removing toxic emailers

removing toxic emailers

[Nathan Sidwell]

Do we have a policy about removing list subscribers that send abusive or 
other toxic emails?  do we have a code of conduct?  Searching the wiki 
or website finds nothing.  The mission statement mentions nothing.

nathan
-- 
Nathan Sidwell

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Eric S. Raymond]

Nathan Sidwell <nathan@acm.org>:
> Do we have a policy about removing list subscribers that send abusive or
> other toxic emails?  do we have a code of conduct?  Searching the wiki or
> website finds nothing.  The mission statement mentions nothing.

I'm not a GCC insider, but I know a few things about the social
dynamics of voluntarist subcultures. You might recall I wrote a book
about that once.

The choice to have a policy for ejecting jerks has serious costs.
One of those costs is the kind of rancorous dispute that has been
burning like a brushfire on this list the last few weeks.  Another,
particularly serious for hackers - is that such a policy is hostile to
autists and others who have poor interaction skills but can ship good
code.  This is a significant percentage of your current and future
potential contributors, enough that excluding them is a real problem.

Most seriously: the rules, whatever they are, will be gamed by people
whose objectives are not "ship useful software". You will be fortunate
if the gamers' objectives are as relatively innocuous as "gain points
in monkey status competition by beating up funny-colored monkeys";
there are much worse cases that have been known to crash even projects
with nearly as much history and social inertia as this one.

Compared to these costs, the overhead of tolerating a few jerks and
assholes is pretty much trivial.  That's hard to see right now because
the jerks are visible and the costs of formal policing are
hypothetical, but I strongly advise you against going down the Code of
Conduct route regardless of how fashionable that looks right now.  I
have forty years of observer-participant anthropology in intentional
online communities, beginning with the disintegration of the USENET
cabal back in the 1980s, telling me that will not end well.

You're better off with an informal system of moderator fiat and
*without* rules that beg to become a subject of dispute and
manipulation. A strong norm about off-list behavior and politics being
out of bounds here is also helpful.

You face a choice between being a community that is about shipping code
and one that is embroiled in perpetual controversy over who gets to
play here and on what terms.  Choose wisely.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Thomas Koenig]

On 14.04.21 15:18, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> A strong norm about off-list behavior and politics being
> out of bounds here is also helpful.

That would have banned the whole discussion about the potential
fork from the start.

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Frosku]

On Wed Apr 14, 2021 at 2:28 PM BST, Thomas Koenig via Gcc wrote:
> On 14.04.21 15:18, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> > A strong norm about off-list behavior and politics being
> > out of bounds here is also helpful.
>
> That would have banned the whole discussion about the potential
> fork from the start.

Given that the whole discussion seems to have been purposed entirely
to calculate a way for certain GCC contributors to virtue signal
their disapproval to the founder of the project's (debunked) bad
behaviors, perhaps that would have been a good thing.

Unfortunately, I think ESR's suggestion was merely that people
shouldn't be banned for off-list behavior or politics (which also
would have prevented RMS from being removed from the SC).

Perhaps the best lesson to take is that allowing a mailing list
which is supposed to be for technical discussion to be turned into
a space for virtue signalling and political gatekeeping isn't ideal.

>>= %frosku = { os => 'gnu+linux', editor => 'emacs', coffee => 1 } =<<

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Frosku]

On Wed Apr 14, 2021 at 2:28 PM BST, Thomas Koenig via Gcc wrote:
> On 14.04.21 15:18, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> > A strong norm about off-list behavior and politics being
> > out of bounds here is also helpful.
>
> That would have banned the whole discussion about the potential
> fork from the start.

It's quite clear from the discussion here that there is no consensus
to fork GCC. Doing so anyway is clearly against community interest
and serves only the egos of those proposing the fork. Unless there is
a *technical* reason to sever ties with the GNU project, it shouldn't
be done.

>>= %frosku = { os => 'gnu+linux', editor => 'emacs', coffee => 1 } =<<

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Nathan Sidwell]

On 4/14/21 9:18 AM, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> Nathan Sidwell <nathan@acm.org>:
>> Do we have a policy about removing list subscribers that send abusive or
>> other toxic emails?  do we have a code of conduct?  Searching the wiki or
>> website finds nothing.  The mission statement mentions nothing.
> 
> I'm not a GCC insider, but I know a few things about the social
> dynamics of voluntarist subcultures. You might recall I wrote a book
> about that once.
> 
> The choice to have a policy for ejecting jerks has serious costs.
> One of those costs is the kind of rancorous dispute that has been
> burning like a brushfire on this list the last few weeks.  Another,
> particularly serious for hackers - is that such a policy is hostile to
> autists and others who have poor interaction skills but can ship good
> code.  This is a significant percentage of your current and future
> potential contributors, enough that excluding them is a real problem.
> 
> Most seriously: the rules, whatever they are, will be gamed by people
> whose objectives are not "ship useful software". You will be fortunate
> if the gamers' objectives are as relatively innocuous as "gain points
> in monkey status competition by beating up funny-colored monkeys";
> there are much worse cases that have been known to crash even projects
> with nearly as much history and social inertia as this one.
> 
> Compared to these costs, the overhead of tolerating a few jerks and
> assholes is pretty much trivial.  That's hard to see right now because
> the jerks are visible and the costs of formal policing are
> hypothetical, but I strongly advise you against going down the Code of
> Conduct route regardless of how fashionable that looks right now.  I
> have forty years of observer-participant anthropology in intentional
> online communities, beginning with the disintegration of the USENET
> cabal back in the 1980s, telling me that will not end well.
> 
> You're better off with an informal system of moderator fiat and
> *without* rules that beg to become a subject of dispute and
> manipulation. A strong norm about off-list behavior and politics being
> out of bounds here is also helpful.
> 
> You face a choice between being a community that is about shipping code
> and one that is embroiled in perpetual controversy over who gets to
> play here and on what terms.  Choose wisely.
> 

I'd just like to eject the jerks, because they make the place 
unwelcoming.  I wouldn't associate with them in physical space, I don't 
want to associate with them here.  And yes, I fully realize there are 
other ways I can choose to not associate with them here.

nathan

-- 
Nathan Sidwell

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Richard Kenner]

> The choice to have a policy for ejecting jerks has serious costs.
> One of those costs is the kind of rancorous dispute that has been
> burning like a brushfire on this list the last few weeks.

I agree.  Look at the huge ongoing debate about Section 230 in the US
that's been going on for at least months.  This is something that seems
like it ought to have a simple solution, but it doesn't.

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Jonathan Wakely]

On Wed, 14 Apr 2021 at 15:39, Thomas Koenig wrote:
>
> On 14.04.21 15:18, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> > A strong norm about off-list behavior and politics being
> > out of bounds here is also helpful.
>
> That would have banned the whole discussion about the potential
> fork from the start.

No, because once again, I raised the topic of a fork because I do not
feel that association with GNU or FSF benefits the GCC project. I did
not say "we have to cancel them because I don't like their politics"
(as it happens, I do like their politics, which is why I've spent two
decades writing copyleft code for GCC, I just think they have failed
to evolve and are sadly irrelevant today).

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Nathan Sidwell]

On 4/14/21 10:23 AM, Richard Kenner wrote:
>> The choice to have a policy for ejecting jerks has serious costs.
>> One of those costs is the kind of rancorous dispute that has been
>> burning like a brushfire on this list the last few weeks.
> 
> I agree.  Look at the huge ongoing debate about Section 230 in the US
> that's been going on for at least months.  This is something that seems
> like it ought to have a simple solution, but it doesn't.
> 

The choice to /not/ have a policy for ejecting jerks has serious costs. 
One of those costs is the kind of rancorous dispute that has been
burning like a brushfire on this list the last few weeks.


-- 
Nathan Sidwell

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Jonathan Wakely]

On Wed, 14 Apr 2021 at 15:49, Jonathan Wakely wrote:
>
> On Wed, 14 Apr 2021 at 15:39, Thomas Koenig wrote:
> >
> > On 14.04.21 15:18, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> > > A strong norm about off-list behavior and politics being
> > > out of bounds here is also helpful.
> >
> > That would have banned the whole discussion about the potential
> > fork from the start.
>
> No, because once again, I raised the topic of a fork because I do not
> feel that association with GNU or FSF benefits the GCC project. I did
> not say "we have to cancel them because I don't like their politics"
> (as it happens, I do like their politics, which is why I've spent two
> decades writing copyleft code for GCC, I just think they have failed
> to evolve and are sadly irrelevant today).

And "the leader of the project had some good ideas but has terrible
leadership skills" is also not political. It's a valid criticism of a
project that we are nominally supposed to be part of.

I don't have more "technical" reason because GNU isn't a "technical"
project, it's a political/philosophical one. The FSF even more so.

And I don't need anybody's consensus to create a fork. Somebody
doesn't understand how free software works.

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Frosku]

On Wed Apr 14, 2021 at 3:54 PM BST, Nathan Sidwell wrote:
> On 4/14/21 10:23 AM, Richard Kenner wrote:
> >> The choice to have a policy for ejecting jerks has serious costs.
> >> One of those costs is the kind of rancorous dispute that has been
> >> burning like a brushfire on this list the last few weeks.
> > 
> > I agree.  Look at the huge ongoing debate about Section 230 in the US
> > that's been going on for at least months.  This is something that seems
> > like it ought to have a simple solution, but it doesn't.
> > 
>
> The choice to /not/ have a policy for ejecting jerks has serious costs.
> One of those costs is the kind of rancorous dispute that has been
> burning like a brushfire on this list the last few weeks.
>
>
> --
> Nathan Sidwell

The implication of this being what? That you would have just removed
everyone who disagreed with you from the debate for being 'jerks'? There is
a way to avoid this kind of "rancorous dispute" -- not proposing and then
doubling down on widely unpopular and technically meritless ideas.

>>= %frosku = { os => 'gnu+linux', editor => 'emacs', coffee => 1 } =<<

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Eric S. Raymond]

Nathan Sidwell <nathan@acm.org>:
> I'd just like to eject the jerks, because they make the place unwelcoming.

I understand the impulse.  The problem is that there is actually a value
conflict between being "welcoming" in that sense and the actual purpose
of this list, which is to ship code.

It's a much more direct conflict in the hacker culture than elsewhere
because so many potential contributors are high-functioning autists.
That makes the downstream consequences of politeness enforcement a lot more
damaging to the project's ability to ship code than they would otherwise be.

There is a hypothetical world, of course, in which jerks and assholes
are such a huge problem that they interfere measurably with shipping
code.  But contemplete the amount of angry verbiage on this list
recently from people who could have been using their fingers typing
code, and I think it's clear that the amount of social friction
oroduced by attempts to eject the jerks will be far higher than if
you simply continued to tolerate them.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Thomas Koenig]

On 14.04.21 16:49, Jonathan Wakely via Gcc wrote:
> On Wed, 14 Apr 2021 at 15:39, Thomas Koenig wrote:
>>
>> On 14.04.21 15:18, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
>>> A strong norm about off-list behavior and politics being
>>> out of bounds here is also helpful.
>>
>> That would have banned the whole discussion about the potential
>> fork from the start.
> 
> No, because once again, I raised the topic of a fork because I do not
> feel that association with GNU or FSF benefits the GCC project.

It sure feels like the proponents of the fork want it for political
reasons, and in this case I mean political reasons which have nothing
to do with open source and everything to do with gender, identity,
race and whatnot politics, more specifically US politics.

If I am mistaken, then the best course of action would be to now focus
on getting gcc 11 out of the door and revisit the whole thing in a few
months, when a rational discussion on the merits and demerits of moving
the project away from the FSF has become possible again.

If I am not mistaken - well, if a fork succeeds in drawing away
a significant amount of developers, the only benefactor will
be LLVM, which may or may not what you want, or are willing
to tolerate in pursuit of your other aims.

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Frosku]

On Wed Apr 14, 2021 at 3:57 PM BST, Jonathan Wakely via Gcc wrote:
> On Wed, 14 Apr 2021 at 15:49, Jonathan Wakely wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, 14 Apr 2021 at 15:39, Thomas Koenig wrote:
> > >
> > > On 14.04.21 15:18, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> > > > A strong norm about off-list behavior and politics being
> > > > out of bounds here is also helpful.
> > >
> > > That would have banned the whole discussion about the potential
> > > fork from the start.
> >
> > No, because once again, I raised the topic of a fork because I do not
> > feel that association with GNU or FSF benefits the GCC project. I did
> > not say "we have to cancel them because I don't like their politics"
> > (as it happens, I do like their politics, which is why I've spent two
> > decades writing copyleft code for GCC, I just think they have failed
> > to evolve and are sadly irrelevant today).
>
> And "the leader of the project had some good ideas but has terrible
> leadership skills" is also not political. It's a valid criticism of a
> project that we are nominally supposed to be part of.
>
> I don't have more "technical" reason because GNU isn't a "technical"
> project, it's a political/philosophical one. The FSF even more so.
>
> And I don't need anybody's consensus to create a fork. Somebody
> doesn't understand how free software works.

Nobody said that you need a consensus to create a fork. The intent of
making a proposal to a community mailing list, however, is generally to
persuade and/or measure public opinion (i.e. gather consensus). In this
case, creating a fork risks splitting the community and the contributors
between two projects -- maybe that's a good thing, though apparently not
for the gfortran developer who's saying it would kill his project.

If RMS's leadership has had a tangible and measurable negative effect on
GCC, that would probably have been the place to open your argument, not
with media hit pieces and a mostly-debunked letter which have nothing to
do with the project.

Turning high-level code into machine code isn't political, it's technical.
The only political aspect is free software, which unless something has
massively changed in the last few days, RMS & FSF both support.

>>= %frosku = { os => 'gnu+linux', editor => 'emacs', coffee => 1 } =<<

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Richard Kenner]

> The choice to /not/ have a policy for ejecting jerks has serious costs. 
> One of those costs is the kind of rancorous dispute that has been
> burning like a brushfire on this list the last few weeks.

Although I agree with the sentiment, there's a real risk that if we
were heading in that direction, we'd be replacing part of that
rancorous dispute with another rancorous dispute, this time about
whether to eject people.

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Eric S. Raymond]

Nathan Sidwell <nathan@acm.org>:
> The choice to /not/ have a policy for ejecting jerks has serious costs. One
> of those costs is the kind of rancorous dispute that has been
> burning like a brushfire on this list the last few weeks.

The situation isn't that symmetrical.  The brushfire didn't happen when it
was a norm here that off-list behavior was not the list's business.  It
only came about when some people decided that norm should no longer apply.

I'm not judging RMS's behavior (or anyone else's) one way or
another. I am simply pointing out that there is a Schelling point in
possible community norms that is well expressed as "you shall judge by
the code alone".  This list is not full of contention from affirming
that norm, but from some peoples' attempt to repudiate it.

