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Who controls glibc?

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Re: Who controls glibc?

#421

Post by p_l »

djur wrote: post #274
tptacek wrote: post #173

Lots of people seem to be rooting around like truffle hogs looking for the partisan politics embedded in this story, but you won't find any. The conflict happening here is between maintainers, who don't want a dated left-leaning joke embedded in the glibc documentation, and Stallman, who does. If there's "political correctness" involved, it's right-leaning. But, as a left-leaning pro-choice person: there's no "politi…

Why is the joke dated? It refers to a current (and recently expanded) US government policy.

It's also horribly written and essentially a bad joke. I don't have anything against Apocrypha in an otherwise serious document, but this is so badly written that I know people who only understood what it was talking about on the third read of it, specifically looking for the meaning.

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).

Re: Who controls glibc?

#422

Post by geofft »

zeth___ wrote: post #54
thsowers wrote: post #39

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.

A couple of questions for you:

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?

Re: Who controls glibc?

#423

Post by da_chicken »

esrauch wrote: post #373
da_chicken wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alright, so where is that line drawn? RMS is the project lead, but it's a community project and at some point the consensus will be that he is just wrong. Clearly that line must exist somewhere, or eglibc would never have been. But the existence of a fork isn't the minimum point since that takes quite a lot to overcome the inertia of forming a new project. The point I keep coming back to is: What is the purpose of th…

What is the point of the project? 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 mark…

Those arguments don't work.

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.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#424

Post by p_l »

craigsmansion wrote: post #385
ubernostrum wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 aba…

> 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!

Considering the stories of the breakdown of MIT AI Lab, you might be... surprised.

(No, Levy's book was not honest to the facts)

Re: Who controls glibc?

#425

Post by ACS_Solver »

esrauch wrote: post #373
da_chicken wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alright, so where is that line drawn? RMS is the project lead, but it's a community project and at some point the consensus will be that he is just wrong. Clearly that line must exist somewhere, or eglibc would never have been. But the existence of a fork isn't the minimum point since that takes quite a lot to overcome the inertia of forming a new project. The point I keep coming back to is: What is the purpose of th…

What is the point of the project? 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 mark…

People sometimes overlook the fact that the FSF is clearly a political organization, the GNU project places politics over technology, and Stallman himself is a political activist first and foremost. Yet people forget this and treat GNU stuff like technology-driven projects.

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.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#426

Post by irishsultan »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #412
sanxiyn wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to defend Rust project here. You should realize that Rust CoC is scoped to official Rust project space. > 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.

This directly contradicts other CoC enforcement cases: 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 a…

That's a different CoC though.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#427

Post by p_l »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #314
freedomben wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, I very much agree. I think RMS has done an incredible amount to protect software freedom, and virtually every single person in the world benefits in some way or another. However, this is an authoritarian response and assertion of control where one need not be. We have plenty of power-hungry dicks out there, we don't need them to have a famous example to emulate. Note: I am not convinced yet that RMS was seriou…

I don't think you can have one without the other. GNU was successful in large part because of RMS's uncompromising position on issues both big and small. RMS is not, and never was, a "power-hungry dick". He just has strong and well-defined political views, and the GNU project was created to reflect those views.

Unfortunately, at times I look at GNU and see that it's a project whose success is in spite of RMS. He gave a good basis in the original manifest, gave generally good inspiration, but that's what it is - inspiration. Said inspiration made people work on the projects that over time somehow managed to end up under GNU umbrella. But a lot of RMS-managed, top-down GNU projects? Never got anywhere.

See also the discussion mentioned by Ulrich Drepper back in 2001, regarding RMS' behaviour back when Ulrich started to port glibc to linux.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#428

Post by GyYZTfWBfQw »

djsumdog wrote: post #233
jsmthrowaway wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m much more concerned about him playing the “childbirth is far more traumatic than having an abortion” card in the discussion about the patch. Until this moment, I wasn’t even aware that was a card. It’s difficult to fathom the logic that would arrive at that statement making sense to someone typing it, particularly a person who will never experience the situations upon which he’s speaking conclusively. You’re righ…

> Immediate future prediction: -4 on this comment Commenting on downvotes is discouraged in the HN guidelines. It's boring, it's trite and this isn't Reddit/Voat.

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

No, it really reeks of Reddit. It tells a lot about the community if they downvote solely for the reason of making a comment (or a prediction) on downvotes. I'm pretty sure many people downvoted it only because of that, completely ignoring anything else he has said. Apparently that's how this community operates. I did get downvoted for my tone alone, and let me tell you this: I said exactly the same thing as some of the people who have been upvoted and are on the top. I was also curious about the people who commented on my tone (and likely downvoted me), and surprise: based on their previous comments in other threads/posts, their views were quite similar to mine; the only difference was the tone. Perhaps we should add emojis so I could spam friendly emojis all around my comments. :) <3

Re: Who controls glibc?

#429

Post by sverige »

wiz21c wrote: post #420
eesmith wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been trying to figure out an answer which was more concrete than "I disagree", and ran into the problem that I can't figure out what "dictator" is supposed to mean, other than "person in authority whom I disagree with." 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 tea…

I think there is no other way to be a dictator (as long as he's appointed byt the board). 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 o…

The Roman office of dictator (which is the origin of the term) was elected with absolute power in order to deal with a crisis -- generally speaking, a major war, and that usually involving an invasion of Roman territory by hostile forces. The term of office was limited to one year, though dictators were sometimes re-elected.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#430

Post by nialv7 »

mikekchar wrote: post #260
mycall wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lets think how many hours RMS has put into GNU over the years. That should count for something, no?

I'm a big fan of RMS, but I've got to say "No". He's not a maintainer. He doesn't get a vote. If he wants to work his way back into that project, then I've got no problem with it. But he doesn't. It's like the CEO telling you that he wants a joke in the technical documentation for one of your libraries. They might get away with it because of their position, but it's an abuse of that position even if the CEO used to b…

Well, let's not forget that "CEO" wrote that technical documentation. And probably also wrote (at least an older version of) the code, too.
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