

Everyone who decided they’d rather have a giant paycheck than have fun made it happen. This site is full of people who make and made that choice, who chase VC money, and consequently have little right to complain about how corporate their working lives are.

Money has always been around, but even "corporate" was not nearly as stifling. 90s era Microsoft code is quite colorful - as I'm sure it would have been at most other companies of the era.

Even today, the Windows source code contains quite a few long, narrative comments that are both historically educational and entertaining to read.

Shortly before I left someone on the coding standards committee espoused the idea that good code was code where you couldn't tell who wrote it. I feel as though the last vestiges of the BillG era died that day.

I've never liked style committees. I've never seen one do anything to actually improve code comprehension, but I've seen plenty of bullshit that kills velocity and sucks all the joy out of programming.

This isn't an easter egg, nor a comment in the code. It's dab smack in the manual. Could distract or confuse someone just trying to look up a function. I say we keep the fun expression stuff in places where it won't get in the user's way of doing their job.

Manuals used to be fun too - except for IBM's, those were never fun.

Jokes may be fun to write. But when you're scouring a manual for a needed function, and you're confronted with a smarmy joke, it probably won't be as fun (especially if you're reading the manual to troubleshoot something.)

It broke up the relative monotony of otherwise dry technical information. It has a similar effect when placed in code. In addition many companies used it as a form branding - "Hey we're not stuffy old IBM! We're Cool!".

Back then manuals were also far more important, you couldn't operate the machine at all without one. Yet the jokes never managed to stop people from getting the information they needed.

I think the real difference when it comes to manuals is most modern ones are not comprehensive. I could see being upset if there was a joke but no information on my actual problem.

It's in a separate box at the end of the manual for that function. It's generally like a footnote. It being there shouldn't distract or hurt you in any way.

LWN covers the topic: "Who controls glibc?"[0] (accessible to non-subscribers in two weeks).

[0]: https://lwn.net/Articles/753646/

subscriber link via lobste.rs: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/753646/c869537af7d612a6/

Obligatory if you find LWN valuable (check out their backcatalog of weekly issues), consider subscribing! (I do.)

Annoyingly since they moved to the continuous publishing model I'm disincentivized to subscribe, as I haven't the discipline to defer reading until Thursdays, and so I can't continue enjoying LWN like I had for the previous decade -- half an hour or more of uninterrupted high quality reading guaranteed once a week

If I don't renew my subscription on the other hand, I get a week-old weekly edition just like I want. My subscription lapsed for a few months recently, and honestly the experience was better. It's infuriating!

To me the most interesting aspect of the story is not that RMS has a God card. The interesting aspect is that RMS decided that blocking the change was so important that using the card was warranted. As RMS stated himself, he is using this power so rarely that developers don't know that it exist.

Why was preserving an old joke important enough to do this?

My understanding is that RMS doesn't see it as just a joke but a form of protest through a joke relevant to the name of the function in question and that asking him to remove it is seen similarly to asking a protester to only protest in designated protest areas during designated protest hours where they cannot bother anyone. If you see it like that and not just as a harmless old joke, it makes more sense why RMS is riled up.

Stallman has his problems. He is like Cassandra, talking, talking, talking for decades about dangers, they come true and still noone listens. Already in 2002 and 2010 he has expressed suicidal thoughts https://www.wired.com/2010/04/ff_hackers/all/1/

I am saying to help understand him not to say he is right here.

Cassandra who?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra_(metaphor)

RMS is typically correct, even if at the time the industry thinks he is being melodramatic. Everything he said has come true. You either listen to his rants and consider the ramifications, or you watch as all your digital rights are eroded.

Conversation about the "old joke" that was removed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17017037

Which was quite sensibly flagged. This is better written but equally silly.

The whole thing is silly. A storm in a teacup.

GNU info pages have had a few jokes sprinkled around for long enough that I assume it has something to do with the environment at the MIT AI lab (e.g., https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/strfry.ht... , https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Error-Cod... ). So I'm not surprised to see RMS push back on the change. I am surprised that he isn't effective at it.

glibc seems to be something that causes non-technical disputes every few years. I'm sure that's because it's central to almost everything but the kernel.