(For those of you unfamilar with the concept, a Schelling point is
one of natural equilibrium in a two- or molti-player game, such that
when you move away from it all parties' decision costs go way up.)
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Frosku]

On Wed Apr 14, 2021 at 12:18 PM BST, Richard Kenner via Gcc wrote:
> > The choice to /not/ have a policy for ejecting jerks has serious costs. 
> > One of those costs is the kind of rancorous dispute that has been
> > burning like a brushfire on this list the last few weeks.
>
> Although I agree with the sentiment, there's a real risk that if we
> were heading in that direction, we'd be replacing part of that
> rancorous dispute with another rancorous dispute, this time about
> whether to eject people.

And after that, an ongoing rancorous debate about who to eject, which
was ESR's premise: a project which decides its purpose is to separate
from wrongthinkers is naturally going to waste a lot of valuable time
and effort arguing about what counts as wrongthink. Time and effort
which could better be spent developing free software.

>>= %frosku = { os => 'gnu+linux', editor => 'emacs', coffee => 1 } =<<

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Didier Kryn]

Le 14/04/2021 à 16:49, Jonathan Wakely via Gcc a écrit :
> On Wed, 14 Apr 2021 at 15:39, Thomas Koenig wrote:
>> On 14.04.21 15:18, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
>>> A strong norm about off-list behavior and politics being
>>> out of bounds here is also helpful.
>> That would have banned the whole discussion about the potential
>> fork from the start.
> No, because once again, I raised the topic of a fork because I do not
> feel that association with GNU or FSF benefits the GCC project. I did
> not say "we have to cancel them because I don't like their politics"
> (as it happens, I do like their politics, which is why I've spent two
> decades writing copyleft code for GCC, I just think they have failed
> to evolve and are sadly irrelevant today).
 

    Well,  /I just think they have failed to evolve and are sadly
irrelevant today/  boils down to  /They have again elected RMS./ The
word  /today/  sounds like a reference to the  /modern standards/  I
have read before on the subject. (~:

--     Didier

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Christopher Dimech]

> Sent: Thursday, April 15, 2021 at 2:08 AM
> From: "Nathan Sidwell" <nathan@acm.org>
> To: esr@thyrsus.com
> Cc: "gcc@gcc.gnu.org" <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>
> Subject: Re: removing toxic emailers
>
> On 4/14/21 9:18 AM, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> > Nathan Sidwell <nathan@acm.org>:
> >> Do we have a policy about removing list subscribers that send abusive or
> >> other toxic emails?  do we have a code of conduct?  Searching the wiki or
> >> website finds nothing.  The mission statement mentions nothing.
> >
> > I'm not a GCC insider, but I know a few things about the social
> > dynamics of voluntarist subcultures. You might recall I wrote a book
> > about that once.
> >
> > The choice to have a policy for ejecting jerks has serious costs.
> > One of those costs is the kind of rancorous dispute that has been
> > burning like a brushfire on this list the last few weeks.  Another,
> > particularly serious for hackers - is that such a policy is hostile to
> > autists and others who have poor interaction skills but can ship good
> > code.  This is a significant percentage of your current and future
> > potential contributors, enough that excluding them is a real problem.
> >
> > Most seriously: the rules, whatever they are, will be gamed by people
> > whose objectives are not "ship useful software". You will be fortunate
> > if the gamers' objectives are as relatively innocuous as "gain points
> > in monkey status competition by beating up funny-colored monkeys";
> > there are much worse cases that have been known to crash even projects
> > with nearly as much history and social inertia as this one.
> >
> > Compared to these costs, the overhead of tolerating a few jerks and
> > assholes is pretty much trivial.  That's hard to see right now because
> > the jerks are visible and the costs of formal policing are
> > hypothetical, but I strongly advise you against going down the Code of
> > Conduct route regardless of how fashionable that looks right now.  I
> > have forty years of observer-participant anthropology in intentional
> > online communities, beginning with the disintegration of the USENET
> > cabal back in the 1980s, telling me that will not end well.
> >
> > You're better off with an informal system of moderator fiat and
> > *without* rules that beg to become a subject of dispute and
> > manipulation. A strong norm about off-list behavior and politics being
> > out of bounds here is also helpful.
> >
> > You face a choice between being a community that is about shipping code
> > and one that is embroiled in perpetual controversy over who gets to
> > play here and on what terms.  Choose wisely.
> >
>
> I'd just like to eject the jerks, because they make the place
> unwelcoming.  I wouldn't associate with them in physical space, I don't
> want to associate with them here.  And yes, I fully realize there are
> other ways I can choose to not associate with them here.
>
> nathan
>
> --
> Nathan Sidwell
>

Everybody knew what you wanted to do with that post from the beginning.
Eradication.  Glad you said it.

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Jeff Law]

On 4/14/2021 8:08 AM, Nathan Sidwell wrote:
> On 4/14/21 9:18 AM, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
>> Nathan Sidwell <nathan@acm.org>:
>>> Do we have a policy about removing list subscribers that send 
>>> abusive or
>>> other toxic emails?  do we have a code of conduct?  Searching the 
>>> wiki or
>>> website finds nothing.  The mission statement mentions nothing.
>>
>> I'm not a GCC insider, but I know a few things about the social
>> dynamics of voluntarist subcultures. You might recall I wrote a book
>> about that once.
>>
>> The choice to have a policy for ejecting jerks has serious costs.
>> One of those costs is the kind of rancorous dispute that has been
>> burning like a brushfire on this list the last few weeks. Another,
>> particularly serious for hackers - is that such a policy is hostile to
>> autists and others who have poor interaction skills but can ship good
>> code.  This is a significant percentage of your current and future
>> potential contributors, enough that excluding them is a real problem.
>>
>> Most seriously: the rules, whatever they are, will be gamed by people
>> whose objectives are not "ship useful software". You will be fortunate
>> if the gamers' objectives are as relatively innocuous as "gain points
>> in monkey status competition by beating up funny-colored monkeys";
>> there are much worse cases that have been known to crash even projects
>> with nearly as much history and social inertia as this one.
>>
>> Compared to these costs, the overhead of tolerating a few jerks and
>> assholes is pretty much trivial.  That's hard to see right now because
>> the jerks are visible and the costs of formal policing are
>> hypothetical, but I strongly advise you against going down the Code of
>> Conduct route regardless of how fashionable that looks right now.  I
>> have forty years of observer-participant anthropology in intentional
>> online communities, beginning with the disintegration of the USENET
>> cabal back in the 1980s, telling me that will not end well.
>>
>> You're better off with an informal system of moderator fiat and
>> *without* rules that beg to become a subject of dispute and
>> manipulation. A strong norm about off-list behavior and politics being
>> out of bounds here is also helpful.
>>
>> You face a choice between being a community that is about shipping code
>> and one that is embroiled in perpetual controversy over who gets to
>> play here and on what terms.  Choose wisely.
>>
>
> I'd just like to eject the jerks, because they make the place 
> unwelcoming.  I wouldn't associate with them in physical space, I 
> don't want to associate with them here.  And yes, I fully realize 
> there are other ways I can choose to not associate with them here.

We've generally avoided kicking folks off the lists -- it's been done 
once or twice when physical violence with threatened, but that's about 
it (aside from spammers).  I don't think we want to get too deep into 
moderation and the like -- IMHO it should be an extremely rare event.  
As much as I disagree with some of the comments that have been made I 
don't think they've risen to the level of wanting/needing to ban those 
individuals from posting.

Jeff

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Martin Jambor]

Hi Nathan,

On Wed, Apr 14 2021, Nathan Sidwell wrote:
> Do we have a policy about removing list subscribers that send abusive or 
> other toxic emails?  do we have a code of conduct?  Searching the wiki 
> or website finds nothing.  The mission statement mentions nothing.

I think that (most?) people have already figured out that messages from
unfamiliar senders on certain topics have to be ignored.  It is much
easier than any moderation, which would be ugly work (someone would have
to read the often horrible stuff).

I think that you only "associate" with trolls if you feed them.  I have
recently made that mistake on this list once and will not repeat it.

Martin


P.S.: For what it is worth, I would love us to disassociate from FSF as
much as possible for reasons that I swear have nothing to do with
politics of US or any other country.

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Jeff Law]

On 4/14/2021 8:49 AM, Jonathan Wakely via Gcc wrote:
> On Wed, 14 Apr 2021 at 15:39, Thomas Koenig wrote:
>> On 14.04.21 15:18, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
>>> A strong norm about off-list behavior and politics being
>>> out of bounds here is also helpful.
>> That would have banned the whole discussion about the potential
>> fork from the start.
> No, because once again, I raised the topic of a fork because I do not
> feel that association with GNU or FSF benefits the GCC project. I did
> not say "we have to cancel them because I don't like their politics"
> (as it happens, I do like their politics, which is why I've spent two
> decades writing copyleft code for GCC, I just think they have failed
> to evolve and are sadly irrelevant today).

[ Speaking for myself, not the steering committee or my employer... ]


Well said (and I'm not being sarcastic).  While my politics may not line 
up 100% with those of the FSF, GNU project or RMS, they have been close 
enough for me to spend 30+ years of my life working on GNU tools.  I 
agree with you Jon that the organizations and RMS personally have failed 
to evolve -- and I'll go a step further than you did in this message and 
state that, IMHO, they are actively harmful to GCC and the free software 
movement in general.


I don't relish the idea of forking GCC again.  Been there, done that, it 
was painful.  But again, I think we're at a point where it's necessary 
again.


Jeff

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Christopher Dimech]

There are many things one can say, but when Richard Stallman talks
about computing, he talks sense.  I categorise him with Mathematician
Paul Erdos.  Furthermore, when I had disagreements with him, I never
got ousted.

> Sent: Thursday, April 15, 2021 at 1:18 AM
> From: "Eric S. Raymond" <esr@thyrsus.com>
> To: "Nathan Sidwell" <nathan@acm.org>
> Cc: "gcc@gcc.gnu.org" <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>
> Subject: Re: removing toxic emailers
>
> Nathan Sidwell <nathan@acm.org>:
> > Do we have a policy about removing list subscribers that send abusive or
> > other toxic emails?  do we have a code of conduct?  Searching the wiki or
> > website finds nothing.  The mission statement mentions nothing.
>
> I'm not a GCC insider, but I know a few things about the social
> dynamics of voluntarist subcultures. You might recall I wrote a book
> about that once.
>
> The choice to have a policy for ejecting jerks has serious costs.
> One of those costs is the kind of rancorous dispute that has been
> burning like a brushfire on this list the last few weeks.  Another,
> particularly serious for hackers - is that such a policy is hostile to
> autists and others who have poor interaction skills but can ship good
> code.  This is a significant percentage of your current and future
> potential contributors, enough that excluding them is a real problem.
>
> Most seriously: the rules, whatever they are, will be gamed by people
> whose objectives are not "ship useful software". You will be fortunate
> if the gamers' objectives are as relatively innocuous as "gain points
> in monkey status competition by beating up funny-colored monkeys";
> there are much worse cases that have been known to crash even projects
> with nearly as much history and social inertia as this one.
>
> Compared to these costs, the overhead of tolerating a few jerks and
> assholes is pretty much trivial.  That's hard to see right now because
> the jerks are visible and the costs of formal policing are
> hypothetical, but I strongly advise you against going down the Code of
> Conduct route regardless of how fashionable that looks right now.  I
> have forty years of observer-participant anthropology in intentional
> online communities, beginning with the disintegration of the USENET
> cabal back in the 1980s, telling me that will not end well.

All of this needs transformation, that can be agreed.  What you have said
makes sense - the fundamental purpose is to enhance our knowing and our
computing capability.

> You're better off with an informal system of moderator fiat and
> *without* rules that beg to become a subject of dispute and
> manipulation. A strong norm about off-list behavior and politics being
> out of bounds here is also helpful.
>
> You face a choice between being a community that is about shipping code
> and one that is embroiled in perpetual controversy over who gets to
> play here and on what terms.  Choose wisely.

There has been an unfortunate history of discrimination at all levels.
Yet, many are simply talking activism originating from rudimentary ideas,
many picked up from the west.  People are mixing things.  There is
exploitation, but not necessarily discrimination.  Exploitation is not
just of the woman.  Anybody who is weaker than you, people are
exploiting - whether it's a man, woman and child.

Should one take Nathan's approach, it would be equally valid to state
that Nathan and some of his associates are in no position to give lessons,
considering the hidden history of exploitation perpetrated by their
employers.  Assisting a company that unleashes exploitative practices,
for income, is equally reprehensible.  Correct me if I am wrong.

> --

> 		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>
>
>
>

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Nathan Sidwell]

On 4/14/21 12:52 PM, Martin Jambor wrote:
> Hi Nathan,
> 
> On Wed, Apr 14 2021, Nathan Sidwell wrote:
>> Do we have a policy about removing list subscribers that send abusive or
>> other toxic emails?  do we have a code of conduct?  Searching the wiki
>> or website finds nothing.  The mission statement mentions nothing.
> 
> I think that (most?) people have already figured out that messages from
> unfamiliar senders on certain topics have to be ignored.  It is much
> easier than any moderation, which would be ugly work (someone would have
> to read the often horrible stuff).
> 
> I think that you only "associate" with trolls if you feed them.  I have
> recently made that mistake on this list once and will not repeat it.

I disagree.  Their emails pollute the list.  Just as I wouldn't like to 
go to a bar where there are noisy jerks in a corner, I don't like to 
frequent an ML where there are.  Bouncers exist in physical space, is it 
so hard to electronically bounce jerks?  Is it so hard to explicitly say 
'be a jerk and be thrown out'?

Their presence makes the place unwelcoming.

nathan

-- 
Nathan Sidwell

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Christopher Dimech]

> Sent: Thursday, April 15, 2021 at 5:09 AM
> From: "Jeff Law via Gcc" <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>
> To: "Jonathan Wakely" <jwakely.gcc@gmail.com>, "Thomas Koenig" <tkoenig@netcologne.de>
> Cc: "gcc@gcc.gnu.org" <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>
> Subject: Re: removing toxic emailers
>
> 
> On 4/14/2021 8:49 AM, Jonathan Wakely via Gcc wrote:
> > On Wed, 14 Apr 2021 at 15:39, Thomas Koenig wrote:
> >> On 14.04.21 15:18, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> >>> A strong norm about off-list behavior and politics being
> >>> out of bounds here is also helpful.
> >> That would have banned the whole discussion about the potential
> >> fork from the start.
> > No, because once again, I raised the topic of a fork because I do not
> > feel that association with GNU or FSF benefits the GCC project. I did
> > not say "we have to cancel them because I don't like their politics"
> > (as it happens, I do like their politics, which is why I've spent two
> > decades writing copyleft code for GCC, I just think they have failed
> > to evolve and are sadly irrelevant today).
> 
> [ Speaking for myself, not the steering committee or my employer... ]
> 
> 
> Well said (and I'm not being sarcastic).  While my politics may not line 
> up 100% with those of the FSF, GNU project or RMS, they have been close 
> enough for me to spend 30+ years of my life working on GNU tools.  I 
> agree with you Jon that the organizations and RMS personally have failed 
> to evolve - Jeff
 
I have been involved in discussions arising from a failure to evolve, I can't
deny it.  Eventually things get rectified, but there is a problem of things
taking too long.  On the other hand forcing people hard won't work.  So I do
live with quite some inconveniences.

Still, I find that things bended in the right way decade-by-decade.  
Day-by-Day - things oscillate.  

