Who controls glibc? [LWN.net]

By Jonathan Corbet
May 7, 2018

The removal of an old joke from the GNU C Library manual might not seem like the sort of topic that would inspire a heated debate. At times, though, a small action can serve as an inadvertent proxy for a more significant question, one which is relevant to both the developers and the users of the project. In this case, that question would be: how is the project governed and who makes decisions about which patches are applied?

Toward the end of April, Raymond Nicholson posted a patch to the glibc manual removing a joke that he didn't think was useful to readers. The joke played on the documentation for abort() to make a statement about US government policy on providing information about abortions. As Nicholson noted: "The joke does not provide any useful information about the abort() function so removing it will not hinder use of glibc". On April 30, Zack Weinberg applied the patch to the glibc repository.

Richard Stallman, who added the joke sometime in the 1990s, asked that it not be removed. The resulting discussion touched on a number of issues. Carlos O'Donell, who has been trying hard to resolve the issue with some degree of consensus, suggested that the joke could hurt people who have had bad experiences associated with abortion. He proposed a couple of possible alternatives, including avoiding jokes entirely or discussing such issues in a different forum. Stallman, however, replied that "a GNU manual, like a course in history, is not meant to be a 'safe space'". He suggested the possibility of adding a trigger warning about functions that create child processes, since childbirth is "far more traumatic than having an abortion".

Whether the joke belongs in the glibc manual is an issue for the glibc developers to decide and wouldn't normally be of much interest beyond the project itself. But in this case, it raises the question of how the developers make this decision. The project's wiki states that the project "uses a consensus-based community-driven development model". In this case, there seems to be a fairly clear consensus among the actual glibc developers that this joke is not appropriate in the project's manual. Weinberg's application of the patch was based on this consensus.

Stallman, however, has made it clear that there are limits to the extent to which glibc is consensus-based; his response was: "My decision is to keep the joke". Weinberg stated his refusal to revert the change; Stallman answered: "I stand by my decision to keep the joke". O'Donell apologized for not contacting Stallman directly about the removal, but also stood by the decision to remove it. He asked:

A large group of developers, serious senior developers, at least 3 project stewards (GNU Developers for the project), are indicating that they do not share your same view on the joke. Please consider their input and work with me to reach a consensus position.

Weinberg defended his application of the patch:

I don't think I did anything wrong procedurally. RMS may be the project leader, but he is not a glibc maintainer. His wishes regarding glibc are perhaps to be given _some_ more weight than those of any other individual, particularly when he is also the author of text under dispute, but we have never, to my knowledge, treated them as mandates.

Stallman was unimpressed, though, and fell back to a pure authority play, saying: "As the head of the GNU Project, I am in charge of what we publish in GNU manuals. I decide the criteria to decide by, too". He later added:

I exercise my authority over Glibc very rarely -- and when I have done so, I have talked with the official maintainers. So rarely that some of you thought that you are entirely autonomous. But that is not the case. On this particular question, I made a decision long ago and stated it where all of you could see it.

O'Donell repeated that a discussion was underway and that the maintainers did not intend to revert the patch. He also asked whether the change violated any GNU policies — a question that went unanswered as of this writing. He also stated clearly that the joke would not return in any form until some sort of consensus was reached.

One could argue that the consensus is already there if one looks at the developers who actually work on glibc; it is difficult to find any of them arguing for the joke's return. The number of people arguing for the joke in general is quite small. That did not stop Alexandre Oliva, who evidently has a high opinion of Stallman's sense of humor, from reverting the change early on May 7 — his first glibc change in 2018. He did not post his change to the mailing list (and only explained it after being asked); his attempt to justify it as a return to consensus did not fly with O'Donell. This discussion, one suspects, is not done.

Each project has its own governance model. The "authoritarian leader" model is quite common in this space, with many projects subject to the will of a (hopefully benevolent) dictator who can decide to accept or reject any change. Sometimes that model works better than others; glibc itself improved its processes and inclusiveness considerably when its single leader was replaced by a more consensus-oriented model. Usually, though, such leaders are at least active developers in the projects they manage; that is not the case for the GNU projects. It can be discouraging for a developer to discover that their changes are subject to a veto from on high by somebody who is not otherwise involved with the project's development. The echoes of this action may thus persist in the glibc community for some time.

to post comments

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 7, 2018 19:09 UTC (Mon) by ami (guest, #5280) [Link] (22 responses)

I suspect that most of the developers really don't care either way. I'm not sure what "consensus" means in such a situation.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 7, 2018 19:20 UTC (Mon) by siddhesh (guest, #64914) [Link] (21 responses)

We (the glibc developers/maintainers) have made it pretty clear what we prefer, please read the thread.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 7, 2018 19:37 UTC (Mon) by ami (guest, #5280) [Link] (20 responses)

I've read bits of it. How do you determine the consensus from that?

Say you have 50 developers. 1 is strongly in favor of a position, 4 are strongly opposed, and 45 really don't care. If you read a discussion thread about this, you might conclude that the consensus is opposed, but the real consensus is closer to "meh".

Anyway, I'm not asking to be a jerk. I genuinely curious. Do glibc developers have some sort of polling mechanism to determine consensus?

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 7, 2018 19:56 UTC (Mon) by siddhesh (guest, #64914) [Link] (19 responses)

Consensus is different from unanimity, so you don't necessarily need everyone to agree exactly on a decision. You only need to be sure that there is no strong sustained opposition. To give a technical example, I may not like a hackish patch but don't hold it up on the condition that the submitter posts a follow up to clean it up. Conversely, I may decide to oppose inclusion of a patch because it adds quadratic behaviour to a case I care about but others may not. In such cases the community negotiates till we reach a resolution.

When 45 out of 50 do not respond, it's not necessary they they don't care, quite often the case is that they agree with the current state, which may either be of consensus or of a sustained opposition and don't want to get involved in the conversation unless absolutely necessary. Most contributors to glibc (even the most active ones) are usually working on the project in addition to another project, like gcc or the kernel so they're juggling multiple things at once.

The article links to a wiki page that describes the consensus rules we use in glibc in quite a bit of detail.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 7, 2018 22:15 UTC (Mon) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (8 responses)

A bit off topic, but my 2 cents about consensus:

In the Quaker tradition of consensus decision making, it's a matter of making a best effort to find what the group as a whole wants.

In that tradition it's considered a mistake to try to build a consensus without hearing from at least most of the members. However, it's also built around the idea that people who are going to participate essentially opt into discussion in certain areas, and have explicitly taken on the duty of participating, even when it's time consuming and slow, which are par for the course in classic consensus decision making. Essentially, everyone is given time to speak about what they think and what they feel, and when the turn comes to you, you can't just pass or stay silent. It would be difficult to adapt this fully to an online medium. Functioning well, this can include outcomes such as participants deciding that they really are too far outside the group needs/wants to be part of the decision and essentially pulling up their stake. It can also include the group as a whole working hard to understand the views and opinions of one who sees it quite differently.

In the general modern interpretation of consensus decision making, participants are often far less committed to fully participate, and would rather simply ignore issues that are insufficiently important to them, or have a poor ratio of importance to expected annoyance. In such an environment, I really don't see what you can do besides try to remember that each participant's views should be given real consideration, and at the same time that it is important and necessary to find the outcome/view/decision that best represents the group overall. Even that is hard to instill in a free assocation of developers, and I think it's generally not perceived that this mode of thinking is important and possibly essential.

In short, consensus is hard. We're not really trained to do it. Most of us don't really fully appreciate the components to achieve it. Expecting strong consensus on mailing lists is perhaps a foolish pursuit. But considering how things are playing out here, I do wish more of the participants valued those principles.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 18:02 UTC (Tue) by lamby (subscriber, #42621) [Link] (2 responses)

Where can I learn more about the Quaker model vs. the "modern" model?

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 9, 2018 3:23 UTC (Wed) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

I don't know. It's just based on personal experiences in my life of what people perceive the word to mean among differing groups.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 9, 2018 11:28 UTC (Wed) by TheIllustriousYou (guest, #124302) [Link]

If you have a Quaker meetinghouse near you, you might pay a visit and ask them. I know a few; I'll ask if any can help you learn more.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 18:47 UTC (Tue) by ClaudeRubinson (subscriber, #11921) [Link] (4 responses)

The Quaker decision-making process seeks to discern God's will (not the group's). It is this belief that a truth exists outside of the decision-making body that distinguishes it from conventional (secular) decision-making processes, including consensus and voting.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 9, 2018 3:22 UTC (Wed) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (3 responses)

This is slightly hair-splitting, because Friends believe there is that of good within people. In practice, there are many decisions made within a monthly meeting which are not viewed by most people as having a significant spiritual dimension.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 9, 2018 3:22 UTC (Wed) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

Err, "that of god".

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 9, 2018 16:53 UTC (Wed) by ClaudeRubinson (subscriber, #11921) [Link] (1 responses)

Quaker process seeks to suppress individual egos and preferences in search of an external truth that exists beyond and apart from the individuals involved. Secular consensus making, on the other hand, seeks to accommodate and encompass the different preferences, viewpoints, etc by asking "What can we all agree on?" This is precisely what makes arriving at consensus so challenging. (The different goals is also one reason why Quaker decision-making practices generally don't work well in a secular context.)

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 9, 2018 17:32 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Entirely correct. My religion tells me that the only true way to consensus is personal combat with edged or blunt weapons.

It's entirely unbiased and fair - there's no nonsense with differing interpretations of "scripture" or arguments about its application.

You either win and vanquish your foes or lose - it's absolute morality, imposed by the all-seeing eyes of gods. After all, they won't let you lose if you are correct, otherwise they won't be omnipotent and all-seeing.

I think that this kind of decision process should be universal.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 13:01 UTC (Tue) by yshuiv7 (guest, #96631) [Link] (9 responses)

Wait a second. You are saying you can assume someone is agreeing with you, if they don't respond?

I think there might be some problem with this assumption.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 13:14 UTC (Tue) by siddhesh (guest, #64914) [Link]

No it's not as simple as that. Depending on the nature of the change, you as maintainer are trusted to decide how long you'd like to wait for agreement and how many people you'd like to review the change before committing it. Every once in a while you might get it wrong but that's not the end because we can always discuss to gather consensus either way.

Again, I'm simplifying, please read the consensus wiki page (linked in the article) which is way more exhaustive.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 18:28 UTC (Tue) by sjfriedl (✭ supporter ✭, #10111) [Link]

It's not fair to read no response as "agreement", but it is fair to read it as "not opposed"

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 10, 2018 3:08 UTC (Thu) by bferrell (subscriber, #624) [Link] (1 responses)

> Wait a second. You are saying you can assume someone is agreeing with you, if they don't respond?
> I think there might be some problem with this assumption.

That's actually the concept behind how abstentions are counted... If you abstain, it's not a disagreement, It's counted as if in favor.

At least in areas I've seen it used, which kind of stinks because people thing it means "I disagree, but refuse to vote"

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 10, 2018 9:10 UTC (Thu) by karkhaz (subscriber, #99844) [Link]

Systems that have a compulsory voting system typically have abstention as an explicit option, which allows for the kind of protest you mentioned: it is compulsory to cast a vote, but you may cast a vote for "none of the above".

This is used on a national elections level in Australia, where voting is compulsory. There isn't actually a "none of the above" box but it's perfectly legal to turn up to the polling station and hand in a ruined ballot card, which is the defacto way of abstaining.

It's indeed a bit presumptuous to lump "I don't care" with "I strongly disagree with all options" in the absence of a voting system that doesn't distinguish between those options. However, on a software project mailing list, it's not the case that there are a fixed number of options to vote for---if somebody disagrees with all possible proposals that have already been suggested, they're free to introduce an alternative suggestion. So in that context it does seem reasonable to read an abstention as "I don't care about this issue" or "I agree with whatever the current consensus is".

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 10, 2018 8:53 UTC (Thu) by zenaan (guest, #3778) [Link] (4 responses)

> Wait a second. You are saying you can assume someone is agreeing with you, if they don't respond?

It's called "tacit agreement" - yes, it's agreement by default - it is an effective (whether intentional or not) surrender to the "vocal majority" even though that vocal majority may be an absolute or relative minority.

But, in a public forum (or "modern democracy") tacit consent also implies a high likelihood of the tyranny of the minority - i.e. those who squawk the loudest get to "win" (or get the government benefits, etc).

Those who seek "safe spaces" (whatever the hell they are) are also called cry-bullies.