Rms was in the clear wrong. This is a professional setting,that joke wasn't professional.

If you wouldn't say it at a work meeting then it's probably not a good idea to say the same in a commit or a serious thread of a foss project.

Although I don't like the joke,it's not so much the content of the joke but rather where the joke was spoken that seemed inappropriate.

I am not offended. much like a coworker coming to work topless in shorts won't offend me;I'd just think that attire is best for outdoors or the beach instead of an office.

I have tried, but failed, to understand what "wasn't professional" means. As far as I can tell, it is a synonym for "doesn't upset the status quo."

Clearly there are work meetings where this sort of joke/commentary would be voiced. For example, the writers' room at the various satirical news shows. There are, after all, professional comedians, including those which work blue.

I've heard people say that children in the workplace isn't professional. Then I think about professional teachers and pediatricians who have children at a workplace. As a child I sometimes went with my father to his job. I don't think he was considered unprofessional for that.

I've heard people say that drinking alcohol on the job isn't professional, and that one should follow a dress code. Then I see people on the job at a conference, drinking, and at one Python conference dressed up in unicorn costume.

It's therefore very context dependent, which is why I don't think "professional" is a useful way to think about the topic.

FWIW, I had a co-worker who was topless in shorts at the office. We were coming back from lunch in a downpour one summer. He wasn't prepared for it, his shirt was sopping wet, and keeping it on was a problem in the A/C'ed room. Having his shirt off wasn't a problem, and he wasn't considered unprofessional for doing so.

That's because it didn't upset the status quo.

You have to consider who your coworkers are. It's all about being considerate of the other people that work alongside you.

In a small group everyone might know each other well enough to make that sort of a joke. But when your coworkers could be literally anyone, from a guy in his undies coding as a hobby to someone at a fortune 100 working in a cubicle farm sporting a tuxedo.

It seems like the goal is to not offend anyone because that exactly is the goal -- anyone can work on it. There is no way to get to know every participant of a large foss project on a personal level so much so that you understand what jokes they find acceptable or not. So, simply don't make comment irrelevant to the work at hand.

Some foss groups specifically dedicate mailing lists and chat rooms for the purpose of socializing where similar jokes and possibly offensive content might be tolerated. When it comes to commits,dev lists,posts or threads it isn't professional to insert irrelevant commentary (at least for a public foss project,one can always have their own company culture and rules for intra-company or private projects)

Thank you for the follow up. I have a better sense of what you mean now.

Part of me still thinks "professional" means "don't upset the status quo", but I will continue to think about it.

You mentioned "irrelevant commentary". That made me think of what US employment law refers to as "bona fide occupational qualifications" where employers are allowed to discriminate based on gender, race, religion, etc. It is not workplace harassment to see pornography in the workplace if one works as a video editor in a pornography studio. Pornography at the workplace, therefore, is not an unambiguous sign of unprofessional activity.

Now, some software is designed such that the humor will offend some people. The first one that came to mind is Leisure Suit Larry, which is a mild example.

Can something like Leisure Suit Larry be developed as a public FOSS project, in a professional sense? Absolutely.

But in that case I think there is a bona fide requirement that participants understand that certain jokes are acceptable.

My view is that since 'professional' seems so contextual, it seems better to explain the specific context (as you did - thanks again!) than to say something isn't professional.

Stallman's from the hippie generation and a project like GNU must have had a strong "stick it to The Man" element. He basically dedicated his life to rejecting the IBM era corporate culture and "professionalism".

I guess I can see where he's coming from, even though I totally disagree and find this view as irrelevant and dated as the dumb joke.

How dated is the joke? Is it not about current US policy?

It's a comment that doesn't actually lend any knowledge on the issue. Striking it makes the documentation clearer to the end user.

Seems like it's time to fork the repo.

At the same time I think the change was overzealousness and that still it's a fair debate to have and why not remove it if they eventually reach consensus (as per their own official definition of consensus [linked somewhere in those e-mails])? It's only to show glibc still have governance problems after the Ulrich Drepper era, it has nothing to do with abort() and its possible meanings in a manual.

What's tragic and shocking is that RMS actually believes the joke is now more important than before when asking that the joke not be removed.