Christopher

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Joseph Myers]

On Wed, 14 Apr 2021, Eric S. Raymond wrote:

> I'm not judging RMS's behavior (or anyone else's) one way or
> another. I am simply pointing out that there is a Schelling point in
> possible community norms that is well expressed as "you shall judge by
> the code alone".  This list is not full of contention from affirming
> that norm, but from some peoples' attempt to repudiate it.

Since RMS, FSF and GNU are not contributing code to the toolchain and 
haven't been for a very long time, the most similar basis to judge them 
would seem to be based on their interactions with toolchain development.  
I think those interactions generally show that FSF and GNU have been bad 
umbrella organizations for the toolchain since at least when the GCC 4.4 
release was delayed waiting for a slow process of developing the GCC 
Runtime Library Exception.

Things have gone most smoothly when no actions or decisions from FSF or 
GNU have been required and when RMS has not attempted to make any 
decisions related to the toolchain.  When RMS has attempted to make any 
decisions, or suggest features, etc., that's generally served to waste a 
lot of time explaining to him why his ideas are irrelevant or based on a 
fundamental lack of understanding of the issues involved.  Even when he's 
made suggestions that are reasonable, he's still wasted a lot of people's 
time arguing about points that should not be controversial.

(By way of example, on 20 Sep 2017 he suggested to the SC that GCC should 
support direct use of non-ASCII characters in identifiers.  I replied 
pointing him to the guidance I'd given in bug 67224 comments 11, 19 and 
21.  So far, that's reasonable, but he then entered into prolonged 
discussion of the details of what particular patches did or didn't do, 
exactly what characters should or should not be allowed in identifiers, 
how GNU relates to standards, to what extent we need to design a feature 
properly before including it in GCC, and so on.  None of his comments 
there were at all useful, since he's far too far removed from current GCC 
development to comment usefully on such matters, and any useful comments 
in that area would have been better somewhere public anyway.  And in due 
course we did get a new GCC contributor who successfully implemented the 
feature in GCC following the guidance I'd given, despite RMS's notions 
that that would be too hard.)

In things where the FSF and GNU have been supposed to be acting as 
umbrella organizations, that has generally been done badly (e.g. there 
have been problems with long delays in processing copyright assignments 
many times over the years; they never managed to come up with a simple 
GPL/GFDL dual-licensing notice so requiring instead the cumbersome system 
of having both GPL and GFDL copies of certain text in target.def and 
tm.texi).


For fairness, I should note the *unique case I know of in the past decade* 
where RMS was involved in a positive toolchain contribution.  On 11 Nov 
2011 he started a discussion with me regarding the problems with glibc 
maintenance, and that ultimately started the transition to more 
community-oriented glibc development.  But ultimately the key parts of 
that transition were not the parts that actually involved RMS - it was 
discussions with Roland McGrath, not with RMS, that were key to achieving 
the transition successfully.

New GNU maintainers of glibc, as recommended by me, were added on RMS's 
direction (maintainers revision 1.1352 on fencepost, 10 Feb 2012).  But 
the actual problems before then with glibc development weren't with the 
GNU maintainers (steering committee), beyond that they didn't do anything 
much to address the dysfunction in glibc development - it wasn't the GNU 
maintainers who were pushing away contributions.  And it was the 
deliberate work on building a community, getting people contributing, 
getting contributions committed (bootstrapping off Roland's authority to 
approve changes regardless of whether the then lead developer cared for 
them) that was actually the key part.  The announcements relating to 
changes 
<https://sourceware.org/pipermail/libc-alpha/2012-March/028224.html> 
<https://sourceware.org/pipermail/libc-alpha/2012-March/028226.html> were 
primarily concerned with a situation that already existed at that time, 
and that had been achieved by following a process that Roland had 
convinced me would be the right way to achieve changes, not with 
announcing anything done on the authority of RMS (which had happened over 
a month earlier without any public announcement).

So in that case, while RMS started the discussion (or at least the part of 
the discussion I saw, I don't know what might have happened before 11 Nov 
2011 involving other people), the useful changes could have been achieved 
by following the same plan with Roland but without RMS involved at all, 
whereas if only RMS's part had happened and there had been an attempt to 
change things only on the authority of RMS without actively building the 
community first, it would have been much less likely to succeed.  No GNU 
authority was ever needed to achieve the changes and the exercise of GNU 
authority that happened through appointing new maintainers was only 
legitimate because it was part of recognizing community changes that were 
in the process of occurring.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Christopher Dimech]

> Sent: Thursday, April 15, 2021 at 6:19 AM
> From: "Nathan Sidwell" <nathan@acm.org>
> To: "Martin Jambor" <mjambor@suse.cz>, "gcc@gcc.gnu.org" <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>
> Subject: Re: removing toxic emailers
>
> On 4/14/21 12:52 PM, Martin Jambor wrote:
> > Hi Nathan,
> >
> > On Wed, Apr 14 2021, Nathan Sidwell wrote:
> >> Do we have a policy about removing list subscribers that send abusive or
> >> other toxic emails?  do we have a code of conduct?  Searching the wiki
> >> or website finds nothing.  The mission statement mentions nothing.
> >
> > I think that (most?) people have already figured out that messages from
> > unfamiliar senders on certain topics have to be ignored.  It is much
> > easier than any moderation, which would be ugly work (someone would have
> > to read the often horrible stuff).
> >
> > I think that you only "associate" with trolls if you feed them.  I have
> > recently made that mistake on this list once and will not repeat it.
>
> I disagree.  Their emails pollute the list.  Just as I wouldn't like to
> go to a bar where there are noisy jerks in a corner, I don't like to
> frequent an ML where there are.  Bouncers exist in physical space, is it
> so hard to electronically bounce jerks?  Is it so hard to explicitly say
> 'be a jerk and be thrown out'?
>
> Their presence makes the place unwelcoming.
> - nathan - Nathan Sidwell

I agree, but the question is - Who will decide?

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Paul Koning]

> On Apr 14, 2021, at 2:19 PM, Nathan Sidwell <nathan@acm.org> wrote:
> 
> On 4/14/21 12:52 PM, Martin Jambor wrote:
>> Hi Nathan,
>> On Wed, Apr 14 2021, Nathan Sidwell wrote:
>>> Do we have a policy about removing list subscribers that send abusive or
>>> other toxic emails?  do we have a code of conduct?  Searching the wiki
>>> or website finds nothing.  The mission statement mentions nothing.
>> I think that (most?) people have already figured out that messages from
>> unfamiliar senders on certain topics have to be ignored.  It is much
>> easier than any moderation, which would be ugly work (someone would have
>> to read the often horrible stuff).
>> I think that you only "associate" with trolls if you feed them.  I have
>> recently made that mistake on this list once and will not repeat it.
> 
> I disagree.  Their emails pollute the list.  Just as I wouldn't like to go to a bar where there are noisy jerks in a corner, I don't like to frequent an ML where there are.  Bouncers exist in physical space, is it so hard to electronically bounce jerks?  Is it so hard to explicitly say 'be a jerk and be thrown out'?

Who decides?

Bouncers enforce the policy of the owner of the joint.  In any meetingplace that has an owner who has authority over who enters, it's possible to establish rules controlling ejection and bouncers to do the ejecting.

Our place does not have a single owner who has the authority to decide unilaterally "you're not wanted, leave".  What mechanism would you use instead?  Ostracism, in the classic Greek sense of a secret ballot to decide for or against banishment?

	paul

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Christopher Dimech]

> Sent: Thursday, April 15, 2021 at 6:27 AM
> From: "Joseph Myers" <joseph@codesourcery.com>
> To: "Eric S. Raymond" <esr@thyrsus.com>
> Cc: gcc@gcc.gnu.org, "Nathan Sidwell" <nathan@acm.org>
> Subject: Re: removing toxic emailers
>
> On Wed, 14 Apr 2021, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
>
> > I'm not judging RMS's behavior (or anyone else's) one way or
> > another. I am simply pointing out that there is a Schelling point in
> > possible community norms that is well expressed as "you shall judge by
> > the code alone".  This list is not full of contention from affirming
> > that norm, but from some peoples' attempt to repudiate it.
>
> Since RMS, FSF and GNU are not contributing code to the toolchain and
> haven't been for a very long time, the most similar basis to judge them
> would seem to be based on their interactions with toolchain development.
> I think those interactions generally show that FSF and GNU have been bad
> umbrella organizations for the toolchain since at least when the GCC 4.4
> release was delayed waiting for a slow process of developing the GCC
> Runtime Library Exception.
>
> Things have gone most smoothly when no actions or decisions from FSF or
> GNU have been required and when RMS has not attempted to make any
> decisions related to the toolchain.  When RMS has attempted to make any
> decisions, or suggest features, etc., that's generally served to waste a
> lot of time explaining to him why his ideas are irrelevant or based on a
> fundamental lack of understanding of the issues involved.  Even when he's
> made suggestions that are reasonable, he's still wasted a lot of people's
> time arguing about points that should not be controversial.
>
> (By way of example, on 20 Sep 2017 he suggested to the SC that GCC should
> support direct use of non-ASCII characters in identifiers.  I replied
> pointing him to the guidance I'd given in bug 67224 comments 11, 19 and
> 21.  So far, that's reasonable, but he then entered into prolonged
> discussion of the details of what particular patches did or didn't do,
> exactly what characters should or should not be allowed in identifiers,
> how GNU relates to standards, to what extent we need to design a feature
> properly before including it in GCC, and so on.  None of his comments
> there were at all useful, since he's far too far removed from current GCC
> development to comment usefully on such matters, and any useful comments
> in that area would have been better somewhere public anyway.  And in due
> course we did get a new GCC contributor who successfully implemented the
> feature in GCC following the guidance I'd given, despite RMS's notions
> that that would be too hard.)
>
> In things where the FSF and GNU have been supposed to be acting as
> umbrella organizations, that has generally been done badly (e.g. there
> have been problems with long delays in processing copyright assignments
> many times over the years; they never managed to come up with a simple
> GPL/GFDL dual-licensing notice so requiring instead the cumbersome system
> of having both GPL and GFDL copies of certain text in target.def and
> tm.texi).

Have suggested the need to work on the GFDL to make it compatible with
GPL-like licenses.

> For fairness, I should note the *unique case I know of in the past decade*
> where RMS was involved in a positive toolchain contribution.  On 11 Nov
> 2011 he started a discussion with me regarding the problems with glibc
> maintenance, and that ultimately started the transition to more
> community-oriented glibc development.  But ultimately the key parts of
> that transition were not the parts that actually involved RMS - it was
> discussions with Roland McGrath, not with RMS, that were key to achieving
> the transition successfully.
>
> New GNU maintainers of glibc, as recommended by me, were added on RMS's
> direction (maintainers revision 1.1352 on fencepost, 10 Feb 2012).  But
> the actual problems before then with glibc development weren't with the
> GNU maintainers (steering committee), beyond that they didn't do anything
> much to address the dysfunction in glibc development - it wasn't the GNU
> maintainers who were pushing away contributions.  And it was the
> deliberate work on building a community, getting people contributing,
> getting contributions committed (bootstrapping off Roland's authority to
> approve changes regardless of whether the then lead developer cared for
> them) that was actually the key part.  The announcements relating to
> changes
> <https://sourceware.org/pipermail/libc-alpha/2012-March/028224.html>
> <https://sourceware.org/pipermail/libc-alpha/2012-March/028226.html> were
> primarily concerned with a situation that already existed at that time,
> and that had been achieved by following a process that Roland had
> convinced me would be the right way to achieve changes, not with
> announcing anything done on the authority of RMS (which had happened over
> a month earlier without any public announcement).
>
> So in that case, while RMS started the discussion (or at least the part of
> the discussion I saw, I don't know what might have happened before 11 Nov
> 2011 involving other people), the useful changes could have been achieved
> by following the same plan with Roland but without RMS involved at all,
> whereas if only RMS's part had happened and there had been an attempt to
> change things only on the authority of RMS without actively building the
> community first, it would have been much less likely to succeed.  No GNU
> authority was ever needed to achieve the changes and the exercise of GNU
> authority that happened through appointing new maintainers was only
> legitimate because it was part of recognizing community changes that were
> in the process of occurring.

It looks like the debate revolves on the dislike of RMS, making any claims
about toxicity on the community null.

It all started with a tirade about commits and implementations to validate
worthiness, which was then used to forcefully advance the senseless assumption
of white male privilege.  There are few things more dishonorable than misleading
the young in the community.

> --
> Joseph S. Myers
> joseph@codesourcery.com
>

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Christopher Dimech]

> Sent: Thursday, April 15, 2021 at 6:32 AM
> From: "Paul Koning via Gcc" <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>
> To: "Nathan Sidwell" <nathan@acm.org>
> Cc: "GCC Development" <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>
> Subject: Re: removing toxic emailers
>
>
>
> > On Apr 14, 2021, at 2:19 PM, Nathan Sidwell <nathan@acm.org> wrote:
> >
> > On 4/14/21 12:52 PM, Martin Jambor wrote:
> >> Hi Nathan,
> >> On Wed, Apr 14 2021, Nathan Sidwell wrote:
> >>> Do we have a policy about removing list subscribers that send abusive or
> >>> other toxic emails?  do we have a code of conduct?  Searching the wiki
> >>> or website finds nothing.  The mission statement mentions nothing.
> >> I think that (most?) people have already figured out that messages from
> >> unfamiliar senders on certain topics have to be ignored.  It is much
> >> easier than any moderation, which would be ugly work (someone would have
> >> to read the often horrible stuff).
> >> I think that you only "associate" with trolls if you feed them.  I have
> >> recently made that mistake on this list once and will not repeat it.
> >
> > I disagree.  Their emails pollute the list.  Just as I wouldn't like to go to a bar where there are noisy jerks in a corner, I don't like to frequent an ML where there are.  Bouncers exist in physical space, is it so hard to electronically bounce jerks?  Is it so hard to explicitly say 'be a jerk and be thrown out'?
>
> Who decides?
>
> Bouncers enforce the policy of the owner of the joint.  In any meetingplace that has an owner who has authority over who enters, it's possible to establish rules controlling ejection and bouncers to do the ejecting.
>
> Our place does not have a single owner who has the authority to decide unilaterally "you're not wanted, leave".  What mechanism would you use instead?  Ostracism, in the classic Greek sense of a secret ballot to decide for or against banishment?
- paul

We can reintroduce the duel.  It was originally reserved for the male members
of the nobility in the late 18th century in England using pistols.  What do
you think of that? :)

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Ian Lance Taylor]

On Wed, Apr 14, 2021 at 9:08 AM Jeff Law via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org> wrote:
>
> once or twice when physical violence with threatened, but that's about
> it (aside from spammers).  I don't think we want to get too deep into
> moderation and the like -- IMHO it should be an extremely rare event.
> As much as I disagree with some of the comments that have been made I
> don't think they've risen to the level of wanting/needing to ban those
> individuals from posting.

I think it's useful to observe that there are a reasonable number of
people who will refuse to participate in a project in which the
mailing list has regular personal attacks and other kinds of abusive
behavior.  I know this because I've spoken with such people myself.
They simply say "that project is not for me" and move on.