The SJWs or "social justice warriors" who actively "create safe spaces" by for example (to pick a totally random example) removing a short yet politically incorrect joke from documentation, are often engaged in some level of "white knighting" or virtue signaling and in any case are subsidizing bad behaviour.

Now, what could also arguably be alleged as the "bad behaviour" of a politically incorrect joke, is also a healthy poke in the ribs of the cry bullies, those trigger-ready snowflakes who self proclaim to melt at the sight of any of a million trigger words - and by publishing their melting quality far and wide, publicly and loudly, they are bullying the rest of us.

We owe it to our dignity to NOT surrender our freedom of speech or our "freedom to trigger" in our public, work and play spaces, to the dictates of the covert passive aggressive cry bullies.

And remember folks, EVERYTHING we say, all our speech, is effectively political in some way. Those who remove a short yet politically-incorrect joke from documentation are making a political statement, doing a political action, saying "this is a safe space for cry bullies, you will not pollute our safe space with politically incorrect jokes", even though it is (usually) in the guise of "we want no politics in our docs".

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 12, 2018 14:12 UTC (Sat) by niner (guest, #26151) [Link] (2 responses)

Just in case you don't know: insulting your opponent usually does not help you win an argument and will not convince anyone. All it does is reflect badly on you and reduce your credibility.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 12, 2018 14:49 UTC (Sat) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (1 responses)

I submit that someone who unironically links to Zero Hedge doesn't care about credibility in the first place :)

Who controls glibc?

Posted Nov 8, 2018 16:39 UTC (Thu) by deepfire (guest, #26138) [Link]

To clarify, that statement of yours says far more about your opinion of ZH, rather than about the poster.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 16, 2018 21:09 UTC (Wed) by tartley (subscriber, #96301) [Link]

No bullying occurred at all. A suggestion was made, discussed, and eventually acted on despite some opposition. This is the normal process.

No censorship occurred at all. RMS or anyone else are free to continue making whatever jokes they want, or can publish a fork of the manual with the joke intact.

The "safe spaces" you complain about only require a moderate level of consideration for others.

I absolutely concede that sometimes people abuse that mechanism, petitioning to impose unreasonable burdens on others. In such cases, your objections would have some merit. But that has not remotely happened in this case, and unless it does, being respectful of other people's wishes is a very low bar indeed.

The joke's a bit crass. Some people don't like it. Most people don't care. Delete it and move on. No harm results. Objections to this are just crying wolf. Save it for an instance that genuinely needs attention.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 7, 2018 19:37 UTC (Mon) by Sesse (subscriber, #53779) [Link] (9 responses)

Wow, the argument is “I am often present at RMS' speeches, and the audience laughs at his jokes, so thus, he decides what is funny”?

It would seem GNU needs glibc more than glibc needs GNU, so perhaps the current glibc maintainership should just find another home for it.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 4:44 UTC (Tue) by liam (guest, #84133) [Link] (2 responses)

At this point, I think the LF may be a better home for this key library.

Who controls glibc?

Posted Jun 9, 2018 0:18 UTC (Sat) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link] (1 responses)

No, that's not a neutral location for a cross-platform project.

(And there are other issues with the Linux Foundation too, of course.)

Who controls glibc?

Posted Nov 8, 2018 16:42 UTC (Thu) by deepfire (guest, #26138) [Link]

Jan, this is intriguing, can you at least hint at what those might be?

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 7:23 UTC (Tue) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link] (4 responses)

Please, do not forget that we are talking about the *manual*. A manual has to be correct, sure, but it is no code. It shares aspects with other written means of expression, like journalism. The most important is perharps that there's no single "correct" way of writing a manual, but a wide sprectrum of personal styles.

With that in mind, I personally would be very upset if someone decided that an estilistic element on my writtings (as is a joke) should be mutilated. This is close to censorship, and very wrong in my oppinion.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 8:27 UTC (Tue) by Sesse (subscriber, #53779) [Link] (3 responses)

How about if someone who doesn't actually contribute anything positive to the project anymore comes up from high above and demands that a (rather controversial!) joke has to stay, because they were important to the project 20 years ago?

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 12:25 UTC (Tue) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link] (2 responses)

Sorry, but it does not sound convincing. Why would any of the factors you mention matter in a non-technical (basically artistical and political) decission? Do you claim that RMS cannot make political decissions for the GNU project (of which GLib is part)? Or that it is not his right for him to seek integrity of the prose he wrote, no matter how long ago?

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 12:51 UTC (Tue) by Sesse (subscriber, #53779) [Link] (1 responses)

Both. RMS should not make political decisions for glibc anymore, and it is not right for him to seek “integrity of the prose he wrote” (where said “prose” is a bad joke completely disconnected from the rest of the manual).

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 10, 2018 9:04 UTC (Thu) by zenaan (guest, #3778) [Link]

> Both. RMS should not make political decisions for glibc anymore, and it is not right for him to seek “integrity of the prose he wrote” (where said “prose” is a bad joke completely disconnected from the rest of the manual).

Yes, many seek to remove any concept of morals (or even ethics), to remove any hint of the founder's original intentions, to remove all politically incorrect prose and the ever-expanding menagerie of trigger words and phrases from all "upstanding and upright" technical material such as documentation.

Let us all submit to the passive aggressive, cry bully trigger-melting "unique snowflakes" by making the entire public world a safe space.

Or, let's not‼

Let's honour the intentions, ethics, vision and grace of the founders on whose shoulders we stand (such as Richard Stallman).

Let's admit that we are above submission to an endless march of passive aggressive cry bullies demanding the entire world become their safe space.

Let's admit that everything we say and do is in some way, on some level political, and at the very least honour the intentions of the founders of those projects we benefit so handsomely from.

Do. Not. Subsidize. Bad. Behaviour.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-04-28/are-social-just...

And do not subsidize the passive aggressive safe-space demanding cry bullies.

Create your world,

Who controls glibc?

Posted Jul 27, 2018 19:43 UTC (Fri) by krijgdenergstenkanker (guest, #125984) [Link]

> It would seem GNU needs glibc more than glibc needs GNU, so perhaps the current glibc maintainership should just find another home for it.

Well that's the issue isn't it? Rights are irrelevant here and in most places and it's an issue of might. Does glibc depend on the FSF for funding that Stallman can order them to drop? Is "glibc" a trademark that the FSF owns? Are there contractual obligations in play that stops the FSF from cutting such funding to coerce them? Even if they stop funding will glibc be able to just secure funding under the auspices of something else? — those are the questions that actually matter here.

Rights exist on paper that Linus wipes his butt with — in the end of the day who controls glibc is decided by who has the might to force it to do its bidding.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 7, 2018 19:41 UTC (Mon) by amk (subscriber, #19) [Link] (6 responses)

Also, the joke is not true and makes the manual inaccurate! There is never, ever, going to be legislation that will make it illegal to describe computer functions named abort(), any more than gun control legislation will affect the usage of database triggers or money-laundering legislation will affect the design of washing machines.

I'm reminded of the controversy long ago over a Linux kernel log message, where the code there was something like if (st->endian == LITTLE_ENDIAN) {printk("fucking Sun blows me");}. I don't care about the swearing, but this message is utterly useless in diagnosing an issue; a better message would be the pedestrian but useful 'wrong endianness in superblock', or whatever it meant.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 7, 2018 20:22 UTC (Mon) by lsl (subscriber, #86508) [Link] (3 responses)

That depends, I guess. The "fucking Sun..." message might be unique within the kernel code so a grep brings you right to the correct source location. Strings complaining about unexpected endianness may show up often enough to be useless.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 7, 2018 22:23 UTC (Mon) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (2 responses)

My very very boring solution to this problem is to ensure that each site where you would emit an error has very minor variations in expression. Usually I try to make this be further information: "wrong endianness encountered in xxx" Here xxx sometimes isn't very user-digestible, but I try to make the first portion of the error as explicitly informative as possible and potentially put the xxx in parenthesis or similar. However, I have been known to use trivially different wording when the xxx approach isn't available.

As a a user, I'd prefer xxx to be some punchy vulgarity, but I think I'm in the minority.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 14, 2018 21:46 UTC (Mon) by cpitrat (subscriber, #116459) [Link] (1 responses)

Or make __FILE__ and __LINE__ be part of your log ...

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 27, 2018 11:03 UTC (Sun) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

In commercial environments, there's often pressure not to show these "internal details" to users.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 7, 2018 21:57 UTC (Mon) by mrshiny (guest, #4266) [Link] (1 responses)

"The joke is not true" is not a good excuse for not telling a joke. The joke appears to be based on actual legislation

the Mexico City Policy, also known as the “Global Gag Rule,” .... The law prohibits allocation of U.S. funding to foreign non-governmental organizations that offer abortion services or information about the procedure.

So to explain it more fully, what RMS is saying is that the Gag Rule will be expanded to prevent GNU from telling you about the abort() function or when it should be used.

Obviously it's not literally true. But jokes usually aren't.

Who controls glibc?

Posted Jun 9, 2018 0:42 UTC (Sat) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link]

Instead of (or at least in addition to) insisting on that joke in a manual almost nobody reads, maybe he should start promoting SheDecides. ☺

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 7, 2018 19:47 UTC (Mon) by ami (guest, #5280) [Link] (16 responses)

I don't think the issue is about the quality of the joke.

IMHO:

1. It's fair to say that the joke is unprofessional, and doesn't have a place in documentation.

2. It's also fair to say that gnu isn't IBM or some other sterile corporate environment, and there's some scope for individual developers to add a bit of personality to the projects they contribute to.

In this case, I would probably favor keeping the joke as a historical artifact, but not adding more like it.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 7, 2018 20:30 UTC (Mon) by jmanig (guest, #120108) [Link] (3 responses)

It seems to be a political statement disguised as a joke, and that it's why Stallman want to keep it around to begin with. Not to go too 2018 on everyone here, but I'd be leery of large projects employing people from electic walks of life embarking on potentially divisive topics such as this one.

I don't even know how to feel about this one. On one hand, you could argue there's already precedent, such as Ulrich Drepper's character assassination of Stallman in the glibc 2.2.4 release notes.

On the other, well... Stallman is kind of proving Drepper's point here.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 7, 2018 23:48 UTC (Mon) by ploxiln (subscriber, #58395) [Link] (1 responses)

Wow, I didn't know about that, link for others: https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-announce/2001/msg00000.html

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 2:59 UTC (Tue) by unixbhaskar (guest, #44758) [Link]

Thanks a bunch for the pointer, I didn't know it either.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 13:33 UTC (Tue) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

I'd say Drepper himself is prior art for glibc shedding tasteless, needlessly offensive jokes that harm the project's public image. If they can do that, they can get rid of this too. There is plenty more work to be done in this area (a few other nasty pieces of work need the boot), but maintaining the positive momentum would be a start.

This joke came from the toilet humour culture of 90s America and should have stayed there, like all other offense-driven development. Even Microsoft grew up. It's time for GNU to do the same.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 7, 2018 22:34 UTC (Mon) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (9 responses)

I think "unprofessional" is a kind of conversation killer. It's often used in such a way that it conveys very little about what is perceieved, but implies that discussion should not occur.

Personally, I view the joke as pretty awkward. It comes off (to me) as implying that anti-abortion viewpoints are not valid, while trying to aim at anti-abortion government censorship. And while I think this is a serious political issue, making a polemic claim dressed up as a joke always strikes me as less than forthright. It's a tricky thing because expressing a political view as a real zingy joke can please me, sometimes even when I don't agree with the point of view. However, a really hamfisted joke placed in a context where it has almost no relevance comes across as unwanted and unpleasant. And I agree with both political views embedded in the comment.

So that's why I don't much like it.

Of course, my views are not particularly important, but I wanted to present what I think is a useful alternative to "this is unprofessional".

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 12:18 UTC (Tue) by Karellen (subscriber, #67644) [Link] (3 responses)

It comes off (to me) as implying that anti-abortion viewpoints are not valid,

Wait, isn't that backwards? The Global Gag Rule is the US Government's policy of censoring/stifling pro-abortion viewpoints, and this joke to me comes off as simply pointing out that pro-abortion viewpoints are valid topics for discussion/documentation.

