LWN: Comments on "Who controls glibc?"

Request #2

deepfire — Thu, 08 Nov 2018 17:03:04 +0000

Jonathan, I think the topic touches an interesting phenomenon that runs deep in our society.

There are people who abhor the increasing influence that political correctness has on the freedom of expression, and so are extremely sensitive on any infringement -- in a way that is not entirely dissymmetric with how the people representing the political correctness side feel.

This is a profound issue, there is no mistake. And while I appreciate that formally the topic of the article is elsewhere, I'm sure we'll be back to discuss it again and again. I don't think it's really useful to try fighting the wind in this case..

That said, this is your forum, Jonathan, and I appreciate all the work you have put into it over the years!

Who controls glibc?

deepfire — Thu, 08 Nov 2018 16:42:32 +0000

Jan, this is intriguing, can you at least hint at what those might be?

Who controls glibc?

deepfire — Thu, 08 Nov 2018 16:39:21 +0000

To clarify, that statement of yours says far more about your opinion of ZH, rather than about the poster.

Who controls glibc?

diegor — Wed, 01 Aug 2018 11:57:58 +0000

If people is offended by abort, we should remove the abort() function. The joke does'nt add anything.

So why we don't censor every reference to "kill children" (process). Maybe someone have lost his kid, and be reminded of her lost.

Who controls glibc?

krijgdenergstenkanker — Fri, 27 Jul 2018 19:43:50 +0000

> It would seem GNU needs glibc more than glibc needs GNU, so perhaps the current glibc maintainership should just find another home for it.

Well that's the issue isn't it? Rights are irrelevant here and in most places and it's an issue of might. Does glibc depend on the FSF for funding that Stallman can order them to drop? Is "glibc" a trademark that the FSF owns? Are there contractual obligations in play that stops the FSF from cutting such funding to coerce them? Even if they stop funding will glibc be able to just secure funding under the auspices of something else? — those are the questions that actually matter here.

Rights exist on paper that Linus wipes his butt with — in the end of the day who controls glibc is decided by who has the might to force it to do its bidding.

It's time to stop

anselm — Sat, 09 Jun 2018 10:39:34 +0000

That would only be an actual issue if the FSF was (a) headquartered outside the USA and (b) receiving funds from the US government for its family-planning or other medical work. Since neither of these premises apply, the “global gag rule” has no bearing on the glibc manual.

It's time to stop

JanC_ — Sat, 09 Jun 2018 01:39:08 +0000

The fact that it gets rescinded & reinstated so often is another reason why it's better removed, I guess, otherwise the release manager (who might not be from the US) has to check the current status of US law before every release…

Who controls glibc?

JanC_ — Sat, 09 Jun 2018 00:42:24 +0000

Instead of (or at least in addition to) insisting on that joke in a manual almost nobody reads, maybe he should start promoting SheDecides. ☺

Who controls glibc?

JanC_ — Sat, 09 Jun 2018 00:18:18 +0000

No, that's not a neutral location for a cross-platform project.

(And there are other issues with the Linux Foundation too, of course.)

Who controls glibc?

peter-b — Thu, 07 Jun 2018 16:27:41 +0000

Yes, I agree that the Rust community moderation policy works really well at fostering a productive and friendly atmosphere.

Who controls glibc?

clicea — Wed, 06 Jun 2018 17:32:28 +0000

Have a counterexample: I've stayed very far away from Rust just because they seem very heavy-handed on policing their developers.

Who controls glibc?

k8to — Sun, 27 May 2018 11:03:08 +0000

In commercial environments, there's often pressure not to show these "internal details" to users.

It's time to stop

anselm — Sun, 27 May 2018 01:15:23 +0000

This is something that US presidents do as a matter of course as one of the first things after they've been inaugurated. They can do it by executive order without having to involve Congress, so it's an easy PR win with their voters. Reagan came up with it in the first place in 1984, then Bill Clinton rescinded it in 1993 and George W. Bush put it back on the books in 2001 until Obama got rid of it again in 2009. It is safe to assume that whichever Democrat takes over from Trump in (hopefully) 2021 will immediately throw it out once more, etc., ad infinitum.

In any case, the “joke” can't really be referring to the “global gag rule” because the “global gag rule” has nothing to do with domestic censorship (because 1st amendment) – it says that the USA will only fund NGOs in other countries if they aver that they do not “perform or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning”. Originally this applied only to family-planning funds; Trump's twist is that now it also extends to other types of health assistance, including HIV assistance.