So we don't get the choice between "everyone is welcome" and "some
people are kicked off the list."  We get the choice between "some
people decline to participate because it is unpleasant" and "some
people are kicked off the list."

Given the choice of which group of people are going to participate and
which group are not, which group do we want?

(I'm raising this as a kind of first principle.  If there is a system
for banning people from the list, there are various things to discuss
as to how that might work.  And I've seen it work effectively in other
communities.  But if we don't agree on that first principle, there is
no point to continuing.)

Ian

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Christopher Jefferson]

On Wed, 14 Apr 2021 at 21:40, Ian Lance Taylor via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Apr 14, 2021 at 9:08 AM Jeff Law via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org> wrote:
> >
> > once or twice when physical violence with threatened, but that's about
> > it (aside from spammers).  I don't think we want to get too deep into
> > moderation and the like -- IMHO it should be an extremely rare event.
> > As much as I disagree with some of the comments that have been made I
> > don't think they've risen to the level of wanting/needing to ban those
> > individuals from posting.
>
> I think it's useful to observe that there are a reasonable number of
> people who will refuse to participate in a project in which the
> mailing list has regular personal attacks and other kinds of abusive
> behavior.  I know this because I've spoken with such people myself.
> They simply say "that project is not for me" and move on.
>

As a single data point, I used to contribute somewhat to gcc
(libstdc++ specifically) -- I did a bunch of work implementing bits of
TR1 and C++03. I found the "GCC community" an unpleasant place to be
(there were many nice individual nice people), and didn't enjoy being
involved. I just moved on to work on several other, open-source
non-GNU projects, which I have been happily contributing to for the
last 10 years or so.

Chris Jefferson

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Paul Koning]

> On Apr 14, 2021, at 4:39 PM, Ian Lance Taylor via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Apr 14, 2021 at 9:08 AM Jeff Law via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org> wrote:
>> 
>> once or twice when physical violence with threatened, but that's about
>> it (aside from spammers).  I don't think we want to get too deep into
>> moderation and the like -- IMHO it should be an extremely rare event.
>> As much as I disagree with some of the comments that have been made I
>> don't think they've risen to the level of wanting/needing to ban those
>> individuals from posting.
> 
> I think it's useful to observe that there are a reasonable number of
> people who will refuse to participate in a project in which the
> mailing list has regular personal attacks and other kinds of abusive
> behavior.  I know this because I've spoken with such people myself.
> They simply say "that project is not for me" and move on.
> 
> So we don't get the choice between "everyone is welcome" and "some
> people are kicked off the list."  We get the choice between "some
> people decline to participate because it is unpleasant" and "some
> people are kicked off the list."
> 
> Given the choice of which group of people are going to participate and
> which group are not, which group do we want?

My answer is "it depends".  More precisely, in the past I would have favored those who decline because the environment is unpleasant -- with the implied assumption being that their objections are reasonable.  Given the emergency of cancel culture, that assumption is no longer automatically valid.

This is why I asked the question "who decides?"  Given a disagreement in which the proposed remedy is to ostracise a participant, it is necessary to inquire for what reason this should be done (and, perhaps, who is pushing for it to be done).  My suggestion is that this judgment can be made by the community (via secret ballot), unless it is decided to delegate that power to a smaller body, considered as trustees, or whatever you choose to call them.

	paul

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Jeff Law]

On 4/14/2021 2:39 PM, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 14, 2021 at 9:08 AM Jeff Law via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org> wrote:
>> once or twice when physical violence with threatened, but that's about
>> it (aside from spammers).  I don't think we want to get too deep into
>> moderation and the like -- IMHO it should be an extremely rare event.
>> As much as I disagree with some of the comments that have been made I
>> don't think they've risen to the level of wanting/needing to ban those
>> individuals from posting.
> I think it's useful to observe that there are a reasonable number of
> people who will refuse to participate in a project in which the
> mailing list has regular personal attacks and other kinds of abusive
> behavior.  I know this because I've spoken with such people myself.
> They simply say "that project is not for me" and move on.
>
> So we don't get the choice between "everyone is welcome" and "some
> people are kicked off the list."  We get the choice between "some
> people decline to participate because it is unpleasant" and "some
> people are kicked off the list."
>
> Given the choice of which group of people are going to participate and
> which group are not, which group do we want?
>
> (I'm raising this as a kind of first principle.  If there is a system
> for banning people from the list, there are various things to discuss
> as to how that might work.  And I've seen it work effectively in other
> communities.  But if we don't agree on that first principle, there is
> no point to continuing.)

It's been a long time, but I think when we've banned someone it's been 
through the steering committee.

But yes, I understand your point and it's a good one and I think we can 
probably find some common ground there -- but even so I think banning 
should be a rare event and some official outreach to the offender should 
happen first.


jeff

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Ian Lance Taylor]

On Wed, Apr 14, 2021 at 1:49 PM Paul Koning <paulkoning@comcast.net> wrote:
>
> > On Apr 14, 2021, at 4:39 PM, Ian Lance Taylor via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org> wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, Apr 14, 2021 at 9:08 AM Jeff Law via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org> wrote:
> >>
> >> once or twice when physical violence with threatened, but that's about
> >> it (aside from spammers).  I don't think we want to get too deep into
> >> moderation and the like -- IMHO it should be an extremely rare event.
> >> As much as I disagree with some of the comments that have been made I
> >> don't think they've risen to the level of wanting/needing to ban those
> >> individuals from posting.
> >
> > I think it's useful to observe that there are a reasonable number of
> > people who will refuse to participate in a project in which the
> > mailing list has regular personal attacks and other kinds of abusive
> > behavior.  I know this because I've spoken with such people myself.
> > They simply say "that project is not for me" and move on.
> >
> > So we don't get the choice between "everyone is welcome" and "some
> > people are kicked off the list."  We get the choice between "some
> > people decline to participate because it is unpleasant" and "some
> > people are kicked off the list."
> >
> > Given the choice of which group of people are going to participate and
> > which group are not, which group do we want?
>
> My answer is "it depends".  More precisely, in the past I would have favored those who decline because the environment is unpleasant -- with the implied assumption being that their objections are reasonable.  Given the emergency of cancel culture, that assumption is no longer automatically valid.
>
> This is why I asked the question "who decides?"  Given a disagreement in which the proposed remedy is to ostracise a participant, it is necessary to inquire for what reason this should be done (and, perhaps, who is pushing for it to be done).  My suggestion is that this judgment can be made by the community (via secret ballot), unless it is decided to delegate that power to a smaller body, considered as trustees, or whatever you choose to call them.

Personally, I think that voting is unworkable in practice.  I think
decisions can be reasonably delegated to a small group of trusted
people.  A fairly common name for that group is "moderators".  It
might be appropriate to use voting of some sort when selecting
moderators.

Ian

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Ian Lance Taylor]

On Wed, Apr 14, 2021 at 2:24 PM Jeff Law <jeffreyalaw@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> But yes, I understand your point and it's a good one and I think we can
> probably find some common ground there -- but even so I think banning
> should be a rare event and some official outreach to the offender should
> happen first.

Agreed (except for cases of obvious spam entirely unrelated to the project).

Ian

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Patrick McGehearty]

To provide a face-to-face example of how banning can work without
a formal written policy, I been in the leadership of a social gaming
organization with chapters in various places. Our local group typically
has 30-40 people show up at events and over the 30+ years of our
existence, we've had multiple hundreds of different people participate.
Those numbers somewhat match the number of active participants on
this mailing list (to an order of magnitude at least).

Like participants of this mailing list, we discourage disagreeable
behavior because we lose participants if a few people make it
unpleasant for the rest of us. When someone goes over the line,
we (one or more people in the leadership) takes them aside (privately
if possible) and politely point out their behavior is not
doing them or the group any favors. If they seem to understand
and agree to do better, that can be the end of it. Some people
may need guidance more than once, but good intentions count.

There have been a very small number of attendees to our group who's
behavior is unacceptable and will not be tolerated. I can think of only
three specific cases in the last 15 years. In each case, there was a
broad consensus that the group would be better off without them.
There have been many more cases where someone started going over the
line but pulled back when corrected. With positive intervention, their
behavior was modified and they continued in the group.

I believe the same approach could work here. When someone goes over
the line, a respected leader with a talent for calming things down
could suggest to them privately that perhaps they might tone it down
to a more appropriate level of discourse. There is a skill to calming
done tempers and not everyone has the right talents for that, but the
right intervention can help.

While I have been irritated at some of the emails, I have not seen
behavior that is severe enough to build a broad consensus for banning.
To be very clear, I am not complaining about what position anyone
has taken, only about when they present their point of view
in a hostile or offensive way or presume the opposing point
of view represents the face of evil. Hostility does not tend to
change anyone's mind.

I don't believe a formal policy is necessary. It should be
clear when someone is way over the line and cannot accept
counseling and guidance. At that point, the steering committee
can give warning and finally take the necessary action.

- Patrick McGehearty


On 4/14/2021 4:24 PM, Jeff Law via Gcc wrote:
>
> On 4/14/2021 2:39 PM, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
>> On Wed, Apr 14, 2021 at 9:08 AM Jeff Law via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org> 
>> wrote:
>>> once or twice when physical violence with threatened, but that's about
>>> it (aside from spammers).  I don't think we want to get too deep into
>>> moderation and the like -- IMHO it should be an extremely rare event.
>>> As much as I disagree with some of the comments that have been made I
>>> don't think they've risen to the level of wanting/needing to ban those
>>> individuals from posting.
>> I think it's useful to observe that there are a reasonable number of
>> people who will refuse to participate in a project in which the
>> mailing list has regular personal attacks and other kinds of abusive
>> behavior.  I know this because I've spoken with such people myself.
>> They simply say "that project is not for me" and move on.
>>
>> So we don't get the choice between "everyone is welcome" and "some
>> people are kicked off the list."  We get the choice between "some
>> people decline to participate because it is unpleasant" and "some
>> people are kicked off the list."
>>
>> Given the choice of which group of people are going to participate and
>> which group are not, which group do we want?
>>
>> (I'm raising this as a kind of first principle.  If there is a system
>> for banning people from the list, there are various things to discuss
>> as to how that might work.  And I've seen it work effectively in other
>> communities.  But if we don't agree on that first principle, there is
>> no point to continuing.)
>
> It's been a long time, but I think when we've banned someone it's been 
> through the steering committee.
>
> But yes, I understand your point and it's a good one and I think we 
> can probably find some common ground there -- but even so I think 
> banning should be a rare event and some official outreach to the 
> offender should happen first.
>
>
> jeff
>

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Frosku]

On Wed Apr 14, 2021 at 9:49 PM BST, Paul Koning via Gcc wrote:
>
> My answer is "it depends". More precisely, in the past I would have
> favored those who decline because the environment is unpleasant -- with
> the implied assumption being that their objections are reasonable. Given
> the emergency of cancel culture, that assumption is no longer
> automatically valid.
>
> This is why I asked the question "who decides?" Given a disagreement in
> which the proposed remedy is to ostracise a participant, it is necessary
> to inquire for what reason this should be done (and, perhaps, who is
> pushing for it to be done). My suggestion is that this judgment can be
> made by the community (via secret ballot), unless it is decided to
> delegate that power to a smaller body, considered as trustees, or
> whatever you choose to call them.
>
> paul

I think, in general, it's fine to leave this decision to moderators. It's
just a little disconcerting when one of the people who would probably be
moderating is saying that he could have shut down the discussion if he
could only ban jerks, as if to imply that everyone who dares to disagree
with his position is a jerk worthy of a ban.

>>= %frosku = { os => 'gnu+linux', editor => 'emacs', coffee => 1 } =<<

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Ian Lance Taylor]

On Wed, Apr 14, 2021 at 3:41 PM Frosku <frosku@frosku.com> wrote:
>
> I think, in general, it's fine to leave this decision to moderators. It's
> just a little disconcerting when one of the people who would probably be
> moderating is saying that he could have shut down the discussion if he
> could only ban jerks, as if to imply that everyone who dares to disagree
> with his position is a jerk worthy of a ban.

I haven't seen anybody say that, so I'm not sure who you are talking
about.  In any case, what makes you say that that person, whoever they
are, would probably be a moderator?  And why do you infer that that
person believes that everybody who "dares to disagree with his
position" is a jerk?  Did they say so?  Or are you making the same
mistake that you are attributing to this person: equating disagreement
over ideas with disagreement about appropriate behavior?

Ian

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Frosku]

On Thu Apr 15, 2021 at 12:19 AM BST, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 14, 2021 at 3:41 PM Frosku <frosku@frosku.com> wrote:
> >
> > I think, in general, it's fine to leave this decision to moderators. It's
> > just a little disconcerting when one of the people who would probably be
> > moderating is saying that he could have shut down the discussion if he
> > could only ban jerks, as if to imply that everyone who dares to disagree
> > with his position is a jerk worthy of a ban.
>
> I haven't seen anybody say that, so I'm not sure who you are talking
> about. In any case, what makes you say that that person, whoever they
> are, would probably be a moderator? And why do you infer that that
> person believes that everybody who "dares to disagree with his
> position" is a jerk? Did they say so? Or are you making the same
> mistake that you are attributing to this person: equating disagreement
> over ideas with disagreement about appropriate behavior?
>
> Ian

This was the quote:

> The choice to /not/ have a policy for ejecting jerks has serious costs.
> One of those costs is the kind of rancorous dispute that has been
> burning like a brushfire on this list the last few weeks.

My read is that this is suggestions that if the 'jerks' were simply
removed from the discussion, there would be no dispute. The only way this
would be true is if all the jerks were on a single side of it, and I make
the assumption that the individual I'm quoting wasn't suggesting that he
himself be banned.

Perhaps you can suggest a more charitable read. Ambiguity is the enemy of
good discussion in text, after all.

>>= %frosku = { os => 'gnu+linux', editor => 'emacs', coffee => 1 } =<<

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Ian Lance Taylor]

On Wed, Apr 14, 2021 at 4:28 PM Frosku <frosku@frosku.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu Apr 15, 2021 at 12:19 AM BST, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
> > On Wed, Apr 14, 2021 at 3:41 PM Frosku <frosku@frosku.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > I think, in general, it's fine to leave this decision to moderators. It's
> > > just a little disconcerting when one of the people who would probably be
> > > moderating is saying that he could have shut down the discussion if he
> > > could only ban jerks, as if to imply that everyone who dares to disagree
> > > with his position is a jerk worthy of a ban.
> >
> > I haven't seen anybody say that, so I'm not sure who you are talking
> > about. In any case, what makes you say that that person, whoever they
> > are, would probably be a moderator? And why do you infer that that
> > person believes that everybody who "dares to disagree with his
> > position" is a jerk? Did they say so? Or are you making the same
> > mistake that you are attributing to this person: equating disagreement
> > over ideas with disagreement about appropriate behavior?
> >
> > Ian
>
> This was the quote:
>
> > The choice to /not/ have a policy for ejecting jerks has serious costs.
> > One of those costs is the kind of rancorous dispute that has been
> > burning like a brushfire on this list the last few weeks.
>
> My read is that this is suggestions that if the 'jerks' were simply
> removed from the discussion, there would be no dispute. The only way this
> would be true is if all the jerks were on a single side of it, and I make
> the assumption that the individual I'm quoting wasn't suggesting that he
> himself be banned.
>
> Perhaps you can suggest a more charitable read. Ambiguity is the enemy of
> good discussion in text, after all.