How do read the joke as being in any way about anti-abortion viewpoints? I don't ever recall seeing any pro-choice campaign suggest that anti-abortion viewpoints should be censored or banned.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 14:28 UTC (Tue) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (2 responses)

You are construing my comments about "unprofessional" as applying to the joke content. That's rather uncharitable as I clearly didn't mean that.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 9, 2018 8:11 UTC (Wed) by Karellen (subscriber, #67644) [Link] (1 responses)

Huh?

Sorry, I wasn't trying to take issue with whether you thought the joke was unprofessional or not. I think it's an interesting point, and probably worth discussing.

I was just surprised with how you read the joke itself. Yeah, it's a tangent from your main point, so sorry about that, but I'm not taking you out of context when I quote:

Personally, I view the joke as pretty awkward. It comes off (to me) as implying that anti-abortion viewpoints are not valid,

am I? You do effectively say "The joke comes off as implying that anti-abortion viewpoints are not valid", don't you?

And I just didn't understand how you read that from the joke. So, I was a bit confused there. I'm also not entirely sure how I'm being uncharitable by asking how you got the meaning you did? I am genuinely curious about that.

Anyway, sorry if I came across as attacking you, or anything like that. That was totally not my intent. I just had a "wait, what?" moment and wanted to clear it up.

Peace

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 9, 2018 20:35 UTC (Wed) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

I think I misread your response.

The implications of the joke as implying anti-abortion views are invalid are probably a bit Americentric.

It's *very* hard in US politics to imagine someone injecting their views in this hamfisted way in the wrong forum as believing anything except that the opposing views are fundamentally invalid. This is because these views are so often extremely strident and because one who was more interested in discussion of the topic would not intrude in such a way.

This is not to say that I personally believe RMS feels this way. I have no real idea. But I do think it's how it reads, which makes it pretty derailing.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 23:13 UTC (Tue) by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604) [Link] (4 responses)

I think the term "unprofessional" should really only be applied in a professional context - meaning you are actually getting paid to do the work. It's not a standard that should apply to a free software project.

It would probably have been best to just leave it alone in the first place since it's really not productive which I would see as a better standard. I'm not implying the original author of the commit wanted to "stir to the pot" so to speak, but often it's very easy to under-estimate the waves this makes. I'd say this debate may end up hurting a lot more than the joke.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 9, 2018 8:46 UTC (Wed) by smcv (subscriber, #53363) [Link] (3 responses)

"Professional" is a shorthand for the behavioural norms you'd (hope to) find in professional employment. The reason for those norms is that in contexts where individuals are perceived to be representing a group, the behaviour of the individual affects outsiders' perception of the group, even if the individual doesn't intend it to. The group might be their employer, but it might also be their profession in general (for instance software engineers), or the Free Software movement, or the glibc team, or GNU, or whatever other group they seem to be representing at the time.

Not all aspects of "professional" behaviour are necessarily required or appropriate everywhere, but the general concept seems transferrable. For instance, if I'm interacting with someone on behalf of Debian, I should be polite, so that they won't go away thinking "Debian people are rude".

There's a time and a place to draw attention to US government policies, but I don't think the glibc reference manual is it. If GNU manuals make political points about Free Software, that's at least a relevant topic (although reference documentation about particular functions wouldn't seem like a great place for that, and indeed the political parts of GNU manuals tend to be in their own section), but political points about topics unrelated to software seem like something that should be elsewhere - both for the benefit of the glibc manual (a greater proportion of relevant text) and for the benefit of the political point being made (more visible to people who don't routinely read the glibc manual).

Having pseudo-legalistic disclaimers in a reference manual for the sake of political satire also seems inadvisable if the writer wants readers to take *actual* legal disclaimers seriously. (See also Firefox's "This might void your warranty!" warning on entering about:config in the en_US locale, which has been criticized for undermining the rather important point that Firefox specifically doesn't have a warranty; the en_GB localization to "Here be dragons!" seems a lot better, since it's more obviously a whimsical phrasing of a general admonition to be careful.)

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 9, 2018 18:03 UTC (Wed) by Tet (subscriber, #5433) [Link] (2 responses)

"Professional" is a shorthand for the behavioural norms you'd (hope to) find in professional employment.

The problem is, those norms vary wildly depending on your location and environment. What is acceptable in my workplace is almost certainly very different to what is acceptable in yours.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 9, 2018 20:28 UTC (Wed) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

The problem I encounter very often is that this term is frequently poorly. Often, I hear it when the real complaint is very unclear, or when the complainant is really using it as a form of proxy bullying in situations where it's easy to imply unreasonable intent. Even when used in totally reasonable situations, it doesn't get to the point of saying what's wrong specifically, so the target of the complaint may not have any chance to learn from it.

It's not so much that the term is fundamentally bad, but it's often better to dig down one layer to more specifically what norm or expectation has been transgressed. It skips opportunity for misunderstanding, and limits space for crypto-bullying.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 19, 2018 4:17 UTC (Sat) by gus3 (guest, #61103) [Link]

But another meaning of "professional" is that someone has put a thing on their résumé, looking for "professional" employment. That thing could be a major or minor contribution to a GNU project, something that a prospective employer might look up in Google, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, or any number of sites that do background checks.

In that sense, the abort() commentary won't exactly look nice to someone looking for "professional" IT/sysadmin employment.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 10, 2018 7:18 UTC (Thu) by gfernandes (subscriber, #119910) [Link] (1 responses)

If you don't like a manual, go write your own. What you can't do, is change what someone else wrote, no matter how long ago.

Also don't forget that someone else is the reason the library even exists, to begin with.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 10, 2018 12:39 UTC (Thu) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]

You surely can, if you're the current maintainer. In fact it is your _duty_ to do so.

It's a manual -- a living document, constantly modified -- not a work fixed in stone as of it's original publishing.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 7, 2018 19:57 UTC (Mon) by spacemachine (guest, #124210) [Link] (102 responses)

This is the beginning of the end of glibc and probably GNU. It's a really bad sign when people start making non-technical changes to accommodate unreasonable people who would take serious offense at a dumb joke in a man page. It shows the maintainers have lost their judgment. Organizations die one paper cut at a time. RIP

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 7, 2018 20:27 UTC (Mon) by raegis (subscriber, #19594) [Link]

Or, perhaps it's just that when the leadership of an organization gradually changes over time, the values of the organization change with them. I think saying this signals the end of Glibc is a stretch.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 7, 2018 20:40 UTC (Mon) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (69 responses)

It's a joke that ties a technical subject to one that has strong emotional connotations, one that many readers may have personal experience of. As a result, it impairs the primary role of the documentation (ie, making it easy for people to find out what this function does and then get on with their life) and removing it is justifiable at a technical level.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 7, 2018 20:52 UTC (Mon) by spacemachine (guest, #124210) [Link] (53 responses)

With genuine all due respect, this is exactly the sort of convoluted logic that leads projects to eventual demise. Designing documentation for exceedingly rare situations is inefficient design. Reality check: the vast majority of people (including those who have had abortions) would take little to no offense to this joke. Even further, most people wouldn't even realize this is a joke about abortion. https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Aborti...

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 7, 2018 21:10 UTC (Mon) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (49 responses)

It's not about people being offended. You could say something that reminds me of a recently deceased loved one, and that would generate a distracting emotional response in me - but you wouldn't have said anything offensive. If you *knew* that saying that was likely to trigger that response in me it still wouldn't be offensive, but it would be inconsiderate. This joke is a direct reference to a sensitive topic that can be reasonably assumed to have an affect on a proportion of readers, which in turn reduces the utility of the documentation for those users. The removal is entirely justifiable on technical grounds.

(And if most people fail to understand that it's a reference to abortion then it's even worse - you're arguing that most people who read this joke aren't going to understand it, in which case removing it makes the documentation less confusing)

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 7, 2018 21:23 UTC (Mon) by andresfreund (subscriber, #69562) [Link] (1 responses)

I find the joke unfortunate *in that context* and I'd vote for removing it (if I had a vote). Even though I find the global gag rule abhorrent.

But the governance implications are the really concerning thing for me. Allowing RMS to come in and make calls over the actual maintainers' objections on random small things isn't healthy. I think there's cases where non-majority calls could be reasonable, but I utterly fail to see how that could be a case of hat. It's quite the pattern over time and projects too.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 4:21 UTC (Tue) by warrax (subscriber, #103205) [Link]

> Allowing RMS to come in and make calls over the actual maintainers' objections on random small things isn't healthy.

Yes, this struck me as being a pretty absurd style of "leadership".

RMS even says (paraphrased) "I'm usually very hands-off, but THIS... THIS is where I draw the line" on a completely innocuous change which has absolutely no impact on the technical content of the manual.

(Not that this is remotely any sort of existential crisis for glibc as some have claimed.)

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 7, 2018 21:25 UTC (Mon) by spacemachine (guest, #124210) [Link] (45 responses)

Replace "it's offensive" with "it invokes an emotional response" in my point and it still stands.

I honestly don't think that reading the words that constitute the joke will invoke an emotional response in any significant proportion of its readers and, in the rare case that it does, they most likely have much bigger problems than the GNU manual.

Now if you genuinely think that a significant proportion of the population will be emotionally affected by those words, then by all means remove it. That just doesn't reflect the reality in which I live.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 7, 2018 21:32 UTC (Mon) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (44 responses)

> Now if you genuinely think that a significant proportion of the population will be emotionally affected by those words, then by all means remove it.

Ok so you agree that it's entirely technically justifiable to remove it if this is the case?

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 7, 2018 21:59 UTC (Mon) by spacemachine (guest, #124210) [Link] (43 responses)

>> Now if you genuinely think that a significant proportion of the population will be emotionally affected by those words, then by all means remove it.

> Ok so you agree that it's entirely technically justifiable to remove it if this is the case?

Yes, it's reasonable to get rid of it if it genuinely prevents a significant percentage of its audience from understanding the document. Again, that is likely not the case here.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 2:57 UTC (Tue) by likryol (guest, #115542) [Link] (42 responses)

Thought experiment: 100 people read a joke like this (maybe not exactly this joke in this subject), 99 are not negatively emotionally affected but 1 person is. It actually ruins their day. They decide to stop pursuing the technical subject for a period or possibly for good because they already experience enough of this insensitivity day-to-day; they don't need it in their deep technical work too.

Was it worth it? Maybe like 10 of those other 99 people got a small snort out of the joke, the other 89 ignored it because it's noise and we're adults reading glibc documentation, not 13 year old boys sneaking into Deadpool.

It's insensitive and useless. It disgusts a subset of people that could be valuable contributors.

If anything it needs to be removed purely to put RMS in his place and establish this as a technical project and not a repository of his outdated and sophomoric jokes.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 3:25 UTC (Tue) by spacemachine (guest, #124210) [Link] (38 responses)

If someone quits a technical field because of this extremely subtle and innocuous joke, it's likely they would have quit anyway since everyday life is orders of magnitudes more difficult.

We can't design our systems around these hypothetical and extremely rare worst cases. The cost is too high and the benefits are too low. No reasonable person would otherwise make trade-offs like those.

Come back to reality, the joke is harmless, RMS is not a monster, let it go.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 3:40 UTC (Tue) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (37 responses)

The cost is minuscule (it's actually easier not to write these things than write them in the first place) and the potential benefit large (more people use free software, and potentially more people contribute to free software). What metrics are you using?

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 8:35 UTC (Tue) by spacemachine (guest, #124210) [Link] (32 responses)

It's not the joke itself that's at stake here. It's the decision making process. It can't be "this offends someone out there therefore let's take it out." Sooner or later you have nothing left (in terms of cultural values).

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 8:40 UTC (Tue) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (31 responses)

I'm not arguing that it should be removed because it's offensive, so this doesn't seem like a relevant objection.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 8:47 UTC (Tue) by spacemachine (guest, #124210) [Link] (30 responses)

Sub offensive with whatever judgment you have of the joke. Point still applies.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 9:02 UTC (Tue) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (29 responses)

"This is likely to discourage some number of people from contributing to the project, does nothing to encourage additional people to contribute to the project, and serves as a distraction from the actual purpose of the work that contains it, therefore let's take it out"?

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 9:28 UTC (Tue) by spacemachine (guest, #124210) [Link] (18 responses)

Yes, the decision making process of "this will discourage some small % of potential contributors so let's take it out" is precisely the wrong way to make decisions. The cost of setting that precedent is the organization around the project itself.

The right way to make decisions is "this will encourage a large % of potential contributors so let's add it." Glibc is very far from that. Like I said, RIP.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 9:40 UTC (Tue) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (17 responses)

Ok, so that sounds like you don't think adding it in the first place was justifiable. What's the problem with reversing that (incorrect) decision?

