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Who controls glibc?

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Re: Who controls glibc?

#141

Post by llukas »

smsm42 wrote: post #122
bhhaskin wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with RMS on this. People need to grow up. It's ok to be offended, but not ok to try and correct everyone just because you are offended. A line needs to be drawn somewhere and this is harmless.

This is harmless - probably true, nobody would die or suffer harm from having irrelevant content in the manual. We could splice full seven books of Harry Potter into it, and provided it is clearly marked up, it won't cause any serious harm. But glibc technical manuals are not exactly the place for RMS - or anybody else - to wage political advocacy campaigns, criticize US federal government or joke on the topics unrel…

Try reading GPL license... is a political statement itself.

Is joke in documentation useful? Probably not...

Re: Who controls glibc?

#142

Post by thiagoharry »

roenxi wrote: post #132
geofft wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody who removed the joke said they were offended by it, they just said that they didn't believe it was the sort of thing that belonged in technical documentation. If anyone is offended, it is RMS, in the sense that he seems personally affronted that he doesn't carry the line-item veto power he thinks he had over all of GNU and people did not ask him before removing something he added 25 years ago. Not everyone who…

Technical documentation isn't the place for a joke full stop. Documentation is for people who are typically busy, uncertain and potentially dealing with something that is going wrong. They want clear, concise and accessible help. They don't want or need tasteless jokes. It is disrespectful to their time to include random garbage. This is supposed to be read by people who need it, not people who know what is going on…

The TexBook was a technical documentation for TeX written by Donald Knuth. The book had a lot of jokes, and I enjoyed reading it.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#143

Post by adrianratnapala »

noobermin wrote: post #106
_diyu wrote: post #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.

This[0] is relevant. He's possibly alienating only a group of vocal people. It isn't clear form the article that it's the consensus more than it is the consensus of people in an email thread. After clicking around the mailing list, it looks more like what [0] suggests than it being a clear majority of contributors to glibc. That said, alienating anyone could be problematic. [0] https://lwn.net/Articles/753720/

> That said, alienating anyone could be problematic.

Heckler's vetoes are also bad for the public.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#144

Post by Zopieux »

I like the fact this joke is 100% US-centric and this alone never came forward as a reasonable argument for its removal. Glibc is used worldwide, people outside the US (they exist!) would have no clue what this joke is about: civilized countries do not have this terrible gag rule.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#145

Post by geofft »

motohagiography wrote: post #136
geofft wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to ascribe a high amount of ill will to glibc maintainers who have been faithful and productive GNU maintainers for many years, and I don't believe there's any other evidence that they wish to undermine RMS' authority. However, if those maintainers find that their faithfulness is rewarded by being told that they don't actually maintain the project, they're just tending it while RMS is busy, it seems entire…

Except that perhaps RMS's approval and veto are no longer legitimate? It's not ascribing ill will at all. They've stumbled on a canary or a "brown M&M," where regardless of how good they think they are, they've transgressed a boundary of the implicit agreement of who has final say. They would have to be good and faithful to have contributions approved to glibc, so I would argue that's not the point. As the principals…

Yeah, I think they stumbled into this, and having realized where they were, decided that having a proxy fight about RMS' authority in general is something they were needing to do at some point. I just don't think they set out to end up here because they were looking for the fight, and I read your comment as accusing the glibc maintainers of being non-core maintainers who were looking for a way to cause a scandal. If I misread it, I apologize.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#146

Post by favorited »

justonepost wrote: post #129
8_hours_ago wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just because RMS is a FOSS legend doesn't make him God. According to RMS he does have ultimate authority over all GNU packages, including Glibc: https://lwn.net/Articles/753661/

He probably owns some root certs. Likely if he were to start exercising such authority without being an active developer, there would be a fork soon enough. Isn't that what happened to emacs?

It happened with GCC. Today's GCC is actually a fork of the original, which became the "blessed" version once the forkers and RMS worked out resolved some issues that led to the fork.

The unforked (for lack of a better term) GCC was set aside, and the fork became the official version.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#147

Post by derefr »

RIMR wrote: post #38
lsh wrote: post #28

To call it a joke is a bit of a stretch, more like a turn of phrase or wink to the reader. As far as explicitly inserting one's politics into communal tools, this case is so mild it's hard to fathom any grounded person wasting time on it. However, there is a case at the moment of the author of the BFG tool for git adding a paragraph of text about fighting trump at the end of his tool's output. He won't get rid of it…

Or, if you're going to be subtly political (as GNU often is), at least be current. That joke was 20-something years old. It ran its course. Also, as far as calling LGBT rainbows "political", I would have to disagree. You either view LBGT people as equal, or you can be a hateful person. There's no good reason to pander to the latter, but plenty of reasons to stand up in unity with the former. There are some concepts t…

> There's no good reason to pander to the latter

"Pander", no. Avoid offending when "offending" would require active effort and "not offending" would just require doing nothing, yes.

Let me talk about professionalism for a moment. The whole concept of "professionalism" is that it's a set of artificial etiquette that allows people who absolutely detest one-another to get along for long enough to complete a joint venture.

I think we forget what professionalism is; a relatively-isolationist country like the US (in terms of where its citizens go on holiday, not in terms of its foreign policy) has little need of it. For most countries through most of history, though, professionalism is the thing that you're expected to show when your country decides to ally with that country you were just at war with, and you have to work with people who had just been shooting friends of yours.

