Who controls glibc?

(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)

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.

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.

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?

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?

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

This is a good thing.