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

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.