"The point of this joke is even more important now than it was when I first wrote it. Please do not remove it."

What's next? GnuJoke?

I'm not offended by the joke at all. I'm pro choice. But I think it's unprofessional to have these kinds of jokes in an important piece of software. This sort of thing just hurts the free software movement's credibility (though not by much).

This is the kind of attitude that lead to forking gcc, the formation of the steering committee etc: https://gcc.gnu.org/news/announcement.html

Hilarious that they would censor the lines that refer to censorship and miss that entirely.

Bitcoin fights over 1MB versus 8MB for 4+ years and glibc fights over a cosmetic joke in the manual page. I often wonder how many man years of labor are wasted with this kind of bike-shedding nonsense.

"a GNU manual, like a course in history, is not meant to be a 'safe space"

That blows my mind. Really? Why? A technical instruction manual should definitely be a safe place.

Wait, what? A safe space is meant to be a safe space. A technical manual is meant to be whatever the hell the authors want it to be. Some choices may make it worse or better at communicating the technical knowledge, true, but those are choices the authors make.

The craziest thing to me about this, from reading the comments, is people are on wildly different sides of this, yet no side thinks this is a big deal.

Looks like a new generation just got introduced to RMS.

"I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing."

Alan J. Perlis (April 1, 1922-February 7, 1990)

https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/...

Well it is free so people have freedom to edit and have a repository of free software without jokes. But nobody has right to demand what goes to someone else's repository.

If glibc maintainers choose to make their own repository which Stallman has has no right demand anything they are free to do so. And then it becomes distributors freedom to choose who's repository they prefer.

I would be polliticaly on the oposite side from RMS on this one. But I also respect a good joke, and I wuldnt try to remove it, especialy of just because it might hurt some feelings.

About the leadersheep I am suprised why this came out only now. I wuld think that they have things sorted out after all this time. I think that RMS is still central figure in FSF

I like the fact this joke is 100% US-centric and this alone never came forward as a reasonable argument for its removal. Glibc is used worldwide, people outside the US (they exist!) would have no clue what this joke is about: civilized countries do not have this terrible gag rule.

The US doesn't have this gag rule either; I think pretty much everyone is scratching their heads about what it is RMS is on about here.

It is, in fact, a US policy[0]. Proponents call it the "Mexico City policy," and opponents usually refer to it as the "Global Gag Rule." It tends to be rescinded whenever a Democrat is elected President, then reinstated whenever a Republican is elected.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico_City_policy

This reminds me of a Facebook story and why they don't want browsers to have "view source". Apparently they get complains now and then after someone has accidentally got into view source. Something about appending and removing childs.

Mechanically speaking, does RMS have the ability to enforce his will on this issue? Say the maintainers unanimously just refuse to revert the patch; can he "fire" them?

Maybe I just don’t have the sophistication to “get” it, but what the heck is this all about. At first glance this just seems like something childish. Someone educate me.

I believe it is in reference to the US government's (or possibly some states') policies concerning abortions.

Specifically it probably refers to the "Mexico City policy", which is a US government rule that has been in effect under Republican presidents and rescinded under Democratic presidents going back to Reagan.

For most of its existence, it basically said that no foreign NGO could receive US funding for family planning if that NGO performed or promoted abortion for family planning.

President Trump has expanded it to say that no foreign NGO can receive any US global health assistance if it performs or promotes abortions.

Providing accurate medical information about abortion is interpreted by some as falling under the Mexico City policy.

you are missing nothing.

It's juicy gossip about RMS with sprinklings of information about how the glibc org works and how that fits into the bigger open source picture.

Some people are into gossip and accept it, other people are into gossip and deny it. I've met very few people who don't love gossip, especially high-quality gossip like this. (Note: I'm sure there are many exceptions, but as a generalization, this one's about as good as they get)

Thank you. The FOSS world seems like a fraternity to which I clearly don’t belong. But to the folks that write FOSS — thank you. I admire the fortitude it must take to put up with this petty nonsense.

RMS has been arguing for technical freedom for decades. Ironically, all the technical freedom in the world won't save us from political correctness.

Bores and prudes will remake everything in their image.