You are assuming that all dispute is rancorous.  That is not the case.

(And I'm still not sure why you think he would "probably be moderating.")

Ian

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Frosku]

On Thu Apr 15, 2021 at 12:36 AM BST, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
>
> (And I'm still not sure why you think he would "probably be
> moderating.")
>
> Ian

In my experience, those people who seek code of conducts generally envision
themselves as the enforcers, not the parties upon which they should be enforced.
If you're telling me that it's unlikely, that makes me feel better.

>>= %frosku = { os => 'gnu+linux', editor => 'emacs', coffee => 1 } =<<

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Ian Lance Taylor]

On Wed, Apr 14, 2021 at 4:39 PM Frosku <frosku@frosku.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu Apr 15, 2021 at 12:36 AM BST, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
> >
> > (And I'm still not sure why you think he would "probably be
> > moderating.")
> >
> > Ian
>
> In my experience, those people who seek code of conducts generally envision
> themselves as the enforcers, not the parties upon which they should be enforced.
> If you're telling me that it's unlikely, that makes me feel better.

It seems unlikely to me.

Ian

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Christopher Dimech]

> Sent: Thursday, April 15, 2021 at 6:19 AM
> From: "Nathan Sidwell" <nathan@acm.org>
> To: "Martin Jambor" <mjambor@suse.cz>, "gcc@gcc.gnu.org" <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>
> Subject: Re: removing toxic emailers
>
> On 4/14/21 12:52 PM, Martin Jambor wrote:
> > Hi Nathan,
> > 
> > On Wed, Apr 14 2021, Nathan Sidwell wrote:
> >> Do we have a policy about removing list subscribers that send abusive or
> >> other toxic emails?  do we have a code of conduct?  Searching the wiki
> >> or website finds nothing.  The mission statement mentions nothing.
> > 
> > I think that (most?) people have already figured out that messages from
> > unfamiliar senders on certain topics have to be ignored.  It is much
> > easier than any moderation, which would be ugly work (someone would have
> > to read the often horrible stuff).
> > 
> > I think that you only "associate" with trolls if you feed them.  I have
> > recently made that mistake on this list once and will not repeat it.
> 
> I disagree.  Their emails pollute the list.  Just as I wouldn't like to 
> go to a bar where there are noisy jerks in a corner, I don't like to 
> frequent an ML where there are.  Bouncers exist in physical space, is it 
> so hard to electronically bounce jerks?  Is it so hard to explicitly say 
> 'be a jerk and be thrown out'?
> 
> Their presence makes the place unwelcoming.
> 
> - nathan - > Nathan Sidwell

What are we?  Adults or Children?  You know, as I know, that identities
can be made up.  There are many computing specialists who can do that.
They can even be made so it looks as though they were sent by you, or 
from your work and home address.  They could even be made up to look as
though your children sent them.

I remember a closing comment by Eben Moglen during a full-day program at
Columbia Law School in 2016.  And I agree with him.

So my point here — if it’s okay just to have a point when people should already be drinking and dancing — my point is let’s not get confused. This is not war time. This is diplomacy time. Skill counts. Agility counts. Discretion counts. Long credibility counts. Ammunition? Ammunition is worthless because wherever we fire it, we work everywhere and it’s only going to hit us. - Eben Moglen

Christopher

 

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Paul Koning]

> On Apr 14, 2021, at 5:38 PM, Ian Lance Taylor <iant@google.com> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Apr 14, 2021 at 1:49 PM Paul Koning <paulkoning@comcast.net> wrote:
>> 
>>> ...
>> 
>> This is why I asked the question "who decides?"  Given a disagreement in which the proposed remedy is to ostracise a participant, it is necessary to inquire for what reason this should be done (and, perhaps, who is pushing for it to be done).  My suggestion is that this judgment can be made by the community (via secret ballot), unless it is decided to delegate that power to a smaller body, considered as trustees, or whatever you choose to call them.
> 
> Personally, I think that voting is unworkable in practice.  I think
> decisions can be reasonably delegated to a small group of trusted
> people.  A fairly common name for that group is "moderators".  It
> might be appropriate to use voting of some sort when selecting
> moderators.

Yes, that seems reasonable.  I think the NetBSD project is an example of this, where the membership votes for the trustees, and the trustees are responsible for a number of project aspects including correcting bad behavior such as we're discussing here.

The SC was mentioned earlier in this thread, though that's not quite so natural given how that is appointed.

	paul

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Chris Punches]

I think (if it matters to anyone what I think) that would be great to
see as long as there was some social/cultural incentive to not elect
"gatekeeper" types.  I see alot of folks with very thin skin misusing
the authority they are trusted with in open source communities, it's
just never over any of these socially charged reasons that get
communities so hyped up so things just get weird for a while when it
happens.

-C

On Wed, 2021-04-14 at 20:13 -0400, Paul Koning via Gcc wrote:
> > On Apr 14, 2021, at 5:38 PM, Ian Lance Taylor <iant@google.com>
> > wrote:
> > 
> > On Wed, Apr 14, 2021 at 1:49 PM Paul Koning <paulkoning@comcast.net
> > > wrote:
> > > > ...
> > > 
> > > This is why I asked the question "who decides?"  Given a
> > > disagreement in which the proposed remedy is to ostracise a
> > > participant, it is necessary to inquire for what reason this
> > > should be done (and, perhaps, who is pushing for it to be
> > > done).  My suggestion is that this judgment can be made by the
> > > community (via secret ballot), unless it is decided to delegate
> > > that power to a smaller body, considered as trustees, or whatever
> > > you choose to call them.
> > 
> > Personally, I think that voting is unworkable in practice.  I think
> > decisions can be reasonably delegated to a small group of trusted
> > people.  A fairly common name for that group is "moderators".  It
> > might be appropriate to use voting of some sort when selecting
> > moderators.
> 
> Yes, that seems reasonable.  I think the NetBSD project is an example
> of this, where the membership votes for the trustees, and the
> trustees are responsible for a number of project aspects including
> correcting bad behavior such as we're discussing here.
> 
> The SC was mentioned earlier in this thread, though that's not quite
> so natural given how that is appointed.
> 
> 	paul
> 

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Thomas Koenig]

My 0.02 Euro-Cent:

There is a minor problem with contributors being overly harsh/
borderline abusive on the mailing list.  In my > 15 years with
the project, I have only had that problem with one single
person, and I have resolved that by never again touching the
system that particular person is responsible for, also not
for testing.

The _real_ problem is in bugzilla, mostly with abusive users
complaining about the time it sometimes takes to fix bugs
("Why didn't you fix this?  Are you stupid or what? That bug
has been open for _weeks_!") or who will not understand that
their program has an error, and insist on the compiler sanctioning
their particular non-standard usage.

On bugzilla, there is also a rather minor problem with contributors
being overly harsh/borderline abusive, but that is also quite
restrictive.

If we talk about gcc becoming a more welcoming place, bugzilla
is the place to start.

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Jonathan Wakely]

On Thu, 15 Apr 2021 at 02:18, Christopher Dimech wrote:
> What are we?  Adults or Children?  You know, as I know, that identities
> can be made up.  There are many computing specialists who can do that.
> They can even be made so it looks as though they were sent by you, or
> from your work and home address.  They could even be made up to look as
> though your children sent them.
>
> I remember a closing comment by Eben Moglen during a full-day program at
> Columbia Law School in 2016.  And I agree with him.
>
> So my point here — if it’s okay just to have a point when people should already be drinking and dancing — my point is let’s not get confused. This is not war time. This is diplomacy time. Skill counts. Agility counts. Discretion counts. Long credibility counts. Ammunition? Ammunition is worthless because wherever we fire it, we work everywhere and it’s only going to hit us. - Eben Moglen

Interesting choice of quote from the guy who made the very first reply
to the whole thing with "What is this?  The usual rant of freaked out
madness!!!"
https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-March/235092.html

and followed soon after with "More rats for the wood pile. "
https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-March/235109.html

But now you're lecturing us about diplomacy.

Fuck off, Christopher. Just fuck off. You've added nothing of value to
this entire discussion, just riled people up and stirred up trouble.
Fuck off.

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Aaron Gyes]

> On Apr 14, 2021, at 5:10 PM, Christopher Dimech <dimech@gmx.com> wrote:

> What are we?  Adults or Children?  You know, as I know, that identities
> can be made up.  There are many computing specialists who can do that.
> They can even be made so it looks as though they were sent by you, or 
> from your work and home address.  They could even be made up to look as
> though your children sent them.

That’s far out man, like outer space far out. It’s fortunate, though, that
despite this confusing world of tricksters you find yourself in, you have
maintained the kind of confidence and composure required to put in thisn insincere
kind of low-effort trolling to defend your principals, in a serious discussion
that were it to go the wrong way, could well potentially also require you to take
responsibility for your behavior in public. 

> So my point here — if it’s okay just to have a point when people should already be drinking and dancing — my point is let’s not get confused. 


Do you imagine people may one day solemnly read through these archives here, shaking
their heads at how Mr. Stallman was treated, how mean and irrational it all was, even as
even you tried your best to outwit the members into doing the right thing… Just as people do
when reading Socrates' Apology, or Tacitus talking about the suffering under emperors?

That would be sad because the annals of the mailing list will be available verbatim, probably
Literally forever, so obviously that can’t happen.

Aaron

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Eric S. Raymond]

Joseph Myers <joseph@codesourcery.com>:
> On Wed, 14 Apr 2021, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> 
> > I'm not judging RMS's behavior (or anyone else's) one way or
> > another. I am simply pointing out that there is a Schelling point in
> > possible community norms that is well expressed as "you shall judge by
> > the code alone".  This list is not full of contention from affirming
> > that norm, but from some peoples' attempt to repudiate it.
> 
> Since RMS, FSF and GNU are not contributing code to the toolchain and 
> haven't been for a very long time, the most similar basis to judge them 
> would seem to be based on their interactions with toolchain development.  
> I think those interactions generally show that FSF and GNU have been bad 
> umbrella organizations for the toolchain since at least when the GCC 4.4 
> release was delayed waiting for a slow process of developing the GCC 
> Runtime Library Exception.

I do not have standing to argue this point.

I will, however, point out that it is a very *different* point from
"RMS has iupset some people and should therefore be canceled".
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Eric S. Raymond]

Paul Koning via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>:
> > On Apr 14, 2021, at 4:39 PM, Ian Lance Taylor via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org> wrote:
> > So we don't get the choice between "everyone is welcome" and "some
> > people are kicked off the list."  We get the choice between "some
> > people decline to participate because it is unpleasant" and "some
> > people are kicked off the list."
> > 
> > Given the choice of which group of people are going to participate and
> > which group are not, which group do we want?
> 
> My answer is "it depends".  More precisely, in the past I would have
> favored those who decline because the environment is unpleasant --
> with the implied assumption being that their objections are
> reasonable.  Given the emergency of cancel culture, that assumption
> is no longer automatically valid.

I concur on both counts.

You (the GCC project) are no longer in a situation where any random
person saying "your environment is hostile" is a reliable signal of a
real problem.  Safetyism is being gamed by outsiders for purposes that
are not yours and have nothing to do with shipping good code.

Complaints need to be discounted accordingly, to a degree that would
not have been required before the development of a self-reinforcing
culture of complaint and rage-mobbing around 2014.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Christopher Dimech]

> Sent: Thursday, April 15, 2021 at 9:18 PM
> From: "Jonathan Wakely" <jwakely.gcc@gmail.com>
> To: "Christopher Dimech" <dimech@gmx.com>
> Cc: "Nathan Sidwell" <nathan@acm.org>, "gcc@gcc.gnu.org" <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>
> Subject: Re: removing toxic emailers
>
> On Thu, 15 Apr 2021 at 02:18, Christopher Dimech wrote:
> > What are we?  Adults or Children?  You know, as I know, that identities
> > can be made up.  There are many computing specialists who can do that.
> > They can even be made so it looks as though they were sent by you, or
> > from your work and home address.  They could even be made up to look as
> > though your children sent them.
> >
> > I remember a closing comment by Eben Moglen during a full-day program at
> > Columbia Law School in 2016.  And I agree with him.
> >
> > So my point here — if it’s okay just to have a point when people should already be drinking and dancing — my point is let’s not get confused. This is not war time. This is diplomacy time. Skill counts. Agility counts. Discretion counts. Long credibility counts. Ammunition? Ammunition is worthless because wherever we fire it, we work everywhere and it’s only going to hit us. - Eben Moglen
> 
> Interesting choice of quote from the guy who made the very first reply
> to the whole thing with "What is this?  The usual rant of freaked out
> madness!!!"
> https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-March/235092.html

Yes, I am that individual who was quoted saying that on the international
press.  Don't you have something bad to say about Eben Moglen too.  
He is proud of what anarchism achieved, a path that is certainly at odds
with Nathan's arguments.  
 
> and followed soon after with "More rats for the wood pile. "
> https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-March/235109.html

Correct.  He brought it upon himself.
 
> But now you're lecturing us about diplomacy.

Something you and Nathan are incapable of.  

I'd just like to eject the jerks... And yes, I fully realize there are
other ways I can choose to not associate with them here. - Nathan


> Fuck off, Christopher. Just fuck off. You've added nothing of value to
> this entire discussion, just riled people up and stirred up trouble.
> Fuck off.

That is a dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Christopher Dimech]

> Sent: Thursday, April 15, 2021 at 10:20 PM
> From: "Aaron Gyes" <duolicat@icloud.com>
> To: gcc@gcc.gnu.org
> Cc: dimech@gmx.com
> Subject: Re: removing toxic emailers
>
> > On Apr 14, 2021, at 5:10 PM, Christopher Dimech <dimech@gmx.com> wrote:
> 
> > What are we?  Adults or Children?  You know, as I know, that identities
> > can be made up.  There are many computing specialists who can do that.
> > They can even be made so it looks as though they were sent by you, or 
> > from your work and home address.  They could even be made up to look as
> > though your children sent them.
> 
> That’s far out man, like outer space far out. It’s fortunate, though, that
> despite this confusing world of tricksters you find yourself in, you have
> maintained the kind of confidence and composure required to put in thisn insincere
> kind of low-effort trolling to defend your principals, in a serious discussion
> that were it to go the wrong way, could well potentially also require you to take
> responsibility for your behavior in public. 

I can easily write articles in the international press and take interviews.
 
> > So my point here — if it’s okay just to have a point when people should already be drinking and dancing — my point is let’s not get confused. 
> 
> 
> Do you imagine people may one day solemnly read through these archives here, shaking
> their heads at how Mr. Stallman was treated, how mean and irrational it all was, even as
> even you tried your best to outwit the members into doing the right thing… Just as people do
> when reading Socrates' Apology, or Tacitus talking about the suffering under emperors?
> 
> That would be sad because the annals of the mailing list will be available verbatim, probably
> Literally forever, so obviously that can’t happen.

