Who controls glibc? [LWN.net]

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 7, 2018 21:51 UTC (Mon) by Koral (guest, #115236)
Parent article: Who controls glibc?

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...

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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