I could get behind keeping the joke in there, if it were actually funny. I object to it on grounds of joke-craftsmanship and economy. It wastes space being insufficiently funny. And by the way, it's not unfunny because it's about abortion; abortion, death, Nazis, murder, child molestation and other taboo topics are precisely the things we should laugh at. (If possible. Obviously don't do it around someone recently traumatized. But laughter is how humans cope and heal, so if you can laugh you know you've got whatever-it-is licked.)

As for Stallman's supposed authority: Anyone who believes in acquiescing to the wishes of a central authority obviously hasn't been listening to Richard Stallman.

Can someone explain what the joke is (I am from France and this seems to be a legal discussion in the US ?)

It's a reference to the Mexico City Policy[1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico_City_policy

I am with RMS on this one. It is not an abortion joke, it is a censorship joke. He doesn't take a stance on abortion (a sensitive matter) but on whether they (FSF or a foreign NGO for example) are allowed to talk about abortion.

Indeed. The irony of censoring a censorship joke is probably lost on the censors.

This isn't censorship...

I don't get it

If additional context is needed: this was in the documentation for the `abort()` function

I think this is it [0]? Has it been changed since this discussion, or was it not removed? I honestly don't get the joke.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Aborting-...

That's it. It's a stupid joke.

Exactly! That is literally the best reason to remove it and nobody is talking about how lame this joke is. It's not even like a European wrote it and so an awkward translation makes it land weird. It's just stupid.

It was reverted earlier after RMS saw the commit, and added himself to the email chain. RMS said that as the leader of the GNU Project, he gets the final say, and said to the maintainers that they are under him.

One of the maintainers then reverted the commit.

To explain the 'joke': In the box at the bottom of that page, it's basically RMS saying that if the government outlaws abortion, they'll have to not give any information on the `abort()` function, and instead say it's not an "acceptable way of terminating a program" (or rather, "acceptable way of terminating a pregnancy")

Ignoring everything else, I have to say that the joke is super confusing and frankly not really funny. I would have been confused if I tried to read that page without any context. For that reason alone I think it should be removed.

> To explain the 'joke': In the box at the bottom of that page, it's basically RMS saying that if the government outlaws abortion, they'll have to not give any information on the `abort()` function, and instead say it's not an "acceptable way of terminating a program" (or rather, "acceptable way of terminating a pregnancy")

No, it's not about government outlawing abortion, per se, it's about government regulating communication about abortion, particularly the global gag rule (Mexico City policy.)

This discussion has been a complete waste of time since its inception. Everyone with an opinion needs to go stand in the corner and think of better ways to spend their time.

well, in cases like this, i wish drepper was still around. this would have been closed with malice as it should have been.

Classic RMS. Love that guy.

So even those with socialist political views can't have their jokes anymore? This is getting interesting. Look, I'm pro-life and anti-abortion but let the man keep his joke. It's not that big of deal.

I agree with RMS on this one too. Another reason not to set foot on US soil for I cannot trust the US law at all.

This particular policy is only in effect outside the US.

i think somebody is bored with maintaining this huge runtime library (its an important, but not the most exciting type of project) and needs a little bit of diversion...

it's a cringey joke but the PC police trying to convince RMS to remove it is equally cringey. with this trend soon we won't allow ourselves to say anything because words lead to feelings and we can't have that, for some reason.

Stallman is completely right. A patch that removes jokes is not making any technical contribution, it is just trying to deface a political instance taken the authors of the code. This is the opposite of contributing.

>1. It's fair to say that the joke is unprofessional, and doesn't have a place in documentation.

Every time I read something such as this, I want to get out of software and into farming or something...

Given his penchant for offensive, inappropriate humor, and how little tolerance the modern FOSS community has for such in the prevailing political atmosphere, this is not a hill RMS wants to die on. Save the rank pulls for something really important, Richard.

If Stallman cared for what hill the mainstream thought he should die on he'd still be hacking lisp/emacs at MIT.

Him being completely irrational about pet causes is the reason why we have an opensource community today. I trust him a whole lot more than anyone else in FOSS, including all the glibc developers put together.