We expect—and depend on—our tooling enabling professionalism in this sense. That means obvious things like not having insults toward the French in ARM ISA references; but it also means not using religious iconography in a country with multiple religions; not including the Battle Hymn of the Republic as a default ringtone on phones; etc. We want to ensure that we don't accidentally, through coincidences of technology, destroy a negotiation or cause a diplomatic crisis.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#148

Post by hermitdev »

jcranmer wrote: post #98
lsh wrote: post #28

To call it a joke is a bit of a stretch, more like a turn of phrase or wink to the reader. As far as explicitly inserting one's politics into communal tools, this case is so mild it's hard to fathom any grounded person wasting time on it. However, there is a case at the moment of the author of the BFG tool for git adding a paragraph of text about fighting trump at the end of his tool's output. He won't get rid of it…

The joke is confusing if you're not well-acquainted with US abortion politics, and, if you read the entire email thread, there were actually quite a few people who didn't get the joke properly (you can include myself in that list as another example). RMS's stance is quite galling here. First, he's making it very adamant that the entire purpose of the joke is political commentary. Second, he's resisting any mechanism…

Except, I don't think RMS intended this as a "joke". I honestly think he was dead serious, but worried that other people would interpret it as a joke and thus be inclined to remove it, hence his "do not remove" comment.

Technical documentation and reference is really not the place for political commentary. It adds nothing and is distracting. Technical documentation should be just that: documentation; not political diatribe. The politics would be better left to a blog post or something of the sorts.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#149

Post by Pyxl101 »

geofft wrote: post #114
motohagiography wrote: post #108

The discussion is a proxy for how executive decisions are made for glibc, and in particular by whom. The merit of a stale joke from the 90s is meaningless, and posturing about its appropriateness is disingenuous. Open source principals have always been eccentric (Torvalds, Raymond(!), etc.), and the FOSS community tolerated it not only because of their technical contributions, but because the open source community it…

This seems to ascribe a high amount of ill will to glibc maintainers who have been faithful and productive GNU maintainers for many years, and I don't believe there's any other evidence that they wish to undermine RMS' authority. However, if those maintainers find that their faithfulness is rewarded by being told that they don't actually maintain the project, they're just tending it while RMS is busy, it seems entire…

> However, if those maintainers find that their faithfulness is rewarded by being told that they don't actually maintain the project, they're just tending it while RMS is busy

Someone or some group/process has to be in charge, be the final decision-maker for a group. In the case of the GNU Project, the Free Software Foundation is likely that decision-maker as the owner of the trademark for "GNU". The FSF as a non-profit organization has articles of incorporation and bylaws [1] describing its process for making decisions - but it is a corporation, just like any corporation, and its decisions concerning its assets are binding in the same way as if Google made a decision about one of its products.

I haven't read the FSF bylaws in detail, but it sounds like RMS believes that he has decision-making authority over the FSF and GNU Project, which he probably does. Someone has to - what's the alternative? In organizations like the FSF and Wikipedia, someone or some process has to have the authority to make decisions. There is no way to delegate actual decision-making to the "community" at large. A person has to have it, either individually or as the executor of a process.

I suppose the alternative is having no trademark nor legal organization in charge of a project, but in that case, a disagreement could result in two different projects contending for the same name. Besides, someone or some organization ultimately has to be in control of properties such as domain names and source control accounts. The moment that a project manages any properties like this, there has to be a formal decision-making process or the project is at risk of chaos. The person who has legal control over project properties like the project domain name, or IP like its trademark, is in de facto final control over the project itself.

There are undoubtedly options for going over RMS's head, such as convincing the directors of the FSF [2] to take a vote on the issue, or take a vote to remove him as president or as a director. Alternatively, people who feel passionately about this issue could lobby the FSF directors to put pressure on RMS to reverse this decision or delegate it, without using the mechanics of a formal vote, such as by threatening resignation. Furthermore, donors of the FSF could threaten to pull their funding over the issue.

Alternatively, project maintainers can fork the codebase and carry on under a new name, managed by a new organization, which is their right to do since the code is open source and free software. To the extent that an open source project or any project is operating under a specific name, managed by a corporation, we should all understand that someone is always "in charge", though that person or group may act with a light touch or operate largely behind the scenes.

[1] https://www.fsf.org/about/financial

[2] https://www.fsf.org/about/people/board

P.S. This comment is not an endorsement of either side of the issue in a normative sense. It is intended to be a positive comment concerning the expectations we should have in working with corporations.

Re: Who controls glibc?

#150

Post by chillingeffect »

roenxi wrote: post #132
geofft wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody who removed the joke said they were offended by it, they just said that they didn't believe it was the sort of thing that belonged in technical documentation. If anyone is offended, it is RMS, in the sense that he seems personally affronted that he doesn't carry the line-item veto power he thinks he had over all of GNU and people did not ask him before removing something he added 25 years ago. Not everyone who…

Technical documentation isn't the place for a joke full stop. Documentation is for people who are typically busy, uncertain and potentially dealing with something that is going wrong. They want clear, concise and accessible help. They don't want or need tasteless jokes. It is disrespectful to their time to include random garbage. This is supposed to be read by people who need it, not people who know what is going on…

We're humans, not robots. We don't run on information alone.
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