Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikekchar | Hacker News Reader

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...

View on HN

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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?

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com