>in FOSS

He isn't "in FOSS" though. I used the word FOSS with him once and he said I shouldn't use it, lol.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.en.html#FOSS

It is a little interesting to me that the joke in question is making fun of a US-right-wing political position, so the fact that it's clear to everyone that this atmosphere disagrees with the joke would seem to remove some credence from the "FOSS is turning into a liberal echo chamber" argument that's been getting popular. There is a political shift / push happening, but "liberal echo chamber" isn't it.

I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that the consensus is that the joke is disagreeable, but that it is not an appropriate joke for the documentation.

I am a staunchly pro-choice, but this joke is out-of-date and out-of-place. I would personally vote for it to go.

I really don't want to see the political divide fragment the GNU/Linux community because people are determined to inject their opinions into code.

If you run a small repo and the development community agrees with political interjections in the software, then go for it. If the community doesn't like it, they can fork it.

But maybe, if the both the developers and the users of a major piece of software found on hundreds of millions of machines think your political joke should go, that's just not a hill worth dying on...

Oh yes - I was unclear about disagreeing with the joke. I don't think anyone is openly disagreeing with the politics of the joke per se, they seem to be saying that it's not meaningful technical documentation and they empathize with those who might disagree with the politics (which might be themselves or might not). So yes, I don't think there's a left/right political divide either here, or elsewhere.

"but this joke is out-of-date"

It isn't out of date, it's entirely relevant today.

So is "US government supports governments committing atrocities on a daily basis. E.g. Saudi and Israel".

That doesn't mean that this political statement belongs in the manpage for "kill".

You don't have to disagree with Stallman on abortion in order to find his humor tasteless and inappropriate for product documentation. Pulling rank as GNU project leader for the sake of a tasteless joke is squandering your moral authority, I think, and he may need it for a time when, say, a state actor tries to sneak nefarious code into glibc.

Not sure how the joke is "tasteless". Michelle Wolf's "knock em out of there" abortion joke was tasteless. This is just a joke about government censorship and overreach.

It's a joke making fun of censorship, which doesn't seem to inherently position it as either left- or right-wing.

In the new spirit of 'liberalism', or the tumblr version of it, mentioning a traumatic event is as bad as causing the traumatic event. You can't mention rape because it might trigger someone, it doesn't matter if you are excusing it, or demanding harsher punishments for it.

Unless you've been on a collage campus in the last 10 years you don't know how insane the movement is. Calling it 'liberal' is complete wrong because it is illiberal in the extreme and makes people take the side of authoritarians who want to remove all wrong think from the world.

In short: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQ5YU_spBw0

I've been on a college campus within the last 10 years and I can only assume the people who genuinely think this either haven't or have their careers depend on pretending it's true (e.g. Turning Point USA).

Fork if you don't like it.

That's the whole point of free software.

Edit: I find it disturbing that so many people want to erase hacker culture from the internet. Consensus is a Bay Area idea, one that came quite late to the world of computers, and one that many of us disagree with.

That’s the really odd thing in this situation. The maintainers all seem to want to remove it, and the project governance says the maintainers are supposed to decide based on the quorum.

RMS just over ruled that. Because it was his joke and he felt like it.

Which seems like it goes against the whole “community“ thing.

If you read the waiver you have to sign before contributing anything to the fsf you surrender all your copyrights to them. This is so they can keep moving software into newer GPL versions.

The maintainers are just mechanics working on someone else's car and have as much say in choosing the interior decor.

The beauty of the system is that if they get sick of that state of affairs they get an identical copy of the car for free and can then do whatever they want to it.

>This is so they can keep moving software into newer GPL versions.

That is already an optional part of the GPL itself afaik.

The maintainers don't own the project though, GNU (RMS) does. If the maintainers want to control the project they are maintaining it does seem that they need to fork it and continue under a new name.

(Or at least that's what I got from this thread. Certainly it's possible that GNU/RMS/Whoever originally had rights has passed those rights to the maintainers, but it doesn't happen simply by virtue of them maintaining it.)

No, that's just another option when it comes to free software. Why not make an effort to cohere rather than disperse? Stronger together and all that.

RMS is pulling the authority card, which is always a dodgy thing to do, and people want an egalitarian project rather than an authoritarian one. Both sides need to learn when to pick a fight and when to let something pass.

Because GNU has always worked that way and given us some of the best software ever written.