Do you plan to start quoting me?  Thank you.

> Aaron

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Iain Sandoe]

Eric S. Raymond <esr@thyrsus.com> wrote:

> Paul Koning via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>:
>>> On Apr 14, 2021, at 4:39 PM, Ian Lance Taylor via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>  
>>> wrote:
>>> So we don't get the choice between "everyone is welcome" and "some
>>> people are kicked off the list."  We get the choice between "some
>>> people decline to participate because it is unpleasant" and "some
>>> people are kicked off the list."
>>>
>>> Given the choice of which group of people are going to participate and
>>> which group are not, which group do we want?
>>
>> My answer is "it depends".  More precisely, in the past I would have
>> favored those who decline because the environment is unpleasant --
>> with the implied assumption being that their objections are
>> reasonable.  Given the emergency of cancel culture, that assumption
>> is no longer automatically valid.
>
> I concur on both counts.
>
> You (the GCC project) are no longer in a situation where any random
> person saying "your environment is hostile" is a reliable signal of a
> real problem.  Safetyism is being gamed by outsiders for purposes that
> are not yours and have nothing to do with shipping good code.
>
> Complaints need to be discounted accordingly, to a degree that would
> not have been required before the development of a self-reinforcing
> culture of complaint and rage-mobbing around 2014.

responding to Ian’s original statement:

I am one of the people who would not be “here” if the environment was
hostile.  That is not a theoretical statement - I declined to contribute to  
one
project already because of the hostility of the interactions.

Although I love to be paid to work on GCC, the truth is that almost all my
contributions are voluntary and I would not choose to spend my spare time
in a conflicted environment, period.

For those of us who are ‘freelance’ these lists and the IRC channel are
pretty much our workplace, it needs to be civilised (for me anyway).

responding in general to this part of the thread.

* The GCC environment is not hostile, and has not been for the 15 or so
  years I’ve been part of the community.

* We would notice if it became so, I’m not sure about the idea that the wool
   can be so easily pulled over our eyes.

I confess to being concerned with the equation “code” > “conduct”; it is not
so in my professional or personal experience.   I have seen an engineering
team suffer great losses of performance from the excesses of one (near  
genius,
but very antisocial) member - the balance was not met.  Likewise, it has been
seen to be a poor balance when there are three gifted individuals in a  
household
but one persecutes the other two (for diagnosed reaons).. again balance is  
not
met

One could see the equation becoming a self-fullfilling prophecy viz.

  *  let us say compilers are complex, and  any significant input over length of time
    will require a resonably competent engineer.

  * reasonably competent engineers with a good social habit are welcome everywhere

  * reasonably competent engineers with poor social habit are welcome in few places.

  - those few places will easily be able to demonstrate that their progress is made
   despite the poor atmosphere, with no way to know that something better was possible.

responding to the thread in general..

* Please could we try to seek concensus?

  - it is disappointing to see people treating this as some kind of point-scoring game
   when to those working on the compiler day to day it is far from a game.

Iain

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Paul Koning]

> On Apr 15, 2021, at 11:17 AM, Iain Sandoe <iain@sandoe.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> ...
> responding in general to this part of the thread.
> 
> * The GCC environment is not hostile, and has not been for the 15 or so
> years I’ve been part of the community.

Glad to see you feel that way; my view matches yours.

> * We would notice if it became so, I’m not sure about the idea that the wool
>  can be so easily pulled over our eyes.
> 
> I confess to being concerned with the equation “code” > “conduct”; it is not
> so in my professional or personal experience.   I have seen an engineering
> team suffer great losses of performance from the excesses of one (near genius,
> but very antisocial) member - the balance was not met.  Likewise, it has been
> seen to be a poor balance when there are three gifted individuals in a household
> but one persecutes the other two (for diagnosed reaons).. again balance is not
> met
> 
> One could see the equation becoming a self-fullfilling prophecy viz.
> 
> *  let us say compilers are complex, and  any significant input over length of time
>   will require a resonably competent engineer.
> 
> * reasonably competent engineers with a good social habit are welcome everywhere
> 
> * reasonably competent engineers with poor social habit are welcome in few places.

All true.

> - those few places will easily be able to demonstrate that their progress is made
>  despite the poor atmosphere, with no way to know that something better was possible.
> 
> responding to the thread in general..
> 
> * Please could we try to seek concensus?
> 
> - it is disappointing to see people treating this as some kind of point-scoring game
>  when to those working on the compiler day to day it is far from a game.

I'm not sure what the consensus is you're looking for.  Consensus on the principle that people should behave in a civil fashion? Yes, I agree with that.  

The difficulty, as I mentioned, is in deciding in concrete situations whether that principle was violated and what should be done about it.  So I think the easy part is the principle; the hard part is the process that will enforce the principle in those cases where it needs to be -- and ONLY in those cases.  Again, if the question had come up 10 years ago I wouldn't be so worried; but in 2021 after years of watching people being blacklisted for daring to speak the wrong politics of the day, I can no longer do so.

	paul

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Gabriel Ravier]

On 4/15/21 8:00 AM, Thomas Koenig via Gcc wrote:
> My 0.02 Euro-Cent:
>
> There is a minor problem with contributors being overly harsh/
> borderline abusive on the mailing list.  In my > 15 years with
> the project, I have only had that problem with one single
> person, and I have resolved that by never again touching the
> system that particular person is responsible for, also not
> for testing.
>
> The _real_ problem is in bugzilla, mostly with abusive users
> complaining about the time it sometimes takes to fix bugs
> ("Why didn't you fix this?  Are you stupid or what? That bug
> has been open for _weeks_!") or who will not understand that
> their program has an error, and insist on the compiler sanctioning
> their particular non-standard usage.

As much as I hate to say it, this is a problem in the wider communities 
around C and C++, too. My teacher will often insist that "GCC and Clang 
make convenient assumptions at O2 and higher" without comprehending that 
the assumptions are "your code conforms to what the C/C++ standard says" 
and that this is the entire reason we have a standard, despite all my 
efforts at explaining things to him.


> On bugzilla, there is also a rather minor problem with contributors
> being overly harsh/borderline abusive, but that is also quite
> restrictive.
>
> If we talk about gcc becoming a more welcoming place, bugzilla
> is the place to start. 

Re: removing toxic emailers

[David Malcolm]

On Thu, 2021-04-15 at 09:49 -0400, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> Joseph Myers <joseph@codesourcery.com>:
> > On Wed, 14 Apr 2021, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> > 
> > > I'm not judging RMS's behavior (or anyone else's) one way or
> > > another. I am simply pointing out that there is a Schelling point
> > > in
> > > possible community norms that is well expressed as "you shall judge
> > > by
> > > the code alone".  This list is not full of contention from
> > > affirming
> > > that norm, but from some peoples' attempt to repudiate it.
> > 
> > Since RMS, FSF and GNU are not contributing code to the toolchain and
> > haven't been for a very long time, the most similar basis to judge
> > them 
> > would seem to be based on their interactions with toolchain
> > development.  
> > I think those interactions generally show that FSF and GNU have been
> > bad 
> > umbrella organizations for the toolchain since at least when the GCC
> > 4.4 
> > release was delayed waiting for a slow process of developing the GCC 
> > Runtime Library Exception.
> 
> I do not have standing to argue this point.
> 
> I will, however, point out that it is a very *different* point from
> "RMS has iupset some people and should therefore be canceled".

[I'm sorry to everyone who's sick of these threads, but I feel I have
to respond to this one; sorry about writing another long email]

Eric: I don't know if you're just being glib, or you're deliberately
trying to caricature those of us who are upset by RMS's behavior.

I think the words "canceled" and "cancel culture" have effectively
become meaningless and should be avoided if we want to have a nuanced
discussion - no-one seems to have a definition of what counts as
"canceling" vs "consequences" vs "fair and measured responses".

At one time, both you and RMS were heroes of mine, and I was a true
believer (of what, I'm no longer sure); I own copies of both "The
Cathedral and the Bazaar" and "Free Software - Free Society", though
both are currently in my attic, gathering dust.

I've long felt that there was a massive hole in the GNU project and FSF
where effective technical leadership should have been - various
maintainers on gcc, gdb, etc have been implementing things, and things
were humming along, and those of us in Red Hat working on them tried to
coordinate on features we felt were important - but where was the top-
level response to, say, LLVM/clang? (to name just one of many changes
in the industry)  In many ways the last 8 years of my career have been
an attempt to get gcc to respond to the appearance of LLVM/clang (I've
added JIT-compilation, improved diagnostics, and I'm implementing a
static analysis pass) - I'm lucky that my managers inside Red Hat are
happy to pay me to hack on this stuff and make GCC better - it helps
our customers, but it also helps GCC, and the broader FLOSS communities
using both toolchains).

Where has the technical leadership from RMS been?  Instead the long-
standing opposition by RMS to exposing the compiler's IR has hobbled
GCC, and partly contributed to the pile of technical debt we have to
dig our way out of.  The only "leadership" coming out of GNU/FSF seem
to me to be dictats from on high about ChangeLog formats and coding
conventions.  The GNU project seems to me to be stuck in the 1980s. 
Perhaps a pronouncement like: "try to make everything be consumable as
libraries with APIs, as well as as standalone binaries" might have
helped (and still could; can we do that please?)

Similarly, I agree with Joseph's observations of the ways that the FSF
and GNU have been bad umbrella organizations for the toolchain.

But beyond the failure of technical leadership, and the organizational
incompetence/incoherence, is RMS's behavior, and the extent to which
it, as you put it "upset some people".

RMS's defenders seem to have fixated on his 2019 comments on Marvin
Minsky, the uproar over those, and his responses to them (then and
recently), and seem keen to assure us that everything's OK now, or, at
least on a road to improvement.

But in the time since those 2019 comments, I've been reconsidering my
views on RMS.  In particular, I have read of many alleged incidents
such as:
 - spontaneously licking a female conference member on the arm
 - appearing to hit on anyone female, even if they're underage
 - asking which female audience members at his talk were virgins

At least one of the above was from a former colleage of mine, which
when I read it was about the point that broke me.

As part of my reconsidering my views on RMS, I recalled an event
described in Sam Williams' biography of RMS in which Williams describes
RMS's then girlfriend talking about how she "admired the way Richard
built up an entire political movement to address an issue of profound
personal concern", which she identified as "crushing loneliness".

When I first read that, years ago, I felt sorry and pity for RMS, and a
vague feeling that community is an important part of FLOSS, or somesuch
sentiment (and a feeling of trying to recreate a lost utopia from the
1980s).

But in the light of the various reports of RMS's awkard behavior around
women, I decided to reread that section.  I looked online, and found
that the book is available here:
  https://www.fsf.org/faif

I noticed this passage immediately after the reference to "crushing
loneliness":

"During dinner, I let the women do the talking and spent most of the 
time trying to detect clues as to whether the last 12 months had 
softened Stallman in any significant way.  I didn’t see anything to
suggest they had.  Although more flirtatious than I remembered,
Stallman retained the same general level of prickliness.  At one point,
my wife uttered an emphatic "God forbid" only to receive a typical
Stallman rebuke."

Something about the reference to "flirtatious" caught me eye in the
light of the stories I've read about RMS's behavior around women.  It
turns out that the original text is available on Project Gutenberg
here:
  http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5768
where that passage reads:

"During dinner, I let the women do the talking and spent most of the
time trying to detect clues as to whether the last 12 months had
softened Stallman in any significant way. I didn't see anything to
suggest they had. Although more flirtatious than I remembered - a
flirtatiousness spoiled somewhat by the number of times Stallman's eyes
seemed to fixate on my wife's chest - Stallman retained the same
general level of prickliness. At one point, my wife uttered an emphatic
"God forbid" only to receive a typical Stallman rebuke."

Spot the difference?

https://www.fsf.org/faif says:
  "It is a rare kind of biography, where the reader has the benefit of
both the biographer's original words and the subject's response."

which is certainly one way of describing it.  It's unclear to me
whether Williams removed that sentence, or RMS did.  It may be unfair
to Williams and his wife to draw attention to this in this email, and
I'm sorry if it is - I mention it here as it's something that no-one
else seemed to have noticed.  I don't want biography to become
hagiography - it's unhealthy to put people up on a pedestal - for them
and us.

I don't know if your retort about "upset[ing] some people" was
referring to the Minsky comments, or to the behaviors RMS seems to be
prone to around women, which although I'm not a woman, appear to me to
be very alienating.  If the latter, you might want to consider that
women and girls are roughly half the population of the world at large
(if not this project), and referring to them as "some people" might be
seen as patronizing.

I don't want FLOSS to be a boy's club, but also, merely, from the
existing narrow perspective of the political mission of the FSF, I
think having more women involved would help keep software freedom
relevant to today's tech enviroment.  For example, I think this article
has an excellent take on the power relationship between smartphones and
their users, comparing a smartphone to an abusive partner:
  https://conversationalist.org/2019/09/13/feminism-explains-our-toxic-relationships-with-our-smartphones/
and it makes many points that I think are very relevant to the FSF's
political mission (if not on-topic to the nuts and bolts of GCC
development; I'm just posting it here by way of example).

Most of the above issues involve gender, but not all of them.

For example, the staff of the FSF appear to have had to unionize
specifically as a response to having to constantly deal with
unreasonable behavior from RMS (and the management apparently wanted to
join the union too, but couldn't due to laws on such matters).

Reading that made me regret if any harsh words I've had for the
organization of the FSF have hurt the staffers there; it seems to have
been a very difficult place to work.

To try to sum up, it's not just RMS's remarks about Minsky that
bothered me.  I think there are technical, governance, *and* social
issues here.  To be fair, I'm not sure how much of my own visceral
reaction to RMS's recent return to the FSF board is due to the amount
of code I've had to write to deal with technical decisions he's imposed
on the project, versus a feeling of "ick" having now read the stories
from women who've felt deeply uncomfortable around him.  Maybe I'm just
bitter about having to fix the code.  To what extent should we accept
eccentric and/or antisocial behavior in FLOSS communities, or does
doing so make us "enablers"?  I'm not sure what the boundaries here
should be.

I think that the idea that some have that list moderation is always
wrong closely relates to "Geek Social Fallacy #1: Ostracizers Are
Evil":
  https://plausiblydeniable.com/five-geek-social-fallacies/
and is equally invalid.

I still admire much of what RMS has written, and have spent much of my
career trying to implement part of a vision inspired by him.  I'm sad
about the way things have turned out.  Twitter seems to turn everything
into a pitched battle between two camps.  I hope there's room for a
nuanced view of him - the good and the less good.  I don't know what
role he should have, but I think it should not be a leadership one, and
I think the FSF and GNU need to greatly change to stay relevant,
including on governance and on succession plans.  None of us are
getting any younger, and the vision of the FSF and GNU seems to me to
be stuck in the 1990s (or earlier).