Who controls glibc?

anselm — Sun, 27 May 2018 00:52:16 +0000

I've never seen the 'joke' before and it still not visible in any 'man abort' I've just ran on a few varied boxes.

That's probably because it isn't in the man page, it's in the Info documentation. Still doesn't make it funny.

Who controls glibc?

stock — Sat, 26 May 2018 14:08:46 +0000

Someone mentioned "RMS is cool with the FSF firing female employees
when they report being harassed. This just continues that." If the Joke
removal attempt can be placed in the same category as Smut throwing
at a historical Open Source icon, then these 'sources and methods' are
to be categorized as sick arguments for the sole purpose to usurp power
and control over important parts within Open Source Software
territory. Such individuals should seek their employment and luck
somewhere else like in some political organization. To summarize: Be
aware for FBI Spy's within the Open Source Community.

--
Robert M. Stockmann - RHCE
Network Engineer - UNIX/Linux Specialist
crashrecovery.org stock@stokkie.net

It's time to stop

shmget — Fri, 25 May 2018 19:43:37 +0000

"outdated joke"

not at all.. the Global Gag Rule has been re-instated January 23, 2017.

Who controls glibc?

shmget — Fri, 25 May 2018 18:54:32 +0000

"You're right, removing it won't (at least in the short term and likely not in the long term) drastically change anything for anyone"

leaving it would not drastically change anything either, and would have taken 0 seconds.

"The real issue (and time waster)" is the removal patch. which created a Streisand effect on an obscure joke that pretty much no-one was aware of.

The stackoverflow link above, when I looked at it had been vewed 790 times.. and I bet most of it was because it was linked above.
but, I been consulting man pages for years, on myny different boxes and distro. I've never seen the 'joke' before
and it still not visible in any 'man abort' I've just ran on a few varied boxes.

iow: that joke has very little visibility, certainly epsilon wrt to 'floss user'. removing it will have 0 effect wrt to drafting new contributor, it it will have a small cumulative effect wrt to discouraging existing ones.... just like the wave of pronoun-war patches inflicted on floss, which had real effect of getting an actual maintainer to call it quit, for what SJW swear were hordes of 'potential contributor' that were not showing up because of it.... yeah .. how things are going in node.js world ?

Who controls glibc?

nix — Thu, 24 May 2018 17:34:49 +0000

If you think glibc is, in any meaningful sense, "RMS's project", you are deluding yourself. Before this thread, Richard had a total of five commits, all in 1995, all to either config.sub or config.guess, none more then 50 lines. (Its history starts in 1989, when the first RCS commit was made.)

This was Roland's project, then Roland and Ulrich's and a few others. Now it is a shared, community-governed project, and frankly RMS's trying to exert dictatorial control over it feels quite offensive, given that there is no sign of him in that community of developers at all.

Who controls glibc?

tdalman — Sun, 20 May 2018 02:23:02 +0000

dractyl,

thank you very much for sharing your thoughts as they match very well with my own.

Being a watcher of the glibc mailinglist for quite some time, I have seen a very positive transformation of this community in the last years. Carlos, Siddhesh, Joseph, and the others are doing a great job not only technically but also by are carefully leading people through constructive discussions.

I was very surprised to see such a vehement discussion virtually on non-topic (technically, that is; I understand the political intent by Richard, as well as the arguments against the "joke" being part of the manual). Likewise, I was surprised by Richards dominant decision because he seemed to play no role in the glibc mailinglist for years (IIRC, the only thread he really participated was about a malloc hook to be removed and its use in emacs, but maybe I missed something).

Who controls glibc?

dractyl — Sat, 19 May 2018 10:27:31 +0000

(Sorry for the delay in my reply; I'm traveling ATM)

I don't see what copyright problem would be here, but perhaps I am not up to date on GPL legalities.

IIRC glibc, under GNU policies, has copyright assignment as part of their process. Therefore there aren't a million little copyright holders all over the place. It doesn't seem especially messy in this regard.

GNU licenses the software (shockingly) under LGPL, so an outside party has every right to fork it.

Therefore, if a new entity is created, they can fork it under the GPL in a very tidy way and since they're bound by terms to keep licensing it the same way, there is no downstream change. I never envisioned licensing as a major issue when I first wrote my comment.