Worth noting that basically every Linux distro for many years used the eglibc fork, until the former glibc maintainer stepped down, and it's hardly the only GNU project that is what it is today because it managed to reabsorb a fork by admitting a mistake. GCC comes to mind.

GNU is what it is today largely because of the name recognition, and people's willingness to get stuff incorporated into GNU because of that name recognition. eglibc was very conservative about patches because it aimed for reunification eventually, but it didn't have to be.

> some people want an egalitarian project rather than an authoritarian one

Plenty of us prefer the authoritarian model, rather than the chaotic model of arbitrary consensus.

Which is totally fair. But that’s not how this project is set up. And that’s what makes this so odd.

Forking out any vestigal rms authority would benefit everyone.

They’re bikeshedding over whether or not to include a comment on a controversial topic. It is not relevant to the functioning of the library and is just a distraction. Rip it out and ban rms for perpetuating such idiotic drama.

RMS isn't the one bikeshedding it.

he's the one forcing it -- he's not an active member of libc anymore, he's not a maintainer, but he decided that his personal joke from 20 years ago absolutely must remain in the documentation because he's petty.

He sounds like the one in need of a safe space where nothing ever changes

It's more like he's preventing bikeshedding by stopping them from making irrelevant non-technical decisions.

There was already a consens before he decided to contribute his own opinion to a triviality. By doing so he prolonged the discussion at least a bit. Forcing your opinion about a pointless and otherwise done issue on others seems like textbook bikeshedding to me.

At leaast now he can honestly say he is still actively involved with glibc.

> Consensus is a Bay Area idea

  [citation needed]

Merriam-Webster says the first known use was 1843, at https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/consensus.

An SCM change, by very nature, doesn't "erase" anything, it only creates a record of change. The repository will always have the history.

Excellent idea! Just rename it political-libc for all the people who want politics mixed in with their C library.

You realize it's the current version of glibc which has the political joke? The patch that RMS is opposing here removed a political reference from the docs.

The FSF and its GNU project are a political endeavor. For a less-political (non-political doesn't exist) libc one might fork into linux-libc or similar.

(I'm not saying that's appropriate thing to do, as I'm just a lurker enjoying the free work by others in glibc's regard, but wanted to make the point)

> The FSF and its GNU project are a political endeavor.

But neither has anything about abortion policy in it's public declaration of goals.

So, while some political messages might make sense in GNU technical docs, I don't see why a warning making an oblique reference to the Mexico City policy is not only acceptable but so critical that central leadership needs to overrule the specific project's maintainers to preserve it.

These constant attempts to assert that "everything is political" are getting really old. All people have the capacity to be political. Nothing else is.

I wish I could understand who taught you people that insistence of stupid horseshit is the key to achieving your goals.

First of all I didn't say that "everything is political" but that in each organisation there is a degree of politics. Maybe the issue is in the word "politics" - this is not about left vs right, but social collaboration. Some people like each other more than others, some are more trustworthy to others and often the way I propose a change and whom I talk to has impact of the change being accepted - those are politics. Also technical decisions have an impact on different people and in subtle ways impact users (i.e. if a kernel switches to a high-res framebuffer mode to print boot messages and developers assume they have the width for formatting messages this impacts visually impaired people, willingly or not -- just made the example up to show subtle things)

Politics aren't bad and are an effect of different people being present in the same space, while of course there is a difference between FSF/GNU/RMS with a strong focus on a political mission and some other projects primarily focussing on a technical mission.

"Hacker culture" is a myth - not in the sense that it's false, but in the sense that it's a set of stories that people like because of their storytelling power, and its exact historical truth is not particularly relevant. As a myth, it tends towards better remembering things that make better stories, like great men inventing things through sheer force of will. And as a myth, it's a story about our origins, which were no doubt messier than we would like to remember. That our present does not seem as awesome as the myth is an unavoidable effect of myths.

But there a few historically true things that are relevant here: first, that an important part of "hacker culture" unequivocally originated in the Bay Area (Fairchild Semiconductor, Homebrew Computer Club, BSD, etc.), and second, that "consensus" has been an important idea in this culture for a while - an obvious example being the IETF's "rough consensus and running code".

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