I don't have the emotional bandwidth to contribute more meaningfully to
the future of GNU/FSF beyond my contributions to GCC, and this email. 
I've posted the following link to Luis Villa's blog before, which in my
view has many good ideas on ways to save the FSF from itself, so I'll
repost it again in case anyone hasn't seen it yet who might find
benefit in it:
  https://lu.is/blog/2021/04/07/values-centered-npos-with-kmaher/

I reject the idea that a FLOSS community should be judged purely on the
code it generates - I want to work in a "professional" environment, for
some definition of "professional", with basic standards of behavior,
or, to quote the late Anthony Bourdain:

"It is truly a privilege to live by what I call the "no asshole" rule.
I don't do business with assholes. I don't care how much money they are
offering me, or what project. Life is too short. Quality of life is
important. I'm fortunate to collaborate with a lot of people who I
respect and like, and I’d like to keep it that way."

In general, my experiences with the GCC community is that it is full of
people I respect and like, but with dysfunction when it comes to
anything to do with GNU/FSF/RMS. (and thank you to the Steering
Committee for helping shelter us from that dysfunction).

This may have turned into a rant, for which I'm sorry, but I hope it's
constructive.  I've used "I and "me" a lot - the views here are my own,
although I'm paid to care about GCC (which I do), and these are not the
opinions of Red Hat, or of my colleagues.

Sorry again about prolonging this thread; I will try to get back to
coding now.

Dave

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Ian Lance Taylor]

On Thu, Apr 15, 2021 at 10:31 AM David Malcolm via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org> wrote:
>
> I still admire much of what RMS has written, and have spent much of my
> career trying to implement part of a vision inspired by him.  I'm sad
> about the way things have turned out.  Twitter seems to turn everything
> into a pitched battle between two camps.  I hope there's room for a
> nuanced view of him - the good and the less good.  I don't know what
> role he should have, but I think it should not be a leadership one, and
> I think the FSF and GNU need to greatly change to stay relevant,
> including on governance and on succession plans.  None of us are
> getting any younger, and the vision of the FSF and GNU seems to me to
> be stuck in the 1990s (or earlier).

Thanks, that is well put.  That describes my own feelings as well.

To be very blunt, I don't know how to read
https://www.fsf.org/news/rms-addresses-the-free-software-community and
think "the person who wrote this should be in a leadership role."  I
don't think RMS is a bad person.  I think that RMS can still have a
great deal to contribute to free software as a programmer and as a
philosopher.  But those are not the words of a leader.  Leadership is
about people: understanding what people need, understanding how to
motivate them toward a shared goal.  What I see in that essay is
somebody who doesn't understand people very well, and is not all that
interested in learning.

Ian

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Iain Sandoe]

Paul Koning <paulkoning@comcast.net> wrote:
>> On Apr 15, 2021, at 11:17 AM, Iain Sandoe <iain@sandoe.co.uk> wrote:
>>
>> ...
>> responding in general to this part of the thread.
>>
>> * The GCC environment is not hostile, and has not been for the 15 or so
>> years I’ve been part of the community.

>> * We would notice if it became so, I’m not sure about the idea that the  
>> wool
>> can be so easily pulled over our eyes.
>>

>> responding to the thread in general..
>>
>> * Please could we try to seek consensus?
>>
>> - it is disappointing to see people treating this as some kind of  
>> point-scoring game
>> when to those working on the compiler day to day it is far from a game.
>
> I'm not sure what the consensus is you're looking for.

Let us start from the observations above and try to add in the issues that  
have
arisen in the recent threads - and end with a proposal....

* One could be glib and suggest that discussions about governance and project
   process should be directed to a different (new) mailing list

   - but that does not  solve the problem(s) it just moves them.
   - (however, it might still be valuable to folks who wish to have an automatic filter
      for these topics or have no interest in them).

* I think we are all clear about the primary role of the gcc@ and  
gcc-patches@ lists

   - primarily technical discussion about current and future projects and patch review
     respectively.

   - we have a history of politely redirecting usage questions to the help list (while
    often answering them anyway), likewise with the irc channel.

   - I believe we also have a history of encouraging input and discussing the technical
     issues (reasonably) calmly.

   - to the best of my recollection I have never seen an idea excluded on any basis than
    technical content.

* Without a specific list to process input on governance and project  
process, this
   list is a reasonable choice.

———

The observations above, copied from my first email, together with a belief  
that most of
the current and potential contributor to GCC would prefer to function in a  
constructive
environment, lead to the following proposition:

   * that, since the lists are generally constructive without additional management,
     (OK. there are occasional heated technical debates), it implies that this community
     by-and-large is already able to function without heavy-handed moderation.

  * It has been postulated that there could be valued technical input from people who
    have difficulty in interacting in a constructive manner (through no fault of their own).

  * no-one else would be making valued input, either they would be a spammer or
    intentionally acting in a destructive manner.

    - Let us propose that someone capable of working on a complex system such as a
     compiler would be able to read and act on a set of guidelines.

    - ergo, I propose that we have a set of guidelines to which someone who is being
    disruptive can be pointed.

   * (Probably?) no-one has any issue with a spammer being thrown off the list, for which
     I guess there is a process already - it would be reasonable to expect that genuine
     contributors (even with difficulties) would make an effort to follow guidelines - and
    that someone who was making no effort to do so is not really any different from a
     spammer.
 
Of course, guidelines require debate (but I doubt that the right set would  
be much
different from the obvious for this group).

  is seems to me that most of the strife in the last two weeks comes from a few key
  things:

   - attacking the person delivering a message rather than debating the message
   - introducing topics spurious and unrelated to the actual debate
   - trying to equate the process of this project with party or international Politics.

===

So .. in summary:

1/ I propose that we do have written guidelines, to which someone behaving  
in a
     non-constructive manner can be pointed.

2/ if those guidelines *are the consensus* of this group and someone is  
unable to
     follow them (given some reasonable chance to amend as is customary in matters
     such as employment law here, at least), then they are treated no differently from
     any other spam.

    * although one might lose some notionally valuable input, the judgement here is that
    the net benefit of such input is negative.

3/ I would recommend on the basis of another online community (about music)  
to
    which I belong, to suggest that Politics (party or international) and Religion are better
    discussed in other forums and are exceedingly unlikely to affect a technical decision
    on the progress of GCC - such discussions almost never end well.

   (I’d believe that any valid exception to the need to heed some political situation would
    be readily recognised by the participants here).

4/ It is likely that we can extract much of the basic guidelines from any  
other writing on
   communicating constructively - after all, it is how 99.99% of this list traffic is managed
   without intervention.

my 0.02GBP only, "patches welcome",
Iain

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Christopher Dimech]

> Sent: Friday, April 16, 2021 at 5:31 AM
> From: "David Malcolm via Gcc" <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>
> To: esr@thyrsus.com, "Joseph Myers" <joseph@codesourcery.com>
> Cc: gcc@gcc.gnu.org, "Nathan Sidwell" <nathan@acm.org>
> Subject: Re: removing toxic emailers
>
> On Thu, 2021-04-15 at 09:49 -0400, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> > Joseph Myers <joseph@codesourcery.com>:
> > > On Wed, 14 Apr 2021, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> > > 
> > > > I'm not judging RMS's behavior (or anyone else's) one way or
> > > > another. I am simply pointing out that there is a Schelling point
> > > > in
> > > > possible community norms that is well expressed as "you shall judge
> > > > by
> > > > the code alone".  This list is not full of contention from
> > > > affirming
> > > > that norm, but from some peoples' attempt to repudiate it.
> > > 
> > > Since RMS, FSF and GNU are not contributing code to the toolchain and
> > > haven't been for a very long time, the most similar basis to judge
> > > them 
> > > would seem to be based on their interactions with toolchain
> > > development.  
> > > I think those interactions generally show that FSF and GNU have been
> > > bad 
> > > umbrella organizations for the toolchain since at least when the GCC
> > > 4.4 
> > > release was delayed waiting for a slow process of developing the GCC 
> > > Runtime Library Exception.
> > 
> > I do not have standing to argue this point.
> > 
> > I will, however, point out that it is a very *different* point from
> > "RMS has iupset some people and should therefore be canceled".
> 
> [I'm sorry to everyone who's sick of these threads, but I feel I have
> to respond to this one; sorry about writing another long email]
> 
> Eric: I don't know if you're just being glib, or you're deliberately
> trying to caricature those of us who are upset by RMS's behavior.
> 
> I think the words "canceled" and "cancel culture" have effectively
> become meaningless and should be avoided if we want to have a nuanced
> discussion - no-one seems to have a definition of what counts as
> "canceling" vs "consequences" vs "fair and measured responses".
> 
> At one time, both you and RMS were heroes of mine, and I was a true
> believer (of what, I'm no longer sure); I own copies of both "The
> Cathedral and the Bazaar" and "Free Software - Free Society", though
> both are currently in my attic, gathering dust.
> 
> I've long felt that there was a massive hole in the GNU project and FSF
> where effective technical leadership should have been - various
> maintainers on gcc, gdb, etc have been implementing things, and things
> were humming along, and those of us in Red Hat working on them tried to
> coordinate on features we felt were important - but where was the top-
> level response to, say, LLVM/clang? (to name just one of many changes
> in the industry)  In many ways the last 8 years of my career have been
> an attempt to get gcc to respond to the appearance of LLVM/clang (I've
> added JIT-compilation, improved diagnostics, and I'm implementing a
> static analysis pass)

I don't see a problem with improvements in appearance when valuable and
useful.  It is not easy to work with as it could be.  One can also complain
about what's missing in LLVM.  I am however not a proponent of C++, and closely
relate to Eric's comment about the unfortunate decline of C.  Have worked
on C++ myself in the oil, gas and mining industry, and in other things like
underwater acoustics.  Where the difficulties of working with object oriented
programming made working with some kinds of algorithms impossible to track
adequately. 

> - I'm lucky that my managers inside Red Hat are
> happy to pay me to hack on this stuff and make GCC better - it helps
> our customers, but it also helps GCC, and the broader FLOSS communities
> using both toolchains).
> 
> Where has the technical leadership from RMS been?  Instead the long-
> standing opposition by RMS to exposing the compiler's IR has hobbled
> GCC, and partly contributed to the pile of technical debt we have to
> dig our way out of.  The only "leadership" coming out of GNU/FSF seem
> to me to be dictats from on high about ChangeLog formats and coding
> conventions.  The GNU project seems to me to be stuck in the 1980s. 
> Perhaps a pronouncement like: "try to make everything be consumable as
> libraries with APIs, as well as as standalone binaries" might have
> helped (and still could; can we do that please?)
> 
> Similarly, I agree with Joseph's observations of the ways that the FSF
> and GNU have been bad umbrella organizations for the toolchain.
> 
> But beyond the failure of technical leadership, and the organizational
> incompetence/incoherence, is RMS's behavior, and the extent to which
> it, as you put it "upset some people".
> 
> RMS's defenders seem to have fixated on his 2019 comments on Marvin
> Minsky, the uproar over those, and his responses to them (then and
> recently), and seem keen to assure us that everything's OK now, or, at
> least on a road to improvement.

I have seen much discussion and arguments emanating from that.  Including
the current debate, as justification for disposing completely of RMS.
 
> But in the time since those 2019 comments, I've been reconsidering my
> views on RMS.  In particular, I have read of many alleged incidents
> such as:
>  - spontaneously licking a female conference member on the arm
>  - appearing to hit on anyone female, even if they're underage
>  - asking which female audience members at his talk were virgins
> 
> At least one of the above was from a former colleage of mine, which
> when I read it was about the point that broke me.
> 
> As part of my reconsidering my views on RMS, I recalled an event
> described in Sam Williams' biography of RMS in which Williams describes
> RMS's then girlfriend talking about how she "admired the way Richard
> built up an entire political movement to address an issue of profound
> personal concern", which she identified as "crushing loneliness".
> 
> When I first read that, years ago, I felt sorry and pity for RMS, and a
> vague feeling that community is an important part of FLOSS, or somesuch
> sentiment (and a feeling of trying to recreate a lost utopia from the
> 1980s).
> 
> But in the light of the various reports of RMS's awkard behavior around
> women, I decided to reread that section.  I looked online, and found
> that the book is available here:
>   https://www.fsf.org/faif

Numerous studies indicate that a woman's presence can change a dude's behavior
in some pretty insane ways.  But that also happens when dealing with influential
people. 
 
> I noticed this passage immediately after the reference to "crushing
> loneliness":
> 
> "During dinner, I let the women do the talking and spent most of the 
> time trying to detect clues as to whether the last 12 months had 
> softened Stallman in any significant way.  I didn’t see anything to
> suggest they had.  Although more flirtatious than I remembered,
> Stallman retained the same general level of prickliness.  At one point,
> my wife uttered an emphatic "God forbid" only to receive a typical
> Stallman rebuke."
> 
> Something about the reference to "flirtatious" caught me eye in the
> light of the stories I've read about RMS's behavior around women.  It
> turns out that the original text is available on Project Gutenberg
> here:
>   http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5768
> where that passage reads:
> 
> "During dinner, I let the women do the talking and spent most of the
> time trying to detect clues as to whether the last 12 months had
> softened Stallman in any significant way. I didn't see anything to
> suggest they had. Although more flirtatious than I remembered - a
> flirtatiousness spoiled somewhat by the number of times Stallman's eyes
> seemed to fixate on my wife's chest - Stallman retained the same
> general level of prickliness. At one point, my wife uttered an emphatic
> "God forbid" only to receive a typical Stallman rebuke."
> 
> Spot the difference?
> 
> https://www.fsf.org/faif says:
>   "It is a rare kind of biography, where the reader has the benefit of
> both the biographer's original words and the subject's response."
> 
> which is certainly one way of describing it.  It's unclear to me
> whether Williams removed that sentence, or RMS did.  It may be unfair
> to Williams and his wife to draw attention to this in this email, and
> I'm sorry if it is - I mention it here as it's something that no-one
> else seemed to have noticed.  I don't want biography to become
> hagiography - it's unhealthy to put people up on a pedestal - for them
> and us.
> 
> I don't know if your retort about "upset[ing] some people" was
> referring to the Minsky comments, or to the behaviors RMS seems to be
> prone to around women, which although I'm not a woman, appear to me to
> be very alienating.  If the latter, you might want to consider that
> women and girls are roughly half the population of the world at large
> (if not this project), and referring to them as "some people" might be
> seen as patronizing.
> 
> I don't want FLOSS to be a boy's club, but also, merely, from the
> existing narrow perspective of the political mission of the FSF, I
> think having more women involved would help keep software freedom
> relevant to today's tech enviroment.  For example, I think this article
> has an excellent take on the power relationship between smartphones and
> their users, comparing a smartphone to an abusive partner:
>   https://conversationalist.org/2019/09/13/feminism-explains-our-toxic-relationships-with-our-smartphones/
> and it makes many points that I think are very relevant to the FSF's
> political mission (if not on-topic to the nuts and bolts of GCC
> development; I'm just posting it here by way of example).
> 
> Most of the above issues involve gender, but not all of them.

In the field of my interest - in mathematics - there is a wealth of scholarship
and career opportunities available to women.  And still there are not enough
to fill the jobs that could be available.  Although the story is much more 
promising for Asian and Hispanic Women. 

