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Comment by letstrynvm | Hacker News Reader

That email says how the author doesn't like rms or his various writings, then switches to an unrelated drama about how the author fell out with a major contributor and there's some ongoing shitstorm in the project due to that.

The title makes it sound like rms' fault but he only features to be ritually denounced in the first half.

I had to google what guile was I'll certainly be trying to avoid it now.

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You appear to have missed where RMS was supposed to have appointed a new co-maintainer without asking anyone in the current team, therefore asserting ownership of a project he was uninvolved with in what appears to a spiteful reason related to his speaking out against RMS. It's in the bottom of the message. It's weird that your response is to threaten to avoid something you've never known about before. Unless you were active in the GNU community already you wouldn't have had reason to use it, so you've not created GNU extensions, were unaware of the language and the threat you're making is that you'll avoid it.

Regardless of whether the statements are accurate, I'll hold judgement until hearing the other side though it does seem odd. I'd be curious what the prospective co-maintainer wants since he quit prior without resolving issues.

There is a reply from Mark Weaver later in the thread:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2019-10/msg00...

Mark's reply should really get a lot more attention.

  > Secondly, there was a specific purpose to raising my grievances on the
  > internal mailing list.  It's because you are vigorously arguing for
  > collective decision making within GNU, while at the same time you are
  > acting in a dictatorial manner within the Guile project, failing to even
  > consult your co-maintainers on core language changes.  I think that's
  > hypocritical, and I said so.

The email in the original post felt very one-sided and strange. Every single action felt like it was being analyzed to find the worst possible reading. The additional perspective from Mark's reply (especially the above quote) feels more balanced and more rational.

> I had to google what guile was I'll certainly be trying to avoid it now.

By avoiding Guile or Wingo's otherwise instructive technical notes (see, e.g., https://wingolog.org/archives/2017/06/27/growing-fibers), aren't you likewise conflating character with merit?

I've never used Guile (I'm invested in Lua), but I like to follow the development. It's an interesting and high-quality project.

The first half was the setup for the last half, where he talks about how RMS appointed his sort-of-nemesis as co-maintainer without consulting him, which is especially shitty because the author is the actual maintainer of Guile and RMS has nothing to do with it in terms of development, maintenance, or leadership. It's a bizarre and unwise thing to do that threatens the future of the project, and it's all on RMS. So it totally makes sense to me that he spent the first half describing his background with RMS.

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There's an appearance of impropriety. Guile's maintainers have been critical of RMS, and now RMS is meddling in the governance of Guile. It seems like the meddling may be to ensure that RMS has allies on that project...

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