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 10:57 UTC (Tue) by spacemachine (guest, #124210) [Link] (16 responses)

The problem is that the justification for the original patch in question is weak. It's a solution for a problem that doesn't exist. When those types of changes start being encouraged, it's the beginning of the end. The project has no direction. People are now wasting their precious limited time looking for, preparing, and submitting one-line patches that have virtually no effect on the project. Then they go ahead and pat themselves on the back for having a productive day. There are hundreds of open bugs on bugzilla, but they are ignored in favor of these pseudo productive patches. This is the future of glibc.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 11:02 UTC (Tue) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (13 responses)

> It's a solution for a problem that doesn't exist.

The problem exists.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 11:13 UTC (Tue) by spacemachine (guest, #124210) [Link] (10 responses)

Hypothetically yes, but not in any way that solving it will drastically improve the state of glibc for its users. It's not that it's not okay to fix small things but there should be good reason for it, not some hypothetical "what if," especially when so many other things are broken. Has any actual user ever complained about this joke?

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 12:38 UTC (Tue) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link] (1 responses)

Fixing small things should only require small reasons. If you have to think very carefully for days, consult dozens of people, do a cost-benefit analysis and write up an extensive rationale document every time you clean up a bit of code or a bit of documentation, it clearly won't be worth the effort. Then the project will collapse under the combined weight of a million tiny problems that nobody bothered fixing.

Efficiently fixing trivial issues seems like a requirement for sustainable software development, not a sign of its demise. (And it sounds like this patch was being handled efficiently until Stallman got involved). Sometimes projects will explicitly talk about paper cuts (minor usability bugs that are individually unimportant, but a user who encounters dozens of them will be strongly put off) and technical debt (problems that weren't worth fixing in the short term, but their cost will accumulate until they seriously impede development) because they're aware they need to deal with those minor issues - it's tempting to ignore them and focus on the highest-priority issues instead, but it's important for the project's long-term health to work on the little things too.

(Besides, in this specific case it's easy to find people like https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48445031/why-would-it... who seem genuinely confused by the statement and wasted an appreciable amount of time trying to understand it, so it's not a hypothetical problem.)

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 13:17 UTC (Tue) by spacemachine (guest, #124210) [Link]

An obscure stack overflow thread does not justify this as a problem that is holding back glibc in any significant way. Do you genuinely believe removing this joke has moved the needle at all?

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 12:58 UTC (Tue) by likryol (guest, #115542) [Link] (7 responses)

You're right, removing it won't (at least in the short term and likely not in the long term) drastically change anything for anyone. You've been saying this is a waste of time while other bugs are still festering, but consider for a second how much time it actually took to make this change happen. Someone saw the "joke", deleted it, committed it. What is that like 30 seconds of work? This isn't a bug that needed hours of time to discover and fix technically or socially, and the quick change could have some benefits for the project in the form of more contributors.

The real issue (and time waster) was when RMS came in and exerted authority he no longer deserves to have (I understand he is an ideological lead and not someone doing technical work, correct me if I'm wrong) thus creating an argument that anyone watching from the outside will see RMS as an overstepping grossly immature leader. Again, not for the joke but because of the authority he is trying to exercise over something so minuscule. If anything deserves "RIP for glibc" it's his behavior, not the 30 seconds of work it took to remove a dumb joke. And if jokes like that aren't turning people away, it will be seeing arguments like his unfold that will make potential contributors go "oooh...maybe I don't want to get into the middle of that culture..."

And all of that you could ultimately blame on someone making minor changes that don't need to happen, fine whatever maybe you're right. But the trigger for this argument and his excessive use of authority could have been more technical and we'd have the same argument at hand, it's probably happened before. This specific instance is easy to separate the technical from the not and so it ends up being reported on.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 13:11 UTC (Tue) by spacemachine (guest, #124210) [Link] (2 responses)

Start to finish it takes much longer than 30 seconds for an outside contributor to get that change checked in. What kind of engineer goes through that just to remove a dumb joke? Those are the kinds of contributors glibc has these days. These aren't the types that make a project great.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 19:15 UTC (Tue) by rra (subscriber, #99804) [Link] (1 responses)

Do you follow glibc development closely? I ask because to me this is a bizarre statement given how dramatically better glibc has gotten in the past few years, in ways that are the exact opposite of what you're implying. It makes me think you're out of touch with current glibc development.

Right now, glibc is blessed with numerous people who are tackling large-scale, impactful work in substantial patch sets on topics ranging broadly from better standards compliance to security improvements to Y2038 issues. I have never seen the project healthier, and I've been following it for over a decade. Even the Hurd port is being resurrected from the dead, which regardless of one's opinions of the importance of this to the broader community is definitely not a trivial or minor effort. And this is happening without, so far as I can see, any slowing down of other work, which speaks to the breadth and capacity of the current development community.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 9, 2018 11:35 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

I concur. glibc's gone from being a project that was verging on moribund to a project that's so active that keeping up with the mailing list alone, let alone the patch flow, is quite a lot of work. It's *lively*, and the changes taking place there are extremely nontrivial. (Even some of the changes with no functional effect -- e.g. classifying every entry point according to its multithread-safety.)

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 17, 2018 22:37 UTC (Thu) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link] (1 responses)

I can't blame RMS for not wanting his project to be taken over by ideologists. It's called Free Software for a reason. Freedom includes the freedom to say and write potentially hurtful things. And for the record, I *don't* think that joke is actually hurtful, and so far nobody has been able to produce an example of a person who was actually hurt or offended by this silly little joke. I don't believe there is such a person.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 24, 2018 17:34 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

If you think glibc is, in any meaningful sense, "RMS's project", you are deluding yourself. Before this thread, Richard had a total of five commits, all in 1995, all to either config.sub or config.guess, none more then 50 lines. (Its history starts in 1989, when the first RCS commit was made.)

This was Roland's project, then Roland and Ulrich's and a few others. Now it is a shared, community-governed project, and frankly RMS's trying to exert dictatorial control over it feels quite offensive, given that there is no sign of him in that community of developers at all.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 25, 2018 18:54 UTC (Fri) by shmget (guest, #58347) [Link] (1 responses)

"You're right, removing it won't (at least in the short term and likely not in the long term) drastically change anything for anyone"

leaving it would not drastically change anything either, and would have taken 0 seconds.

"The real issue (and time waster)" is the removal patch. which created a Streisand effect on an obscure joke that pretty much no-one was aware of.

The stackoverflow link above, when I looked at it had been vewed 790 times.. and I bet most of it was because it was linked above.
but, I been consulting man pages for years, on myny different boxes and distro. I've never seen the 'joke' before
and it still not visible in any 'man abort' I've just ran on a few varied boxes.

iow: that joke has very little visibility, certainly epsilon wrt to 'floss user'. removing it will have 0 effect wrt to drafting new contributor, it it will have a small cumulative effect wrt to discouraging existing ones.... just like the wave of pronoun-war patches inflicted on floss, which had real effect of getting an actual maintainer to call it quit, for what SJW swear were hordes of 'potential contributor' that were not showing up because of it.... yeah .. how things are going in node.js world ?

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 27, 2018 0:52 UTC (Sun) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

I've never seen the 'joke' before and it still not visible in any 'man abort' I've just ran on a few varied boxes.

That's probably because it isn't in the man page, it's in the Info documentation. Still doesn't make it funny.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 17, 2018 22:19 UTC (Thu) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]

I'm sure it does exist in your head.

Who controls glibc?

Posted Aug 1, 2018 11:57 UTC (Wed) by diegor (subscriber, #1967) [Link]

If people is offended by abort, we should remove the abort() function. The joke does'nt add anything.

So why we don't censor every reference to "kill children" (process). Maybe someone have lost his kid, and be reminded of her lost.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 12:24 UTC (Tue) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (1 responses)

There are hundreds of open bugs on bugzilla, but they are ignored in favor of these pseudo productive patches. This is the future of glibc.

So Stallman thinks that as the notional “project leader” he gets to decide that his lame paragraph (I won't dignify it by calling it a “joke”) must stay in, but he doesn't think that as the notional “project leader” he ought to see about getting those hundreds of open bugs fixed? Some leadership.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 17, 2018 22:38 UTC (Thu) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]

RMS always made it quite clear that he cares about freedom and not about software quality.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 17:08 UTC (Tue) by fuhchee (subscriber, #40059) [Link] (9 responses)

Counterpoint: "The presence of less-than-100%-PC humour is likely to *attract* some number of developers to the project. Therefore let's leave it in."

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 22:12 UTC (Tue) by jubal (subscriber, #67202) [Link] (8 responses)

Re-counterpoint: unfounded assumption.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 22:22 UTC (Tue) by fuhchee (subscriber, #40059) [Link] (5 responses)

Well the point is what is the burden of proof? I could point to ... myself ?! ... as someone who generally prefers a more relaxed type of community. I'm not the only one. So this is a reciprocal of the "if it turns someone, anyone away, it's bad" argument.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 23:22 UTC (Tue) by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604) [Link] (2 responses)

Interesting point. I usually sometimes find myself re-phrasing and re-phrasing commit messages and even code comments over and over, especially when it's correcting a mistake someone made, at least at work. It's easier for private projects, but the potential to offend genuinely scares me.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 10, 2018 11:16 UTC (Thu) by zenaan (guest, #3778) [Link] (1 responses)

To paraphrase you: "The work to avoid offending the various categories of snowflake safe-space-junkies, can be a real cost, can be significant, is a detriment, and the chilling effect this all has is real."

THAT is the reason this particular joke (by RMS) should stay in the glibc manual.

"The triggered" and "the oppressed" are redefining permissible speech - which is ironically apropos RMS' original joke.

The redefinition of allowed speech is dangerous and literally tyrannical in the underlying intent of doing so (whether conscious, or unconscious) - refer Dr Jordan Peterson who puts this exact point so succinctly.

Create your world, folks,

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 10, 2018 22:11 UTC (Thu) by tvld (guest, #59052) [Link]

You keep advertising this opinion throughout this comment thread. But do you actually know the glibc developer community? Do you know what they think works well for them, and what helped them make all the technical progress on the project in the recent years? Have you attended a GNU Tools Cauldron, for example, to see how they work together and what kind of environment the actual developers want? The glibc community *is* building the environment they want.

Speaking as someone who has contributed to glibc in the recent years, my impression was that nobody was or felt bullied. Developers just *wanted* to be friendly to each other. IOW, you misjudge what drives this.

There's nothing wrong with a majority wanting to be friendly people in the first place and not being interested in bothering with unfriendly behavior.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 9, 2018 0:02 UTC (Wed) by likryol (guest, #115542) [Link] (1 responses)

I hear you but I think we can have a "relaxed community" without making questionable jokes in an official, long lived, and widely seen media.

Also I derailed the original point of this comment thread which is I think to say that if anything is adding up to "RIP glibc" it isn't the removal of OT content, it's the BDFL being excessively authoritarian.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 10, 2018 16:43 UTC (Thu) by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604) [Link]

I think that's also something people in this debate often forget, the intent of the original committer is probably not to censor RMS or derail the project by starting this debate.

Who controls glibc?

Posted Jun 6, 2018 17:32 UTC (Wed) by clicea (guest, #75492) [Link] (1 responses)

Have a counterexample: I've stayed very far away from Rust just because they seem very heavy-handed on policing their developers.

Who controls glibc?

Posted Jun 7, 2018 16:27 UTC (Thu) by peter-b (guest, #66996) [Link]

Yes, I agree that the Rust community moderation policy works really well at fostering a productive and friendly atmosphere.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 17, 2018 22:17 UTC (Thu) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link] (3 responses)

The benefit is 0 because nobody has yet been able to demonstrate that *anybody* was actually offended by the joke, let alone anybody who actually makes a difference. OTOH, I find this whole debate extremely off-putting, and so do plenty of other people, which is something you seem to completely ignore.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 18, 2018 8:40 UTC (Fri) by gevaerts (subscriber, #21521) [Link] (1 responses)

Why should anyone care about you finding anything off-putting? Isn't the whole point of most of your comments that that's fine? Why are you being such a crybaby?

