Overstanding Pro-Choice

Overstanding Pro-Choice

Posted Dec 8, 2018 8:06 UTC (Sat) by Garak (guest, #99377)
Parent article: A "joke" in the glibc manual

For many, including me, it is a little hard to understand why there is any opposition to removing the joke at all.

Though you wrote a significant article on the issue, I can only advise- "dwell on it more". It shouldn't be that hard to understand _any_ opposition. Really.

It is clearly out of place,

I call B.S. The person who put it there in the first place thought it fit there.

not particularly funny

clearly not particularly funny to you is clearly not the same thing as clearly not particularly funny to anyone.

and doesn't really push the GNU anti-censorship philosophy forward in any real way even if you grant that anti-censorship is a goal of the project

Oh, au contrair, I'd have to say the article you wrote about it is proof that its existence furthered pushing that philosophy, using you as an instrument. Imagine how much more visibility the philosophy has now, than a year ago. This scenario I consider a wonderful display of the liberty of F(L)OSS. For goodness sake, if anybody cares enough they can fork, call it mylibc, and allow any others who share the preference to follow their fork. I think the real issue is that people were under the illusion that there was some magical democracy-like community in charge of glibc, when in fact it's a (debatably optimal/malignant/benign) dictator. And the related issue of certain F(L)OSS factions that see many slightly differing forks and competition and _choice_ among them as net-negative due to userbase confusion, instead of net-positive due to maximal choice for the userbase.

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