I was referring to potential logistical issues; downstream disruption. But if mostly the same people are woking on the same code, with the same license, I can't see an issue there either. I see XFree86 and maybe LibreOffice as examples of this pattern.

All in all, the barrier to action arising from disruption for the glibc developers is low.

As for systemd, I am asserting no opinion of it's quality or suitability for purpose one way or the other because it's not relevant to my point. I used systemd merely as an example of something that necessitated a lot downstream changes in order to accommodate it.

The point of whether the joke was appropriate or not, whether is was funny or not, whether someone might be offended by it or not or whether it improved the world with levity or not, isn't relevant or material to the underlying issue in any way. It could have just as easily been some arcane compiler optimization.

Whether the GNU project's politics (as in policy and governing structure, rather than philosophy) are still relevant and acceptable to the governed is a key issue to be resolved. I don't see how you can leave it unresolved now that it's come up.

This is not about reversing GNU's fundamental raison d'être. I don't see "RMS is our BDFL" being a core tenet of the Free Software ideals upon which it was founded.

If the organization is ultimately unable to evolve and mature, someone will come along to pick up the torch and run with it. Perhaps that someone, individual or group, will have a stronger commitment to democratic ideals as well.

It would be a shame if that became necessary, but at some level, isn't that part of the beauty of Free Software?

Who controls glibc?

anselm — Sat, 19 May 2018 10:26:33 +0000

OK, let me rephrase that. I have no problem with jokes in a technical manual as long as the jokes are actually funny and are about the technical subject matter at hand.

This would exclude jokes about US abortion laws, however hilarious, in the glibc manual because the connection – via the word “abort” – is pretty tenuous at best and may not even work in translation (both because the target language may not use the same vocabulary, and because the legal situation around abortion may be different so the “joke” is not funny at all). It would also exclude political propaganda camouflaging as lame jokes in general. The reason for this is that when you're trying to be entertaining in a technical manual, it is best to do that in a way that, as far as possible, all readers of the manual will find enjoyable, not just the ones who happen to agree with your politics.

Loss for words

HelloWorld — Sat, 19 May 2018 09:31:41 +0000

> I know giving birth can be traumatic, but thankfully I know a lot of women who regard giving birth one of their best moments in life. Labeling that far more traumatic than an abortion is not even disrespectful - it's stupid.
Now that's ridiculous. Giving birth involves the most intense pain you're ever likely to endure as a woman. A typical abortion boils down to taking a pill, another one two days later and then getting your period.

Who controls glibc?

HelloWorld — Sat, 19 May 2018 09:17:11 +0000

OK, suppose there was an absolutely hilarious joke about US abortion laws in the glibc manual. Would you support that?

Who controls glibc?

gus3 — Sat, 19 May 2018 04:17:02 +0000

But another meaning of "professional" is that someone has put a thing on their résumé, looking for "professional" employment. That thing could be a major or minor contribution to a GNU project, something that a prospective employer might look up in Google, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, or any number of sites that do background checks.

In that sense, the abort() commentary won't exactly look nice to someone looking for "professional" IT/sysadmin employment.

Who controls glibc?

anselm — Fri, 18 May 2018 23:10:49 +0000

I don't have a problem with jokes in a technical manual but I prefer it if the jokes are actually funny.

Who controls glibc?

sdalley — Fri, 18 May 2018 12:45:05 +0000

Yes, this whole debate *is* extremely off-putting, which is why I'm astonished that you're still blathering away about it when our esteemed editor has already told you to shut up.

Who controls glibc?

Darkstar — Fri, 18 May 2018 12:05:13 +0000

Well, if I had read that text in the manual, I wouldn't have interpreted it as a joke in the first place. I admit still don't understand it (or understand why it is supposed to be funny), I guess I'm just a bit "out of the loop" with respect to US-American politics or something.

Point is, there are probably people who might be confused by that sentence, so IMHO it is a good thing that it has been removed, if only for all the non-US people who don't "get" the joke...

Who controls glibc?

HelloWorld — Fri, 18 May 2018 09:35:51 +0000

> Rather, it's a totally inappropriate comment to have in a technical manual.
I disagree with that notion. I don't see anything wrong with having a joke in a technical manual.

Who controls glibc?