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 18, 2018 9:33 UTC (Fri) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]

The point is that nobody has yet been able to produce an example of a person who was *actually* hurt by that joke while there clearly are people who are annoyed by this sort of political correctness nonsense. LLVM lost a major contributor recently because of that sort thing.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 18, 2018 12:45 UTC (Fri) by sdalley (subscriber, #18550) [Link]

Yes, this whole debate *is* extremely off-putting, which is why I'm astonished that you're still blathering away about it when our esteemed editor has already told you to shut up.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 17, 2018 22:11 UTC (Thu) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link] (2 responses)

> Thought experiment: 100 people read a joke like this (maybe not exactly this joke in this subject), 99 are not negatively emotionally affected but 1 person is. It actually ruins their day. They decide to stop pursuing the technical subject for a period or possibly for good because they already experience enough of this insensitivity day-to-day; they don't need it in their deep technical work too.
Show me *one* cases where this joke has that effect. Because if you can't, you're just making shit up

> It's insensitive and useless. It disgusts a subset of people that could be valuable contributors.
So what about the people who are disgusted by this sort of SJW drama? Because I know I am. But you know what? I'd still contribute to glibc if I were interested, despite this nonsense. That's because I'm a grownup.

What you don't seem to understand is that the world is not a safe space. If you are in a psychological state that doesn't allow you to tolerate this kind of joke, you need to sort that out (see a therapist or something), because the world's not going to change to accommodate that. Nor should it.

That's enough

Posted May 17, 2018 22:15 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (1 responses)

OK, only warning. You've had three postings to insult others, you need to stop here, please.

Remember: this was not an article about a joke.

What are you even talking about?

Posted May 17, 2018 22:32 UTC (Thu) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]

I honestly didn't mean to offend anybody here, and I'm not even sure why you would think that.

If you're thinking of the “see a therapist” thing, it wasn't meant as an insult. A functional human being needs to be able to tolerate this kind of joke, and if he or she can't, then yes, I believe seeing a therapist is the right thing to do.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 2:25 UTC (Tue) by riking (subscriber, #95706) [Link]

>... recently deceased loved one...
> If you *knew* that saying that was likely to trigger that response in me it still wouldn't be offensive, but it would be inconsiderate.

I disagree in regards to the severity here – that's not just "inconsiderate," that's flat-out malicious.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 7, 2018 23:28 UTC (Mon) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link] (1 responses)

Designing documentation for exceedingly rare situations is inefficient design? That seems a bizarre way to state what's going on here.

From the "designing documentation", how about there's advantages to avoiding tangents, even technical tangents, that make the documentation longer for little value to the average reader. There are probably a host of questions about how abort() works on various systems and its portability that this section doesn't answer, and it's wasting 10% of the documentation on a political "joke"? Cut that junk and go on.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 7, 2018 23:29 UTC (Mon) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link]

And yeah, I do appreciate the point RMS is making. It's still not relevant to the documentation.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 6:48 UTC (Tue) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]

> With genuine all due respect, this is exactly the sort of convoluted logic that leads projects to eventual demise. Designing documentation for exceedingly rare situations is inefficient design. [...] Even further, most people wouldn't even realize this is a joke about abortion.

It's difficult then to see why you're expending so much effort arguing in favour of a frankly terrible joke which would not be enlightening to 'most people'. Even with 'most people' ruled out of the audience, you'd further have to rule out the people who were already aware of the proposed legislation: it doesn't help to 'raise awareness' if you're only hitting a limited echo chamber.

If you don't want to design for corner cases, take it out (it just isn't helpful), and replace it with an explicit statement which clearly informs the reader, makes a well-argued position, and suggests how to take action. That's so clear and unambiguous that anyone will be able to follow.

Oh, and removing it also has the benefit of not raising negative reactions in others. Be it because people are offended by the discussion, or because they've had personal experience and it brings only an unexpected and unwelcome reminder, somewhere it has no place appearing and adds no value.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 7, 2018 20:58 UTC (Mon) by shemminger (subscriber, #5739) [Link]

Yup, the joke was is just RMS graffiti. With about as much useful impact as that.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 7:50 UTC (Tue) by lkundrak (subscriber, #43452) [Link] (12 responses)

If I read it correctly, the joke is basically a statement in support of abortion rights. If anything, wouldn't the "strong emotional connotations" be likely to be positive in the first place?

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 8:37 UTC (Tue) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (11 responses)

For someone who's had an abortion, in a society that repeatedly tells people that doing so is shameful? I know multiple people who are strongly pro abortion rights but also very sensitive to jokes that reference them due to their own personal experiences.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 18:29 UTC (Tue) by spacemachine (guest, #124210) [Link] (1 responses)

Are they programmers?

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 18:32 UTC (Tue) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

Yes, they are - but remember that people often develop into programmers after they've already been exposed to a project, and their perception then may still influence their desire to contribute later.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 17, 2018 21:53 UTC (Thu) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link] (8 responses)

> For someone who's had an abortion, in a society that repeatedly tells people that doing so is shameful?
So you're saying that telling these people (in a humorous form) that they *should* have the right to get an abortion (and hence, implicitly, that it was wrong of other people to shame them for it) is also somehow offensive? What kind of logic is that?!

Besides, the world is not a safe space. If you're an adult and you can't handle a joke, go see a therapist.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 17, 2018 22:57 UTC (Thu) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (7 responses)

Where did I say it was offensive?

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 18, 2018 6:29 UTC (Fri) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link] (6 responses)

The point is: if somebody can't handle this sort of joke, they are not human beings capable of functioning in a free society. A society where you can't make political jokes - whether it's because you'll be locked up like in the country I was born in, or because you risk societal death for triggering some crybaby - is not a free society. The problem is that by purging this kind of silly little thing you're establishing an atmosphere that will prevent people from making jokes (or even serious statements) that would actually *not* affect anyone negatively out of sheer fear that they might and that they'll be judged for that.

In fact I would argue that that is already happening in the US, especially on campus. And you have yet to prove that the joke has *actually* negatively impacted anyone.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 18, 2018 6:59 UTC (Fri) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

Ok so you're arguing against something that I didn't actually say

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 18, 2018 7:15 UTC (Fri) by karkhaz (subscriber, #99844) [Link] (4 responses)

> A society where you can't make political jokes - whether it's because you'll be locked up like in the country I was born in, or because you risk societal death for triggering some crybaby

Nobody suggested either of the above consequences happen to rms. Although I recall various other incidents that I suppose you're referring to, where a developer was pilloried for making offensive comments, this is not one of them. The only "punishment" here is the removal of the joke from the manual.

> by purging this kind of silly little thing you're establishing an atmosphere that will prevent people from making jokes

In this case, I don't see much evidence that anybody is calling for censorship of abortion jokes anywhere outside the technical reference. This was a patch to remove the joke from the manual, not a mandate to prevent rms from making these jokes on his own spare time.

> The point is: if somebody can't handle this sort of joke

The strongest argument I've heard from removing this from the manual isn't that some people cannot "handle" the joke, that it is offensive, or anything of the sort. Rather, it's a totally inappropriate comment to have in a technical manual.

(Somewhat contrived) analogy: suppose that in the documentation for posix_spawn, rms had written a snarky cartouche about his favourite restaurant for eating caviar. Totally uncontroversial, nobody gets offended. But the comment ought to be removed on exactly the same grounds as the abortion one: it doesn't belong in a technical manual, and the vast majority of readers didn't ask to be belaboured with rms's sense of humor.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 18, 2018 9:35 UTC (Fri) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link] (3 responses)

> Rather, it's a totally inappropriate comment to have in a technical manual.
I disagree with that notion. I don't see anything wrong with having a joke in a technical manual.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 18, 2018 23:10 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (2 responses)

I don't have a problem with jokes in a technical manual but I prefer it if the jokes are actually funny.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 19, 2018 9:17 UTC (Sat) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link] (1 responses)

OK, suppose there was an absolutely hilarious joke about US abortion laws in the glibc manual. Would you support that?

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 19, 2018 10:26 UTC (Sat) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

OK, let me rephrase that. I have no problem with jokes in a technical manual as long as the jokes are actually funny and are about the technical subject matter at hand.

This would exclude jokes about US abortion laws, however hilarious, in the glibc manual because the connection – via the word “abort” – is pretty tenuous at best and may not even work in translation (both because the target language may not use the same vocabulary, and because the legal situation around abortion may be different so the “joke” is not funny at all). It would also exclude political propaganda camouflaging as lame jokes in general. The reason for this is that when you're trying to be entertaining in a technical manual, it is best to do that in a way that, as far as possible, all readers of the manual will find enjoyable, not just the ones who happen to agree with your politics.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 17, 2018 21:46 UTC (Thu) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]

As an adult you're supposed to be able to handle jokes that you don't like. If you can't, then you are the problem and not the one who made the joke.

Oh, and since you mentioned personal experiences, here's mine. I was born in a country where people would be locked up for telling the wrong kind of joke. Now granted, nobody has proposed that (yet), but a society where you have to walk on eggshells all the time because some crybaby may be offended is not a free society, and it's sad that things have come this far in the U. S..

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 7, 2018 21:06 UTC (Mon) by andresfreund (subscriber, #69562) [Link]

So that's what you're concerned about, rather than RMS making unilateral project decisions about a project he's not contributed to in ages, overriding the actual maintainers?

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 1:20 UTC (Tue) by interalia (subscriber, #26615) [Link] (4 responses)

It's all in the article title, which isn't "Who thinks this is too PC?" but "Who controls glibc?".

It doesn't actually matter that this disagreement is about some joke in documentation. Suppose Stallman insisted that a function should return EAGAIN in some obscure corner case despite the maintainers thinking it was fine that it does not. Do you think they should defer to Stallman simply because he said so? Is he actually the BDFL he claims to be if the maintainers don't recognise that authority?

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 2:12 UTC (Tue) by spacemachine (guest, #124210) [Link] (3 responses)

RMS ultimately controls Glibc, whether he's benevolent or not. Whoever thought otherwise was deluding themselves. They are free to fork if they want but the GNU project is under the authority of RMS, no question about it.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 3:43 UTC (Tue) by rra (subscriber, #99804) [Link]

Do you think it's a good thing for the GNU project to be under the single authority of RMS?

Speaking as an FSF associate member, I don't, and I say that despite a great deal of respect for what RMS has accomplished. Any governance model that empowers one person that way seems rather dangerous to me. It's also not compatible with how tax-exempt non-profits should be run in the United States. (I realize that many of them, particularly ones founded by charismatic leaders, are run that way, but I think that's a bug, not a feature.)

The Free Software Foundation, like any other tax-exempt US non-profit, has a board of directors who are legally responsible for the actions of the FSF as a whole. They certainly are, and should be, reluctant to override RMS, but they should be capable of doing so if the situation warrants. (Jokes in manuals definitely don't; questions of maintenance authority for well-run GNU projects might.)

If RMS wants an organization that he solely and exclusively controls, well, don't make it a tax-exempt non-profit. Receiving preferential treatment from society and government because your organization supports the public good comes with an obligation to be responsible to the public and a board of directors for one's actions.

And even short of that (I certainly hope this particular issue doesn't get escalated to that level), devolution of authority is generally a good thing. GNU maintainers should be empowered to make decisions about the software they maintain in areas that aren't foundational. And this fairly obviously isn't foundational -- how many people reading this even knew that passage was there? Given that, how much influence could it have possibly had over the political question it tries to address?

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 3:53 UTC (Tue) by interalia (subscriber, #26615) [Link] (1 responses)

Maybe it depends how we define "control" in this situation. No doubt the FSF has ultimate power to appoint and replace maintainers of GNU projects, but does Stallman have sole power to do this on the FSF's behalf?

Even if he does, it would be interesting to know the political ramifications of doing so. For example, the Queen of Australia (a title held by the Queen of the United Kingdom) appoints and replaces our governor-general. Formally she has the complete power to do so, but de facto she does so only on the advice of Australia's Prime Minister, and it would be a constitutional/international incident if she "interfered" by declining to follow our PM's advice. So in practice she does not have control of who Australia's governor-general is.

Stallman may or may not formally be in control of GNU libc, but is he willing to replace all its maintainers in order to keep this one line?

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 9, 2018 4:05 UTC (Wed) by lxoliva (guest, #40702) [Link]

I don't get why the FSF is even brought up here. The FSF doesn't control GNU any more than GNU controls the FSF. One is an independent incorporated foundation, the other is an operating system, and an independent non-incorporated operating system development project. Richard founded and presides the FSF, and he's also founder and leader of GNU (Chief GNUisance), and he's also the founder of the Free Software movement, and more.

