> prohibits "unfriendliness"
You’re inverting what is written in the CoC and reporting that here. The CoC does not prohibit unfriendliness.
I am guessing that the reason “be friendly and patient” is in the CoC is because projects like GCC are having trouble attracting new maintainers. As far as I can tell, the project is in trouble—for a long time, GCC was the only game in town, and now that people could just as easily decide to contribute to LLVM/Clang instead, GCC needs to take some effort to make sure that it still has maintainers long-term.
The idea that a CoC “not needed” doesn’t seem credible, I think you’d need to provide some kind of reasoning to support that argument. You haven’t provided any reasoning besides “GCC existed for 30 years without one”, and that argument doesn’t make any logical sense. The landscape has changed, there are competitors (LLVM), and some of GCC’s previous decisions at the highest level have made it somewhat hostile to contributors—something which the project can no longer afford to do.
> allows anti-GPL companies (see latest RHEL upstream source portal incident) running the steering committee to decide what the vague language actually means without disclosing what financial interests are behind the decisions to shut down discussions.
This seems like an unreasonable and invalid complaint to me. It hypothesizes that the CoC will be wielded as a weapon to achieve some kind of “anti-GPL” corporate goals, or something to that effect.
If anything, I’ve only seen, in the GCC project, “pro-GPL” abuses, where Stallman has directed GCC developers to make technical decisions not based on technical merits, but based on the desire of Stallman to advance the FSF’s pro-GPL goals politically. I’m talking about stuff like having a serializable IR here—technical decisions which make a lot of sense, but which the politics of GCC quashed in order to support the pro-GPL mission.
And here LLVM is, with its serializable IR, and pro-corporate licensing scheme, taking away mindshare from GCC.
The CoC is not really a pro-corporate tool any more than it is a pro-GPL tool. It is a tool for fixing problems in a community, and the GCC project needs to put a lot of thought and care into how it runs its community, because the long-term viability of that community is now in jeopardy. The CoC is there to improve the community—and if you think CoCs should have more detail, that’s something that can be fixed over time—rules tend to get more detailed as they are modified and updated.