Who controls glibc? [LWN.net]

Who controls glibc?

Posted May 8, 2018 6:34 UTC (Tue) by siddhesh (guest, #64914)
In reply to: Who controls glibc? by Koral
Parent article: Who controls glibc?

'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.

to post comments

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