Saying the FSF has ultimate power to appoint and replace maintainers of GNU projects is not true at all. That who appoints and replaces maintainers of GNU projects is the Chief GNUisance. The FSF has nothing to do with it.

The FSF manages copyrights over some GNU projects, publishes software licenses used by most GNU projects, but it doesn't control GNU.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 9:25 UTC (Tue) by lordcheeto (guest, #124253) [Link] (23 responses)

This isn't really about the joke anymore. It was removed because a patch was submitted, there were no technical grounds to object to it being applied, and a consensus was reached in accordance with the rules of the community. While there was a comment on the joke from RMS saying not to remove it, the community should not be subject to his iron deference, has been maintained without his input, and this was not in the official Invariant Sections. He is welcome to his opinion, and is on the mailing list should he wish to express it. He did not, no one else did (I'm not counting this joke), and it was removed after 2 days of clear affirmations supporting the patch removing the joke.

This is about RMS pulling rank after the fact, and Alexandre Oliva ignoring the community principles in reverting it. Specifically, "Cases likely to need more review and a longer period before pushing a commit include: changes that have previously been controversial."

The removal was not controversial—no one objected, and AFAIK, this has no historical (much less recent) controversy surrounding it. It had clearly become controversial by the point the reversion was made by Alexandre.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 10:44 UTC (Tue) by spacemachine (guest, #124210) [Link] (22 responses)

My point is that the the existence and check-in of the original patch is evidence that the glibc maintainers and contributors aren't really focusing on important changes to glibc. Someone spent like 30 minutes or likely more preparing this diff and submitting it. I don't know about you but I like to spend my increasingly limited programming time actually, you know, programming and solving hard problems.

That's why it seems like the beginning of the end of glibc. People are spending their time focusing on random things to remove on the basis of it potentially offending someone, instead of focusing on important changes that will solve actual problems. RIP

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 12:02 UTC (Tue) by gevaerts (subscriber, #21521) [Link] (1 responses)

Do *you* never do something that someone might find less important than something else you could be doing?

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 18:31 UTC (Tue) by spacemachine (guest, #124210) [Link]

In shared project... No, I don't.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 13:42 UTC (Tue) by siddhesh (guest, #64914) [Link] (10 responses)

The patch author is not a maintainer, (s)he was a one-off contributor and the first review didn't even assume that this is going to blow up the way it did, so it must have been a no-brainer that one would get out of their way as they take a sip of their coffee. Heck, if Zack hadn't gotten to it for another day, then maybe I would have installed it.

But please don't let facts get in the way.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 18:33 UTC (Tue) by spacemachine (guest, #124210) [Link]

None of these facts (of which I was alresdy aware) refute anything I wrote.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 18:40 UTC (Tue) by spacemachine (guest, #124210) [Link] (8 responses)

Additionally the contributed and committed aren't innocent here. There were clear instructions not to remove the joke in the source code. They were intentionally undermining RMS from the start. It's clear they were maliciously hoping he wouldn't notice.

It's time to stop

Posted May 8, 2018 19:23 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (7 responses)

So at this point we understand well that you think little of the glibc project and you are not impressed with the patch. Could I ask that this stuff come to an end at this point? I don't see much value in arguing it further.

It's time to stop

Posted May 8, 2018 20:20 UTC (Tue) by spacemachine (guest, #124210) [Link] (6 responses)

Thanks for the tap (and the article), I'll honor your request. RMS should fire these maintainers, it's clear they don't respect him. Sneaky underhanded behavior kills projects.

It's time to stop

Posted May 9, 2018 8:34 UTC (Wed) by lordcheeto (guest, #124253) [Link] (5 responses)

Calling it sneaky is uncalled-for. This was the removal of a few lines of a non-technical, outdated joke comment that hasn't been touched in 26 years. 2 days passed between when the patch was submitted and when it was installed, with no serious objections. That was plenty of time for a change of this narrow magnitude. There was no reason for Zach to believe that this seemingly innocuous removal would cause such a schism.

It's time to stop

Posted May 12, 2018 14:45 UTC (Sat) by niner (guest, #26151) [Link]

"I'll honor your request". Goes on to completely ignore the request starting with the next sentence...

It's time to stop

Posted May 25, 2018 19:43 UTC (Fri) by shmget (guest, #58347) [Link] (3 responses)

"outdated joke"

not at all.. the Global Gag Rule has been re-instated January 23, 2017.

It's time to stop

Posted May 27, 2018 1:15 UTC (Sun) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (2 responses)

This is something that US presidents do as a matter of course as one of the first things after they've been inaugurated. They can do it by executive order without having to involve Congress, so it's an easy PR win with their voters. Reagan came up with it in the first place in 1984, then Bill Clinton rescinded it in 1993 and George W. Bush put it back on the books in 2001 until Obama got rid of it again in 2009. It is safe to assume that whichever Democrat takes over from Trump in (hopefully) 2021 will immediately throw it out once more, etc., ad infinitum.

In any case, the “joke” can't really be referring to the “global gag rule” because the “global gag rule” has nothing to do with domestic censorship (because 1st amendment) – it says that the USA will only fund NGOs in other countries if they aver that they do not “perform or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning”. Originally this applied only to family-planning funds; Trump's twist is that now it also extends to other types of health assistance, including HIV assistance.

It's time to stop

Posted Jun 9, 2018 1:39 UTC (Sat) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link] (1 responses)

The fact that it gets rescinded & reinstated so often is another reason why it's better removed, I guess, otherwise the release manager (who might not be from the US) has to check the current status of US law before every release…

It's time to stop

Posted Jun 9, 2018 10:39 UTC (Sat) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

That would only be an actual issue if the FSF was (a) headquartered outside the USA and (b) receiving funds from the US government for its family-planning or other medical work. Since neither of these premises apply, the “global gag rule” has no bearing on the glibc manual.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 13:56 UTC (Tue) by lordcheeto (guest, #124253) [Link] (8 responses)

Every open source project has small commits that are just typo fixes, documentation updates, etc. from people that happened to stumble upon it. Often from people that have never submitted a patch or pull request before, as appears to be the case here. It gets their feet wet. It introduces them to the community and their contribution guidelines.

This is a good thing.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 18:36 UTC (Tue) by spacemachine (guest, #124210) [Link] (7 responses)

This was not a typo. This was a clear contradiction of the instructions that were in the source code. Everyone knew they were disobeying a request by RMS. An innocent first time contributor wouldn't do this. The contributor had an agenda from the beginning.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 18:54 UTC (Tue) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link] (6 responses)

Now you've gone off the deep end. Every sentence in your last post is untrue (well, except for the "not a typo"). But you know what? It doesn't matter. The issue remains not the fate of a stupid joke but the question of whether RMS does or does not have veto authority over a decision made by the development team. Whether this issue was exposed unintentionally or through deliberate provocation, it's now out in the open.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 20:17 UTC (Tue) by spacemachine (guest, #124210) [Link] (5 responses)

You can feign ignorance but diff doesn't lie, it was provocation. 1000 things fo fix about glibc but instead the lines with clear instructions to leave alone were targetted. When patches with the purpose of provocation start to surface, it's the beginning of the end. RMS should fire all of them.

Request #2

Posted May 8, 2018 20:18 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (4 responses)

I'll repeat: we get it. We know how you feel about all of this. Now would be a good time to stop posting these, please.

Request #2

Posted May 8, 2018 20:50 UTC (Tue) by spacemachine (guest, #124210) [Link] (3 responses)

Separate question, why am I being asked to stop when it's other people that keep responding to me and ignoring my points? Why does it matter how many comments there are?

Request #2

Posted May 8, 2018 21:14 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (2 responses)

It is my wish for everybody to stop this particular back-and-forth, not just you. But, of the 111 comments on this article (as of this writing) 22 — a full 20% — were written by you. That suggests that you're the one driving this particular cycle; if you stop, I suspect that most others will as well. Though somebody will inevitably respond to one of your comments; I hope you'll be able to let that slide.

"Number of comments" is not necessarily a problem, but large numbers of repetitive comments can only drown out the signal in the conversation overall.

Calling supporters of this change "malicious" is also heading into personal attack territory, which is not something we want here.

You are not unique in any of the above, but you stood out enough to make you an obvious intervention point when I wanted to calm things down in general. I appreciate your willingness to respect that request.

(Incidentally, I almost didn't write this article at all out of fear for what the comment stream could be. It has not come even close to what we had imagined; for that we are grateful to everybody involved.)

Request #2

Posted May 8, 2018 22:19 UTC (Tue) by andresfreund (subscriber, #69562) [Link]

> (Incidentally, I almost didn't write this article at all out of fear for what the comment stream could be. It has not come even close to what we had imagined; for that we are grateful to everybody involved.)

I think that's a complicating factor. But I still appreciate the article. Sometimes I wonder if this kind of article couldn't stand having comments disabled. Or at least rate-limited to one an hour or such.

Request #2

Posted Nov 8, 2018 17:03 UTC (Thu) by deepfire (guest, #26138) [Link]

Jonathan, I think the topic touches an interesting phenomenon that runs deep in our society.

There are people who abhor the increasing influence that political correctness has on the freedom of expression, and so are extremely sensitive on any infringement -- in a way that is not entirely dissymmetric with how the people representing the political correctness side feel.

This is a profound issue, there is no mistake. And while I appreciate that formally the topic of the article is elsewhere, I'm sure we'll be back to discuss it again and again. I don't think it's really useful to try fighting the wind in this case..

That said, this is your forum, Jonathan, and I appreciate all the work you have put into it over the years!

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 11, 2018 14:53 UTC (Fri) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link]

I agree. I think the joke is in poor taste, and totally disagree with RMS based on personal views.
I also support and defend the right for jokes I find tasteless to exist and clutter manuals.
Wretched taste is the a key defense against Politically Correct totalitarianism.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 7, 2018 20:23 UTC (Mon) by jdulaney (subscriber, #83672) [Link] (9 responses)

Is anyone surprised? RMS is cool with the FSF firing female employees when they report being harassed. This just continues that.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 7, 2018 23:08 UTC (Mon) by jerojasro (guest, #98169) [Link] (2 responses)

I've never seen anything about these firings. Could you refer me to news/blog posts?

(I'm neither attacking nor questioning your statement, just curious about when/how this happened, what was the followup, etc.)

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 2:26 UTC (Tue) by john_zh (guest, #111192) [Link] (1 responses)

I guess it was a drama related to libreboot. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libreboot.

> In September 2016 the lead developer announced that the project would leave the GNU Project and in January 2017, Richard Stallman announced that Libreboot was released from the GNU project. The reason for the dispute was allegations from the lead maintainer that FSF had fired a transgender employee because the employee reported gender harassment. The FSF denied these allegations the same day. In April 2017, the Libreboot project removed the accusations from their website, the lead developer apologised for what happened and control of the website was transferred to another contributor.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 12:37 UTC (Tue) by deejoe (guest, #66074) [Link]

If that's it, more context:

https://libreboot.org/news/unity.html

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 2:33 UTC (Tue) by geoffbeier (guest, #123670) [Link] (5 responses)

Is there any way you could link to a source for this? I'd be interested in knowing more about it, and a quick search didn't turn up anything reliable that I could see.

(This isn't meant to be combative at all. I'd like to know more and I couldn't find anything.)

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 2:48 UTC (Tue) by jdulaney (subscriber, #83672) [Link] (4 responses)

I'm sorry, I cannot go into detail, just that I know the people involved and what happened.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 3:21 UTC (Tue) by Kalenx (subscriber, #120295) [Link] (2 responses)

Then your comment is utterly useless.

I'm not even pro-Stallman here, I find many of his "jokes" offensive and I definitely do not condone his general attitude. But this kind of public statement (yes, a comment here is a public statement, albeit not of great impact for most of them), unsourced, unproved, without any details, and out of context, has zero usefulness. It does however have downsides: it brings no information while messing with the discussion on the topic at hand.

If someone has something to say, then by all means he/she should go for it. I'm not asking for formal/judicial proof here, not even for this person to get out of his/her anonymity, just something better than "I've heard that at an unknown time and place, an unknown female allegedly being an FSG employee got harrassed by another unkown person, took unknown actions which were ultimately met by RMS firing her after unknown discussions. So yeah, no one should be surprised by RMS not wanting to remove an abortion joke".

