Live data from Hacker News

Who controls glibc?

lwn.net

71–80 of 528 posts

Re: Who controls glibc?

#71
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.

Stallman made the right call.

https://www.reddit.com/r/node/comments/6whs2e/multiple_coc_v...

Re: Who controls glibc?

#73
post #34

Fork if you don't like it. 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.

> Consensus is a Bay Area idea

  [citation needed]
Merriam-Webster says the first known use was 1843, at https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/consensus.

An SCM change, by very nature, doesn't "erase" anything, it only creates a record of change. The repository will always have the history.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#74
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.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#75
post #60
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#76
post #50
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because GNU has always worked that way and given us some of the best software ever written.

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.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#77
post #61
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm pretty sure this is sarcasm. I really hope it is anyway, because otherwise it stinks of "long live the king"

If you look at his other comments in this I’m not sure it’s sarcasm.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#78
post #60
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#79
post #60
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#80
post #54

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. [0]: https://…

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.

There is no god but FOSS and rms is his prophet? This sounds like a religious argument on your end
Post reply on HN