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

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

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

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

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

The emperor of Japan is really awesome.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So I must have meant something a little hyperbolic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

While I agree with Ulrich, it is pretty brutal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In terms of personal respect, sure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's his full reply in context:

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's probably not healthy to take them seriously.

  > this isn't Reddit/Voat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

> If you think any exercise of rightful power is authoritarian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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