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 4:06 UTC (Tue) by jdulaney (subscriber, #83672) [Link] (1 responses)

It's not unknown, I know the people involved, and was peripherally involved myself.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 6:12 UTC (Tue) by Kalenx (subscriber, #120295) [Link]

> It's not unknown, I know the people involved

Sigh...

Look, I really want harrassed people to be able to report their harrasser, especially in tech. I really want people preventing or retaliating against harrassed people coming out to be punished, no matter high or famous they are. I genuinely do.

But read your comments as if you were an outsider. Imagine they were against another person if it helps (not even forcibly in tech). You begin by:

> Is anyone surprised?

as if the following of your comment was common knowledge. Then you state a very serious charge:

> RMS is cool with the FSF firing female employees when they report being harassed.

And the only fact/proof/testimony/conversation/mail/blog/irc log/report to back your argument when someone ask is "I know the people involved". Well, I could have guessed that, it's kind of hard to report someone without knowing them...

Again, I'm not saying that RMS did no wrong here (I just don't know). If he did, this has to be denounced. But by setting the bar so low for such denunciation, anyone can basically report half of the planet the same way.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 4:13 UTC (Tue) by geoffbeier (guest, #123670) [Link]

I'm sorry for what happened to the people you know. I wish you could share more details so that the rest of us could consider them when deciding how we want to interact with the stewards of this project.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 7, 2018 21:18 UTC (Mon) by jmm (subscriber, #34596) [Link] (1 responses)

Red Hat and SuSE should simply fork it away from the all GNU sillyness; eglibc - the emphatic glibc.

libseaweasel

Posted May 17, 2018 7:13 UTC (Thu) by Garak (guest, #99377) [Link]

because trademark can be a gnuisance(sp?) ;)

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 7, 2018 21:51 UTC (Mon) by Koral (guest, #115236) [Link] (5 responses)

I think because of the strong political origin of GNU makes sense that RMS can enforce his opinion on what he thinks is relevant for its scope.
He's also not limiting anybody freedom, if somebody is just not happy with some project decision can simply fork.
By the way I honestly think that the joke is really not that bad...

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 7, 2018 22:34 UTC (Mon) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] (1 responses)

I think RMS would have a point if contributors proposed to make a a change that undermined the FSF's core message, but in this case it doesn't, so he should just let it go.

Over the years, the toolchain developers have gradually removed RMS's childish jokes (MS-DOG and the like) from the documentation and the comments, and that's for the best.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 7, 2018 22:44 UTC (Mon) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

I kind of liked the childish MS-DOG and the Vomit-Making System, if only because of the glee I took when Digital Equipment joined the GNU donators list to pay for the dumb joke to be removed. The intersection of corporate bureaucracy and childish humor and how it played out was sort fun to watch from the perspective of a supplier.

(We sold the Gnu Compiler Collection & port work & runtime & docs to DEC and they asked us to remove the stupid joke and we regretfully had to inform them that we didn't have the legal authority to do so.)

But my adolescent fun is perhaps outweighed by my sadness that DEC is long gone.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 6:34 UTC (Tue) by siddhesh (guest, #64914) [Link] (2 responses)

'Simply fork' is not as simple because it has far-reaching consequences. A fork in this situation will mean the death of the glibc project because most maintainers actively involved would move to the new project, taking their distributions and products (practically all of them) with them. That is not a situation that any of us want.

Nobody among the maintainers disagrees with the political origin and nature of the GNU project. The GNU project promotes the four freedoms guaranteed by Free Software and that is a formidable battle by itself. The FSF (!=GNU) endorses other values that are worth fighting for too such as censorship and privacy, but they're not directly related to the GNU project and its political battles are not directly related to that of the GNU project and only serves to dilute the message of the GNU project.

It's a case of non-positive gains, which doesn't leave any reasonable excuse to leave that bit in IMO.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 11, 2018 8:47 UTC (Fri) by gezza (subscriber, #40700) [Link] (1 responses)

If the consequence of not forking is that RMS can override developer consensus, then the price is too high.

The death of glibc in name, as most developers move to the new project is actually desirable - there ends up being one used version, now known as eglibc (empathic, earlier in the thread).

Fork, get it out of GNU (aka RMS) control and be done.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 11, 2018 8:52 UTC (Fri) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link]

eglibc was discontinued few years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embedded_GLIBC

Stallman would benefit from removal of the joke

Posted May 8, 2018 0:08 UTC (Tue) by tbird20d (subscriber, #1901) [Link]

It's not so much a joke as a political statement. I think the most common reaction from people is likely an eye-roll, not offense. In my case the eye-roll is not about the political statement itself, but that Stallman would be willing to insert political statements on divisive issues into the GNU documentation. I think that reflects poorly on him, and removal of the joke not only improves the documentation (removing some noise), but removes another example of his somewhat weird, unprofessional, behavior.

Who controls glibc? And why?

Posted May 8, 2018 0:23 UTC (Tue) by vomlehn (guest, #45588) [Link]

As I read these comments, I kept waiting for someone to state what should be quickly arrived at:

What is the purpose of the documentation? Or, even, what is the purpose of the GNU C project?

I'm not a contributor, so I have no axe to grind other than using tons of GNU-supported software, but I do have a lot of experience in working in a variety of consensus-oriented communities (many non-technical). This is clearly a case where Mr. Stallman has a particular set of values and priorities and some number of contributors differ in these. So, if it is not possible to achieve agreement, the next question is what paths do the various parties find suitable to their respective wishes?

It may be that, overall, the desire to continue as a single project takes priority and whoever has the ultimate decision-making power gets to decide. Deciding who has that power would, in this case, need to involve a high degree of willingness in others to gracefully yield on this decision. If having one project is not the priority, well, GNU software can fork, too.

I do hope that all involved realized that this is both an issue which is about as important as most bikeshedding issues, and another one which is defining the answer to a really important question of the GNU C direction setting and that the two shouldn't be confused.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 3:25 UTC (Tue) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (1 responses)

RMS probably should have placed the joke in a GFDL Invariant Section if he didn't want it to be removed from the glibc manual.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 4:49 UTC (Tue) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]

That would only be appropriate if he wanted it in all forks, which I suspect is not the case.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 9:39 UTC (Tue) by ejr (subscriber, #51652) [Link]

I'm curious. How many women are involved either in the email thread or this discussion?

Perhaps forcing women to take a personal stand in a very personal area just to be involved serves as a barrier.

Loss for words

Posted May 8, 2018 9:55 UTC (Tue) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] (5 responses)

"Giving birth is far more traumatic than having an abortion"

I'm having trouble being polite and respectful reading this. I know giving birth can be traumatic, but thankfully I know a lot of women who regard giving birth one of their best moments in life. Labeling that far more traumatic than an abortion is not even disrespectful - it's stupid.

Loss for words

Posted May 8, 2018 11:46 UTC (Tue) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link]

I assumed "traumatic" was being used in a physical sense: giving birth involves more physical trauma to the body. That seems like the kind of statement we would make as engineers: measurable and not subjective. I doubt anyone would try to claim that one was always more emotionally traumatic for all women than the other.

Loss for words

Posted May 8, 2018 19:23 UTC (Tue) by mgraesslin (guest, #78959) [Link] (2 responses)

Terrible and that reminds me of his really bad emacs virginity joke at desktop summit 2009. See e.g. https://mjg59.livejournal.com/113408.html - I was shocked when I heard that. But in combination it kind of makes a pattern.

Church of emacs routine

Posted May 10, 2018 9:06 UTC (Thu) by Nemo_bis (guest, #88187) [Link] (1 responses)

Can you call it a pattern when both examples are from 2009? Do we have a more recent transcript?

The routine is supposed to illustrate the benefits of the church of emacs in comparison to other religions. Is the "virgin of emacs" more or less sexist than the Virgin of other religions? I'd say it's a big improvement, because you can easily substitute "male" and "his" in the sentence and it won't change a thing. I'm male and my partner took my emacs almost-virginity away: we can feel included in this religion too!

Oh, in fact I now see there is a 2014 recording from Modena: https://youtu.be/1jPmnDZ6ab8?t=2m0s
Here he says "virgin of emacs, which means *anyone* who's never used emacs; [...] offering the virgin the *opportunity* to lose emacs virginity is a blessed act" (transcription errors mine; stress on "anyone" and "opportunity" in the original AFAICT).

Church of emacs routine

Posted May 10, 2018 18:26 UTC (Thu) by emorrp1 (guest, #99512) [Link]

Thanks for that, I'm glad it's been changed to be more inclusive. I've come across this one before and squirmed a little, while thinking it would still be a great joke if it said "person". Interestingly, "opportunity" vs. "that uh, that uh, taking" implies it could have been a moment of searching for memory, excluded from the linked transcript. RMS also said explicitly in the reported email thread: "The cult of the Virgin of Emacs is simply intended as a joke about the cult of the Virgin Mary. I assure anyone who perceived derogatory meanings in it that I did not intend them."

Loss for words

Posted May 19, 2018 9:31 UTC (Sat) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]

> I know giving birth can be traumatic, but thankfully I know a lot of women who regard giving birth one of their best moments in life. Labeling that far more traumatic than an abortion is not even disrespectful - it's stupid.
Now that's ridiculous. Giving birth involves the most intense pain you're ever likely to endure as a woman. A typical abortion boils down to taking a pill, another one two days later and then getting your period.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 14:47 UTC (Tue) by dractyl (guest, #26334) [Link] (9 responses)

Whether it's offensive to any of us, or problematic by some other metric isn't especially relevant.

The website says "consensus-based community-driven development model".

If that's true, then it sounds like the joke should be out, assuming I trust in Jonathan's reporting (which I do). By what metric the developers made their individual choices is also not especially relevant. They made their own decisions by their own value systems (whether we agree with them or not), and their aggregate decision should be respected.

Alternatively, the stated governance model is bullshit. If that's the case and the actual governance model is "Stallman is a god" then the joke should stay in. Why he feels that way is also irrelevant if that indeed is the control structure.

In both of these cases, there is a risk of political fallout. Loss of key people, reduction in morale, wasted time/energy and a risk of fork/migration.

Of course, the actual governing model might actually be something else, or very much about to be remade (English nobility vs the King, anyone?).

Discussing whether the joke is offensive or appropriate or not is the wrong argument, at least with regards to the matter at hand. A tangent, but likely an interesting/flame-worthy one.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 16:57 UTC (Tue) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (8 responses)

It's important to remember that consensus is not a majority vote.

If all you do is "most people want X, we do X", then you actively leave other people out in the cold and foster discontent. This can be minimized if everyone accepts this is the governance model, but that's not at all what consensus means.

It's apparent that at least some project members do not agree with the removal. The ideal next step is for all parties to work to better understand the nature of the disagreement, and for individuals to consider their reasons for their viewpoints in light of the viewpoints of others etc. Essentially, in consesnsus process, the decision is not made, and may take some time to achieve.

That said, there are definitely some participants who are not really trying to follow that model here.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 10, 2018 9:33 UTC (Thu) by dractyl (guest, #26334) [Link] (7 responses)

The glibc wiki has a whole page devoted to illustrating the concept (https://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/Consensus), but the definition of consensus is only important if that's the model you're working under.

If it's not actually a consensus driven model and RMS can assert his authority whenever he pleases without regard to the option of others, which is clearly what he thinks in this case, then the definition of consensus doesn't matter either.

Having looked over some of the (rather impressive for an OSS/FS project) GNU governance documentation, RMS is probably technically in the right, although I didn't do a deep dive. I mostly base that opinion on a) that there is formal and detailed governance documentation, and b) that he's the sort who knows the rules inside and out (probably wrote most of them) and wouldn't say what he did if he didn't think he could back it up in triplicate. Nonetheless, I'm sure that will be part of the ensuing discussion.

That said, legal and wise are not necessarily the same thing. This seems like an odd thing to rarely assert one's authority over, at least from a practical standpoint. I'm sure he at least partially sees this passage as illustrating some principle of free speech, but there are many other opportunities for such expression that don't come with in-fighting and risk of escalation attached.

He likely has the authority to do it, but it seems like a bit of a bad call.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 11, 2018 16:19 UTC (Fri) by civodul (guest, #58311) [Link] (6 responses)

I don't think it's a matter of "right": there's no "law" governing what RMS can and cannot do within the project.

However, as a GNU maintainer, I disagree with this authoritarian governance model. It's at odds with the way many (most?) GNU packages work on a day-to-day basis, focusing on consensus similarly to what glibc does. Many GNU packages do provide a welcoming environment. What RMS is doing here is painting GNU as an unwelcoming project, one where it's okay to dismiss other people's views; *that* is something I cannot accept.

