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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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."
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.
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.”
> 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.).
> "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.
> 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 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?
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."
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.
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.
[+] [-] tptacek|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ocdtrekkie|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jsmthrowaway|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dec0dedab0de|7 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] burnte|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djur|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matthewbauer|7 years ago|reply
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."
[+] [-] motohagiography|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] djsumdog|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] djur|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ww520|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bjt2n3904|7 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] ubernostrum|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Jerry2|7 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] geofft|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lsh|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] thsowers|7 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] timb07|7 years ago|reply
RMS would vehemently disagree with you: he founded the Free Software community, and has nothing to do with Open Source Software.
[+] [-] drb91|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] zeth___|7 years ago|reply
>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.
[+] [-] _diyu|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] madrox|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dragonwriter|7 years ago|reply
And, further, about project governance.
[+] [-] noobermin|7 years ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] DannyBee|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SEJeff|7 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] ocdtrekkie|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LeoPanthera|7 years ago|reply
Was he convinced? Or was the change made against his wishes?
[+] [-] xxpor|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davexunit|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] komali2|7 years ago|reply
"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
[+] [-] jwilk|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zeth___|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] chris_wot|7 years ago|reply
“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
[+] [-] eadmund|7 years ago|reply
'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.
[+] [-] oblio|7 years ago|reply
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.).
[+] [-] wyldfire|7 years ago|reply
> "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.
[+] [-] gus_massa|7 years ago|reply
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). [...]
[+] [-] LinuxBender|7 years ago|reply
[0] - https://www.musl-libc.org/faq.html
[+] [-] djpowell|7 years ago|reply
"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."
[+] [-] LeoPanthera|7 years ago|reply
It's a political/protest joke, maybe.
Either way, the glibc documentation is not the ideal place for it.
[+] [-] MBCook|7 years ago|reply
Seems fitting enough.
[+] [-] FundThrowaway|7 years ago|reply
I thought this was one of the last places I could come to get away from it but not anymore.
[+] [-] midasz|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] manangatangy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sigi45|7 years ago|reply
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.