Who controls glibc?

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.

They stepped back from that years and years ago. If for some reason there's a decision that desperately needs to be made, but for which no decision is coming out of the normal processes, there's a technical board, elected by committers, rotating every release cycle, that can be asked to make the call (disclaimer: I've served three terms on Django's technical board).

But in both the BDFL era, and the current technical-board era, the people with final decision-making authority only exercised it when asked to, as a last resort when other mechanisms had failed.

For the final decision-maker to actively step in and veto something the normal decision process already has consensus around, or just pre-emptively declare something decided against what seems to be a consensus buliding the other way... is unthinkable for me. I'd treat it as a sign that it's time either to fork away from that person, or to remove that person's decision-making authority and put the authority in the hands of someone more responsible.

I think you're confusing two separate issues.

Torvalds' acidic method of communication is certainly eccentric. But from my casual reading of LKML what he communicates is not. Like:

* some patch is prone to bugginess and not suitable to merge

* some patch shows that the submitter doesn't understand some fundamental aspect of C and thus isn't suitable to merge as written

* some patchset looks similar to some previous subsystem that caused massive problems and should therefore be avoided

* the patch was measured to break things or perform poorly

* the patch is shoehorning in a feature that doesn't belong in the kernel

* some non-technical proposal would cause future problems for Kernel devs and should be avoided

In the case of Stallman's joke, we can certainly say his method of communication-- popping in to make a surprise decision by fiat-- is eccentric. But we can also say the content of what he is communicating is also eccentric. What possible rationale could there be to tying up volunteer glibc maintainers' time for a bike-shedding session about a decades-old joke?

It's the difference between someone with a Penguin fetish favoring Penguin-based metaphors, and someone with a Gnu fetish forcing you to sit through 125 "funny" videos of Gnus.

Scratch that-- there are 10 more "Abortion Joke" messages from April. So make that 126 "funny" videos about Gnus.

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.