Free software now goes far beyond GNU, but I think GNU still has a key role in the movement; we shouldn't let such behavior harm it.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 12, 2018 4:30 UTC (Sat) by dractyl (guest, #26334) [Link] (5 responses)

This goes back to my offhand remark in my first post: English nobility vs the King.

RMS clearly believes he's the King and that being King means he can enforce his will on everyone else if he chooses to do so. He can probably even point to a document saying that's so. The fact that he doesn't do it very often is irrelevant. Indeed, he's said just this, only with slightly different words.

You disagree, as do many others with you. You also have a document of sorts ("uses a consensus-based community-driven development model"), but more importantly the reality of day-to-day contemporary practice built on the culture and beliefs of the active participants.

Long leash dictatorship, or consensus governance?

That is the basis of the situation. Everything else is fluff; a distraction.

In the OSS/FS world, the inevitable conclusion of failed negotiations over political differences is the fork. Then the matter is decided by the very democratic method of the developers choosing sides once the schism has formed. I'm fine with that. That seems very much the OSS/FS way.

I am reminded of a principle in negotiation: BATNA, or Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement. This is the principle that lets apparently weak individuals crush multinationals at the negotiating table. It talks about what happens if no agreement can be reached through discussion. Talks are over, there's no deal. Then what happens?

Someone else mentioned that GNU needs glibc more than glibc needs GNU. This is true.

RMSs BATNA is the loss of a major, high-profile project when the developers fork, not to mention loss of face, influence and reputation. It would be hard to qualify the loss of glibc as anything other than a huge net negative. The problem is that I doubt RMS will see it in this light, and thus will not negotiate accordingly. He might eventually find, to his lasting discomfort, that yesterday's god is today's out of touch has-been. I also don't imagine he ever truly envisioned the freedom-guaranteeing power of the fork being used against him personally in this way or at this scale.

The dissenting developers' BATNA, assuming they can maintain cohesion, is they probably lose a minority of talented developers, waste some time coming up with a new name and laying down new infra, and otherwise coping with temporary disruption. If they were smart, they'd also formalize their new governance, incorporating lessons learned. Other than that, they lose little; life proceeds much as before. There are several high profile examples of this happening in the history of OSS/FS.

The distributions' BATNA, as outsiders, is to switch their glibc upstream. I don't imagine that would be especially problematic for them. If they did systemd, they can manage this.

I doubt the commoners, such as myself, will care at the end of the day, or indeed even know. We're just too far removed from palace intrigue for it to make a difference.

Normal politics would muddle through with some kind of kludge or lower the heat until everyone moved on; perhaps with the help of a well timed distraction. I'm not sure that'll the case here. The point of contention is too clear (you can't smudge it up, or say more time is needed to understand the problem) and RMS just doesn't strike me as the kind of person to back down at all.

I think, overall, the community zeitgeist favors the democratic approach and RMS has not built up sufficient goodwill beyond his core supporters to overcome this in the way someone like Guido or Linus might.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 17, 2018 10:56 UTC (Thu) by Zolko (guest, #99166) [Link] (4 responses)

"The distributions' BATNA, as outsiders, is to switch their glibc upstream. I don't imagine that would be especially problematic for them. If they did systemd, they can manage this."

I know I'm late to the party, but I can't let this one sail: if the result of forking glibc is as successful as the catastrophe that systemd is, and considering the Devuan fork, it is quite clear that the oldtimers (including Stallman) are right. Technically speaking a fork is probably possible, but because of copyright issues the nightmare would be huge, in no possible comparison to the small virtual benefit of removing a potential negative emotional effect.

In other words: this is an easter egg, FFS !!! The kind of things that make life funny and enjoyable for must of us. This has provable positive emotional effects on many people: it makes us smile ! And nobody here has actually come out and shown a provable negative effect, only some hypothetical, potential, made-up stuff.

The GNU project had political motives from the beginning, nobody can now come and pretend they didn't know. Reversing that political motive should not be allowed with a one-line diff.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 17, 2018 11:38 UTC (Thu) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link] (1 responses)

Excellent, I was worried this article wasn't going to reach 200 comments even with the culture war stuff, so a systemd flamewar is absolutely what we need!

(In other words: Perhaps you should have let this one sail, it's a distraction from the more relevant topic of glibc's governance.)

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 17, 2018 13:09 UTC (Thu) by sdalley (subscriber, #18550) [Link]

I *think* Zolko was just being heavily satirical...

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 19, 2018 10:27 UTC (Sat) by dractyl (guest, #26334) [Link] (1 responses)

(Sorry for the delay in my reply; I'm traveling ATM)

I don't see what copyright problem would be here, but perhaps I am not up to date on GPL legalities.

IIRC glibc, under GNU policies, has copyright assignment as part of their process. Therefore there aren't a million little copyright holders all over the place. It doesn't seem especially messy in this regard.

GNU licenses the software (shockingly) under LGPL, so an outside party has every right to fork it.

Therefore, if a new entity is created, they can fork it under the GPL in a very tidy way and since they're bound by terms to keep licensing it the same way, there is no downstream change. I never envisioned licensing as a major issue when I first wrote my comment.

I was referring to potential logistical issues; downstream disruption. But if mostly the same people are woking on the same code, with the same license, I can't see an issue there either. I see XFree86 and maybe LibreOffice as examples of this pattern.

All in all, the barrier to action arising from disruption for the glibc developers is low.

As for systemd, I am asserting no opinion of it's quality or suitability for purpose one way or the other because it's not relevant to my point. I used systemd merely as an example of something that necessitated a lot downstream changes in order to accommodate it.

The point of whether the joke was appropriate or not, whether is was funny or not, whether someone might be offended by it or not or whether it improved the world with levity or not, isn't relevant or material to the underlying issue in any way. It could have just as easily been some arcane compiler optimization.

Whether the GNU project's politics (as in policy and governing structure, rather than philosophy) are still relevant and acceptable to the governed is a key issue to be resolved. I don't see how you can leave it unresolved now that it's come up.

This is not about reversing GNU's fundamental raison d'être. I don't see "RMS is our BDFL" being a core tenet of the Free Software ideals upon which it was founded.

If the organization is ultimately unable to evolve and mature, someone will come along to pick up the torch and run with it. Perhaps that someone, individual or group, will have a stronger commitment to democratic ideals as well.

It would be a shame if that became necessary, but at some level, isn't that part of the beauty of Free Software?

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 20, 2018 2:23 UTC (Sun) by tdalman (guest, #41971) [Link]

dractyl,

thank you very much for sharing your thoughts as they match very well with my own.

Being a watcher of the glibc mailinglist for quite some time, I have seen a very positive transformation of this community in the last years. Carlos, Siddhesh, Joseph, and the others are doing a great job not only technically but also by are carefully leading people through constructive discussions.

I was very surprised to see such a vehement discussion virtually on non-topic (technically, that is; I understand the political intent by Richard, as well as the arguments against the "joke" being part of the manual). Likewise, I was surprised by Richards dominant decision because he seemed to play no role in the glibc mailinglist for years (IIRC, the only thread he really participated was about a malloc hook to be removed and its use in emacs, but maybe I missed something).

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 21:52 UTC (Tue) by jhhaller (guest, #56103) [Link] (2 responses)

I suppose the "sucker rod" statement in syslogd(1) is the next to go.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 10, 2018 11:27 UTC (Thu) by hmh (subscriber, #3838) [Link] (1 responses)

man syslogd
No manual entry for syslogd.

May it rest in peace. Long live rsyslog and syslog-ng (as well as any other modern replacements)...

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 10, 2018 21:37 UTC (Thu) by jwilk (subscriber, #63328) [Link]

rsyslog did in fact remove this joke:
https://github.com/rsyslog/rsyslog/commit/53a178cd0f7b23d...

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 9, 2018 0:50 UTC (Wed) by trentbuck (guest, #66356) [Link] (3 responses)

The comment should have been removed anyway on the grounds that it's bloody confusing:

* Which federation are they talking about? Germany? Mexico? Australia? Russia? The EU?

* If this text was added in the 1990s, surely the draft bill was either enacted or rejected by now? It should have linked directly to the draft bill, so that readers can go straight there and check its current status. If that's not possible, at least cite the name of the draft bill!

There's no need to point out that the alleged "joke" is tasteless, insensitive, irrelevant, and unfunny, because the text can be removed already on the grounds of being Americentric and out-of-date.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 9, 2018 3:40 UTC (Wed) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (2 responses)

It is sadly not really out of date, but the obscurity and Americentrism seem fair commentary.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 9, 2018 4:01 UTC (Wed) by mtaht (guest, #11087) [Link]

I feel in this thread that everyone has jumped the shark.

Here, have some Carlin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuEQixrBKCc

And some bill hicks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYwV0fqEQrw

After getting in a good belly laugh - GET BACK TO WORK.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 11, 2018 8:59 UTC (Fri) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

That's actually the most offensive part of it, that participants in an i18n software project, think their country is so much more important than everyone else’s, that they deserve to hijack the project public technical documentation in i18n English, and make it a vehicle for statements on their own internal petty political conflicts.

And then they compound it by discussing endlessly if the statement is in good or poor taste, without caring if it is smart or kind to treat contributors and users of other countries as second class humans.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 14, 2018 14:50 UTC (Mon) by ortalo (guest, #4654) [Link]

Anyway, Ken Thomson clarified it all already. All of our computers are in his control now ; at least until HAL9000 comes back from Saturn (or Jupiter, cannot remember).
Hopefully, Starman can give it a ride...

This "joke" annoyed me, & that's being kind

Posted May 17, 2018 5:33 UTC (Thu) by gus3 (guest, #61103) [Link]

I do what I can to be a Free Software advocate, but the "joke" about the abort() function has always made me cringe. This, and Karen Sandler's "joke" about Vice President Cheney's having no heart. Never mind that Cheney was actually a forward-thinker in medical technology (he was an early adopter of non-beating blood flow), but simply that he was a Republican in the USA. That automatically made him a bigger political target than Bill Clinton ever was, in the Free Software community. Karen Sandler saw him as fair game for any political jabs, anywhere she spoke about Free Software.

That the Free Software community never chided or chastised her for this, speaks volumes about the community itself.

The judgments against Cheney and Clinton, in the FOSS community, pre-figured the Social Justice Warrior movement, which now is trying to figure out who is the worse criminal, or the better victim. In this aspect, the Free Software community has become simply a subset of the SJW movement. Both have subverted the treatment of real victims to political agendas: if the politics aren't "correct," then anyone else can declare everyone either "victims" or "perpetrators."

Here's the really sad point: I'm not a paid subscriber to LWN, so I haven't been able to read this story for 10 (ten!) days. But I knew, from the first time I read the headline, that the "joke" about abort() was the topic at hand.

Put another way: this is a posting I knew I'd see on LWN for several years.

Swipes at politicians may be fashionable at times; but they don't convince others to adopt GNU, Free Software, or G/F/L/OSS projects. The users see no value in the greater product, when they see how someone managed to insert political commentary in some obscure spot. One user sees it, then it gets posted on the 'net, for everyone to see it. Then the big political debate begins. That shouldn't be how Free Software works.

But that's just my comment... but it's also my complaint.

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 18, 2018 12:05 UTC (Fri) by Darkstar (guest, #28767) [Link]

Well, if I had read that text in the manual, I wouldn't have interpreted it as a joke in the first place. I admit still don't understand it (or understand why it is supposed to be funny), I guess I'm just a bit "out of the loop" with respect to US-American politics or something.

Point is, there are probably people who might be confused by that sentence, so IMHO it is a good thing that it has been removed, if only for all the non-US people who don't "get" the joke...

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 26, 2018 14:08 UTC (Sat) by stock (guest, #5849) [Link]

Someone mentioned "RMS is cool with the FSF firing female employees
when they report being harassed. This just continues that." If the Joke
removal attempt can be placed in the same category as Smut throwing
at a historical Open Source icon, then these 'sources and methods' are
to be categorized as sick arguments for the sole purpose to usurp power
and control over important parts within Open Source Software
territory. Such individuals should seek their employment and luck
somewhere else like in some political organization. To summarize: Be
aware for FBI Spy's within the Open Source Community.

--
Robert M. Stockmann - RHCE
Network Engineer - UNIX/Linux Specialist
crashrecovery.org stock@stokkie.net