> "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?
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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
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.)
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.
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.
"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."
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Then you're either willfully blind, or extremely lucky.
My alma mater allows talks about helping tweens transition to their preferred gender, but banned a talked by a "pickup artist" in the last 18 months.
Last Thursday I looked up a dissertation from the graduate library for work and they had a sticker on every door un-ironically using "lgbtqia+ and allies". Here's another one that does the same: https://lgbtqia.ucdavis.edu/educated/glossary.html
I'm not sure how any of this supports the point you're making (I believe the point you're making is "mentioning a traumatic event is as bad as causing the traumatic event" and/or "[these people are] authoritarians who want to remove all wrong think from the world").
If the point you're making is "I don't believe the concept of LGBTQIA+ and allies should exist," then yes, there would appear to be authoritarians who want to remove all wrong think from the world....
I find it disturbing that an otherwise intelligent sounding person regresses to the reading level of an 8 year old when confronted with dissonant information.
Let me explain again, and do try to read this time.
We have two events both of which the general public would find distasteful: one advocated treating women like objects, the other advocated tweens should undergo irreversible medical procedures that have at best dubious health outcomes.
One was banned, one wasn't. This is a problem.
Further the climate of the university is one that until recently was used as used as a straw-man to make fun of conservatives, "no one calls it lgbtqia+, you're just being disingenuous" was a reply I have received on reddit as little as 6 months ago.
You're welcome to slander me again if the above is too difficult to wrap your head around though.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The day went and passed a few years ago. SJW asswipes campaigned to have the phrased blacklist removed from projects and changed to allow list, also 'slave database' too because it could offend some dead ancestor that was a slave? These little cry babies are ruining tech, another example MS just had a tech conference with a cuddle farm, they imported animals so people could feed and cuddle them in the event any of the talks accidentally included trigger words. Don't forget crockfordgate - the javascript legend (the good parts book) who described brackets as dogballs and was mercilyless hunted by SJWs including being removed from jsconf. Sad times.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> "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."
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
"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.
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.
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.
> 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.
'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.
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.
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.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 462 ms ] thread> "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.
[0] - https://www.musl-libc.org/faq.html
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.
Perhaps glibc isn't that bad...
https://rurban.github.io/safeclib/doc/safec-3.3/d1/dae/md_do...
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). [...]
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.
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
@dang, can you do the honors sir^
Was he convinced? Or was the change made against his wishes?
[0] https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Aborting-...
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")
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.)
It's a political/protest joke, maybe.
Either way, the glibc documentation is not the ideal place for it.
Seems fitting enough.
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.
[0]: https://lwn.net/Articles/753646/
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!
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.
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.
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.
Of course, it's still inappropriate for glibc docs.
(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.)
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.
"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 guess, the same could be said about abortion jokes. Some people might take them too personal.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That is already an optional part of the GPL itself afaik.
(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.)
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.
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.
Plenty of us prefer the authoritarian model, rather than the chaotic model of arbitrary consensus.
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.
He sounds like the one in need of a safe space where nothing ever changes
At leaast now he can honestly say he is still actively involved with glibc.
An SCM change, by very nature, doesn't "erase" anything, it only creates a record of change. The repository will always have the history.
(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)
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.
I wish I could understand who taught you people that insistence of stupid horseshit is the key to achieving your goals.
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.
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".
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.
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
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...
It isn't out of date, it's entirely relevant today.
That doesn't mean that this political statement belongs in the manpage for "kill".
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
My alma mater allows talks about helping tweens transition to their preferred gender, but banned a talked by a "pickup artist" in the last 18 months.
Last Thursday I looked up a dissertation from the graduate library for work and they had a sticker on every door un-ironically using "lgbtqia+ and allies". Here's another one that does the same: https://lgbtqia.ucdavis.edu/educated/glossary.html
If the point you're making is "I don't believe the concept of LGBTQIA+ and allies should exist," then yes, there would appear to be authoritarians who want to remove all wrong think from the world....
Let me explain again, and do try to read this time.
We have two events both of which the general public would find distasteful: one advocated treating women like objects, the other advocated tweens should undergo irreversible medical procedures that have at best dubious health outcomes.
One was banned, one wasn't. This is a problem.
Further the climate of the university is one that until recently was used as used as a straw-man to make fun of conservatives, "no one calls it lgbtqia+, you're just being disingenuous" was a reply I have received on reddit as little as 6 months ago.
You're welcome to slander me again if the above is too difficult to wrap your head around though.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
People are emotional animals. When trying to persuade them, disregard this fact at your peril.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Calling people names is a good way to make enemies, not allies.
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.
>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 really hope it is anyway, because otherwise it stinks of "long live the king"
Unless of course that leader is him, in which case his narcissistic side will gladly welcome it
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
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?
RMS would vehemently disagree with you: he founded the Free Software community, and has nothing to do with Open Source Software.
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.
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)
"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
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.
>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?
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...
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.
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...
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.
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.
It's literally an outsider trying to force the actual maintainers to do something they disgaree with. But you appear to support the outsider.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
Heckler's vetoes are also bad for the public.
And, further, about project governance.
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.
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."
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
What?. You'll have to explain to me how you've come to such a conclussion.
The consensus was that it be removed. It was removed. Just because HMS 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/
Isn't that what happened to emacs?
The unforked (for lack of a better term) GCC was set aside, and the fork became the official version.
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?
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.
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.
https://github.com/antirez/redis/issues/3185
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
"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.
"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
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.
This isn't a well-constructed joke in that sense - it's likely to cause confusion, not increased understanding.
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
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.
Is joke in documentation useful? Probably not...
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.
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.
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 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)
Probably not the right way to have a discussion.
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.
You want to transport me back to the 70's MIT AI lab? I'm so there!
(No, Levy's book was not honest to the facts)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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.
You really have to be clueless to not get the joke.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.