HelloWorld — Fri, 18 May 2018 09:33:37 +0000

The point is that nobody has yet been able to produce an example of a person who was *actually* hurt by that joke while there clearly are people who are annoyed by this sort of political correctness nonsense. LLVM lost a major contributor recently because of that sort thing.

Who controls glibc?

gevaerts — Fri, 18 May 2018 08:40:17 +0000

Why should anyone care about you finding anything off-putting? Isn't the whole point of most of your comments that that's fine? Why are you being such a crybaby?

Who controls glibc?

karkhaz — Fri, 18 May 2018 07:15:26 +0000

> A society where you can't make political jokes - whether it's because you'll be locked up like in the country I was born in, or because you risk societal death for triggering some crybaby

Nobody suggested either of the above consequences happen to rms. Although I recall various other incidents that I suppose you're referring to, where a developer was pilloried for making offensive comments, this is not one of them. The only "punishment" here is the removal of the joke from the manual.

> by purging this kind of silly little thing you're establishing an atmosphere that will prevent people from making jokes

In this case, I don't see much evidence that anybody is calling for censorship of abortion jokes anywhere outside the technical reference. This was a patch to remove the joke from the manual, not a mandate to prevent rms from making these jokes on his own spare time.

> The point is: if somebody can't handle this sort of joke

The strongest argument I've heard from removing this from the manual isn't that some people cannot "handle" the joke, that it is offensive, or anything of the sort. Rather, it's a totally inappropriate comment to have in a technical manual.

(Somewhat contrived) analogy: suppose that in the documentation for posix_spawn, rms had written a snarky cartouche about his favourite restaurant for eating caviar. Totally uncontroversial, nobody gets offended. But the comment ought to be removed on exactly the same grounds as the abortion one: it doesn't belong in a technical manual, and the vast majority of readers didn't ask to be belaboured with rms's sense of humor.

Who controls glibc?

mjg59 — Fri, 18 May 2018 06:59:39 +0000

Ok so you're arguing against something that I didn't actually say

Who controls glibc?

HelloWorld — Fri, 18 May 2018 06:29:59 +0000

The point is: if somebody can't handle this sort of joke, they are not human beings capable of functioning in a free society. A society where you can't make political jokes - whether it's because you'll be locked up like in the country I was born in, or because you risk societal death for triggering some crybaby - is not a free society. The problem is that by purging this kind of silly little thing you're establishing an atmosphere that will prevent people from making jokes (or even serious statements) that would actually *not* affect anyone negatively out of sheer fear that they might and that they'll be judged for that.

In fact I would argue that that is already happening in the US, especially on campus. And you have yet to prove that the joke has *actually* negatively impacted anyone.

Who controls glibc?

mjg59 — Thu, 17 May 2018 22:57:30 +0000

Where did I say it was offensive?

Who controls glibc?

HelloWorld — Thu, 17 May 2018 22:38:58 +0000

RMS always made it quite clear that he cares about freedom and not about software quality.

Who controls glibc?

HelloWorld — Thu, 17 May 2018 22:37:50 +0000

I can't blame RMS for not wanting his project to be taken over by ideologists. It's called Free Software for a reason. Freedom includes the freedom to say and write potentially hurtful things. And for the record, I *don't* think that joke is actually hurtful, and so far nobody has been able to produce an example of a person who was actually hurt or offended by this silly little joke. I don't believe there is such a person.

What are you even talking about?

HelloWorld — Thu, 17 May 2018 22:32:49 +0000

I honestly didn't mean to offend anybody here, and I'm not even sure why you would think that.

If you're thinking of the “see a therapist” thing, it wasn't meant as an insult. A functional human being needs to be able to tolerate this kind of joke, and if he or she can't, then yes, I believe seeing a therapist is the right thing to do.

Who controls glibc?

HelloWorld — Thu, 17 May 2018 22:19:58 +0000

I'm sure it does exist in your head.

Who controls glibc?

HelloWorld — Thu, 17 May 2018 22:17:50 +0000

The benefit is 0 because nobody has yet been able to demonstrate that *anybody* was actually offended by the joke, let alone anybody who actually makes a difference. OTOH, I find this whole debate extremely off-putting, and so do plenty of other people, which is something you seem to completely ignore.

That's enough

corbet — Thu, 17 May 2018 22:15:57 +0000

OK, only warning. You've had three postings to insult others, you need to stop here, please.

Remember: this was not an article about a joke.