Various mathematical societies as well as corporations, federal, state and local government agencies, minority support groups, the military, universities, academic associations, research companies, and other groups offer assistance for qualified individuals.

At any rate, at times when positions were held by women, I did not notice any
appreciative difference in leadership or management style.  The same problems
remained.  The reality is that it change is mostly dependent on the qualities
of the people involved, rather than what's under their pants. 

> For example, the staff of the FSF appear to have had to unionize
> specifically as a response to having to constantly deal with
> unreasonable behavior from RMS (and the management apparently wanted to
> join the union too, but couldn't due to laws on such matters).
> 
> Reading that made me regret if any harsh words I've had for the
> organization of the FSF have hurt the staffers there; it seems to have
> been a very difficult place to work.
> 
> To try to sum up, it's not just RMS's remarks about Minsky that
> bothered me.  I think there are technical, governance, *and* social
> issues here.  To be fair, I'm not sure how much of my own visceral
> reaction to RMS's recent return to the FSF board is due to the amount
> of code I've had to write to deal with technical decisions he's imposed
> on the project, versus a feeling of "ick" having now read the stories
> from women who've felt deeply uncomfortable around him.  Maybe I'm just
> bitter about having to fix the code.  To what extent should we accept
> eccentric and/or antisocial behavior in FLOSS communities, or does
> doing so make us "enablers"?  I'm not sure what the boundaries here
> should be.
> 
> I think that the idea that some have that list moderation is always
> wrong closely relates to "Geek Social Fallacy #1: Ostracizers Are
> Evil":
>   https://plausiblydeniable.com/five-geek-social-fallacies/
> and is equally invalid.
> 
> I still admire much of what RMS has written, and have spent much of my
> career trying to implement part of a vision inspired by him.  I'm sad
> about the way things have turned out.  Twitter seems to turn everything
> into a pitched battle between two camps.  I hope there's room for a
> nuanced view of him - the good and the less good.  I don't know what
> role he should have, but I think it should not be a leadership one, and
> I think the FSF and GNU need to greatly change to stay relevant,
> including on governance and on succession plans.  None of us are
> getting any younger, and the vision of the FSF and GNU seems to me to
> be stuck in the 1990s (or earlier).
> 
> I don't have the emotional bandwidth to contribute more meaningfully to
> the future of GNU/FSF beyond my contributions to GCC, and this email. 
> I've posted the following link to Luis Villa's blog before, which in my
> view has many good ideas on ways to save the FSF from itself, so I'll
> repost it again in case anyone hasn't seen it yet who might find
> benefit in it:
>   https://lu.is/blog/2021/04/07/values-centered-npos-with-kmaher/
> 
> I reject the idea that a FLOSS community should be judged purely on the
> code it generates - I want to work in a "professional" environment, for
> some definition of "professional", with basic standards of behavior,
> or, to quote the late Anthony Bourdain:
> 
> "It is truly a privilege to live by what I call the "no asshole" rule.
> I don't do business with assholes. I don't care how much money they are
> offering me, or what project. Life is too short. Quality of life is
> important. I'm fortunate to collaborate with a lot of people who I
> respect and like, and I’d like to keep it that way."
> 
> In general, my experiences with the GCC community is that it is full of
> people I respect and like, but with dysfunction when it comes to
> anything to do with GNU/FSF/RMS. (and thank you to the Steering
> Committee for helping shelter us from that dysfunction).
 
> This may have turned into a rant, for which I'm sorry, but I hope it's
> constructive.  I've used "I and "me" a lot - the views here are my own,
> although I'm paid to care about GCC (which I do), and these are not the
> opinions of Red Hat, or of my colleagues.
> 
> Sorry again about prolonging this thread; I will try to get back to
> coding now.
> 
> Dave
> 
>

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Christopher Dimech]

> Sent: Friday, April 16, 2021 at 7:21 AM
> From: "Iain Sandoe" <iain@sandoe.co.uk>
> To: "GCC Development" <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>
> Subject: Re: removing toxic emailers
>
> Paul Koning <paulkoning@comcast.net> wrote:
> >> On Apr 15, 2021, at 11:17 AM, Iain Sandoe <iain@sandoe.co.uk> wrote:
> >>
> >> ...
> >> responding in general to this part of the thread.
> >>
> >> * The GCC environment is not hostile, and has not been for the 15 or so
> >> years I’ve been part of the community.
> 
> >> * We would notice if it became so, I’m not sure about the idea that the  
> >> wool
> >> can be so easily pulled over our eyes.
> >>
> 
> >> responding to the thread in general..
> >>
> >> * Please could we try to seek consensus?
> >>
> >> - it is disappointing to see people treating this as some kind of  
> >> point-scoring game
> >> when to those working on the compiler day to day it is far from a game.
> >
> > I'm not sure what the consensus is you're looking for.
> 
> Let us start from the observations above and try to add in the issues that  
> have
> arisen in the recent threads - and end with a proposal....
> 
> * One could be glib and suggest that discussions about governance and project
>    process should be directed to a different (new) mailing list
> 
>    - but that does not  solve the problem(s) it just moves them.
>    - (however, it might still be valuable to folks who wish to have an automatic filter
>       for these topics or have no interest in them).
> 
> * I think we are all clear about the primary role of the gcc@ and  
> gcc-patches@ lists
> 
>    - primarily technical discussion about current and future projects and patch review
>      respectively.
> 
>    - we have a history of politely redirecting usage questions to the help list (while
>     often answering them anyway), likewise with the irc channel.
> 
>    - I believe we also have a history of encouraging input and discussing the technical
>      issues (reasonably) calmly.
> 
>    - to the best of my recollection I have never seen an idea excluded on any basis than
>     technical content.
> 
> * Without a specific list to process input on governance and project  
> process, this
>    list is a reasonable choice.
> 
> ———
> 
> The observations above, copied from my first email, together with a belief  
> that most of
> the current and potential contributor to GCC would prefer to function in a  
> constructive
> environment, lead to the following proposition:
> 
>    * that, since the lists are generally constructive without additional management,
>      (OK. there are occasional heated technical debates), it implies that this community
>      by-and-large is already able to function without heavy-handed moderation.
> 
>   * It has been postulated that there could be valued technical input from people who
>     have difficulty in interacting in a constructive manner (through no fault of their own).
> 
>   * no-one else would be making valued input, either they would be a spammer or
>     intentionally acting in a destructive manner.
> 
>     - Let us propose that someone capable of working on a complex system such as a
>      compiler would be able to read and act on a set of guidelines.
> 
>     - ergo, I propose that we have a set of guidelines to which someone who is being
>     disruptive can be pointed.
> 
>    * (Probably?) no-one has any issue with a spammer being thrown off the list, for which
>      I guess there is a process already - it would be reasonable to expect that genuine
>      contributors (even with difficulties) would make an effort to follow guidelines - and
>     that someone who was making no effort to do so is not really any different from a
>      spammer.
>  
> Of course, guidelines require debate (but I doubt that the right set would  
> be much
> different from the obvious for this group).
> 
>   is seems to me that most of the strife in the last two weeks comes from a few key
>   things:
> 
>    - attacking the person delivering a message rather than debating the message
>    - introducing topics spurious and unrelated to the actual debate
>    - trying to equate the process of this project with party or international Politics.
> 
> ===
> 
> So .. in summary:
> 
> 1/ I propose that we do have written guidelines, to which someone behaving  
> in a
>      non-constructive manner can be pointed.
> 
> 2/ if those guidelines *are the consensus* of this group and someone is  
> unable to
>      follow them (given some reasonable chance to amend as is customary in matters
>      such as employment law here, at least), then they are treated no differently from
>      any other spam.

Proposing the guidelines essentially means that the community accepts the fact
that many of us are incapable of navigate everyday problems and dilemmas by making
“right” decisions based on the use of good judgment and values rather than sterile
sets of rules and conventions that typically disregard the individual, the particular,
or the discrete.  Thusly, it is wrong to suggest that the problems are simply associated with RMS, FSF and GNU. 

Human beings have the capacity to be wise and develop their thoughts on wise
decision-making skills that evolve from a combination of experience, empathy,
and intellect.  Many times, this means having the capacity to break those
guidelines and rules.
 
In the World Trade Center Disaster, many people who were used to following
the rules died because they did what they were told by authority figures. 
I know about these things as part of my industrial work experience.

>     * although one might lose some notionally valuable input, the judgement here is that
>     the net benefit of such input is negative.
> 
> 3/ I would recommend on the basis of another online community (about music)  
> to
>     which I belong, to suggest that Politics (party or international) and Religion are better
>     discussed in other forums and are exceedingly unlikely to affect a technical decision
>     on the progress of GCC - such discussions almost never end well.
> 
>    (I’d believe that any valid exception to the need to heed some political situation would
>     be readily recognised by the participants here).
> 
> 4/ It is likely that we can extract much of the basic guidelines from any  
> other writing on
>    communicating constructively - after all, it is how 99.99% of this list traffic is managed
>    without intervention.
> 
> my 0.02GBP only, "patches welcome",
> Iain
> 
>

Gcc as callable libraries (was: removing toxic emailers)

[Thomas Koenig]

David,

for some reason or other, I did not get your mail, so I will
just reply copying in from the archive.

First, thanks for injecting some sanity into the discussion.

I will not discuss RMS' personal shortcomings or the lack of them.
In today's toxic political climate, such allegations are often
made up and weaponized without an effective defense for the
alleged wrongdoer.  I don't know the truth of the matter, and I make
a point of not finding out.

 > In many ways the last 8 years of my career have been
 > an attempt to get gcc to respond to the appearance of LLVM/clang (I've
 > added JIT-compilation, improved diagnostics, and I'm implementing a
 > static analysis pass)

And this is highly welcome, and has made gcc (including gfortran) a much
better compiler.  I well remember how you implemented the much better
colored error messages that gfortran has now.

 > Perhaps a pronouncement like: "try to make everything be consumable as
 > libraries with APIs, as well as as standalone binaries" might have
 > helped (and still could; can we do that please?)

That makes perfect sense, as LLVM shows, and is something that the
steering committee could decide for the project (or rather, it could
issue a pronouncement that this will not be opposed if some volunteer
does it).

I think this could be as close to an unanimous decision as there can
be among such a diverse community as the gcc developers.  If the FSF
takes umbrage at this, the ball is in their court.

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Ian Lance Taylor]

On Thu, Apr 15, 2021 at 12:45 PM Christopher Dimech via Gcc
<gcc@gcc.gnu.org> wrote:
>
> Proposing the guidelines essentially means that the community accepts the fact
> that many of us are incapable of navigate everyday problems and dilemmas by making
> “right” decisions based on the use of good judgment and values rather than sterile
> sets of rules and conventions that typically disregard the individual, the particular,
> or the discrete.  Thusly, it is wrong to suggest that the problems are simply associated with RMS, FSF and GNU.

I think you are conflating two different things.  Iain was describing
general guidelines for communication, not saying anything about RMS,
FSF, or GNU.

Personally I would say that the purpose of communication guidelines
for GCC mailing lists is not for existing members of the community.
As several people have said, the GCC mailing lists are normally civil.
It is to provide a mechanism for blocking people whose goal is, for
whatever reason, to disrupt the community.  Such a mechanism requires
a lot of sensitivity to context and care on the part of the
moderators.  But it still helps to have a set of guidelines to refer
to.

Ian

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Iain Sandoe]

Christopher Dimech <dimech@gmx.com> wrote:

>
>> Sent: Friday, April 16, 2021 at 7:21 AM
>> From: "Iain Sandoe" <iain@sandoe.co.uk>
>> To: "GCC Development" <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>
>> Subject: Re: removing toxic emailers
>>
>> Paul Koning <paulkoning@comcast.net> wrote:
>>>> On Apr 15, 2021, at 11:17 AM, Iain Sandoe <iain@sandoe.co.uk> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> ...
>>>> responding in general to this part of the thread.
>>>>
>>>> * The GCC environment is not hostile, and has not been for the 15 or so
>>>> years I’ve been part of the community.
>>
>>>> * We would notice if it became so, I’m not sure about the idea that the
>>>> wool
>>>> can be so easily pulled over our eyes.
>>
>>>> responding to the thread in general..
>>>>
>>>> * Please could we try to seek consensus?
>>>>
>>>> - it is disappointing to see people treating this as some kind of
>>>> point-scoring game
>>>> when to those working on the compiler day to day it is far from a game.
>>>
>>> I'm not sure what the consensus is you're looking for.
>>
>> Let us start from the observations above and try to add in the issues that
>> have
>> arisen in the recent threads - and end with a proposal....
>>
>> * One could be glib and suggest that discussions about governance and  
>> project
>>   process should be directed to a different (new) mailing list
>>
>>   - but that does not  solve the problem(s) it just moves them.
>>   - (however, it might still be valuable to folks who wish to have an automatic filter
>>      for these topics or have no interest in them).
>>
>> * I think we are all clear about the primary role of the gcc@ and
>> gcc-patches@ lists
>>
>>   - primarily technical discussion about current and future projects and patch review
>>     respectively.
>>
>>   - we have a history of politely redirecting usage questions to the help list (while
>>    often answering them anyway), likewise with the irc channel.
>>
>>   - I believe we also have a history of encouraging input and discussing the technical
>>     issues (reasonably) calmly.
>>
>>   - to the best of my recollection I have never seen an idea excluded on any basis than
>>    technical content.
>>
>> * Without a specific list to process input on governance and project
>> process, this
>>   list is a reasonable choice.
>>
>> ———
>>
>> The observations above, copied from my first email, together with a belief
>> that most of
>> the current and potential contributor to GCC would prefer to function in a
>> constructive
>> environment, lead to the following proposition:
>>
>>   * that, since the lists are generally constructive without additional management,
>>     (OK. there are occasional heated technical debates), it implies that this community
>>     by-and-large is already able to function without heavy-handed moderation.
>>
>>  * It has been postulated that there could be valued technical input from people who
>>    have difficulty in interacting in a constructive manner (through no fault of their own).
>>
>>  * no-one else would be making valued input, either they would be a spammer or
>>    intentionally acting in a destructive manner.
>>
>>    - Let us propose that someone capable of working on a complex system such as a
>>     compiler would be able to read and act on a set of guidelines.
>>
>>    - ergo, I propose that we have a set of guidelines to which someone who is being
>>    disruptive can be pointed.
>>
>>   * (Probably?) no-one has any issue with a spammer being thrown off the list, for which
>>     I guess there is a process already - it would be reasonable to expect that genuine
>>     contributors (even with difficulties) would make an effort to follow guidelines - and
>>    that someone who was making no effort to do so is not really any different from a
>>     spammer.
>>
>> Of course, guidelines require debate (but I doubt that the right set would
>> be much
>> different from the obvious for this group).
>>
>>  is seems to me that most of the strife in the last two weeks comes from a few key
>>  things:
>>
>>   - attacking the person delivering a message rather than debating the message
>>   - introducing topics spurious and unrelated to the actual debate
>>   - trying to equate the process of this project with party or international Politics.
>>
>> ===
>>
>> So .. in summary:
>>
>> 1/ I propose that we do have written guidelines, to which someone behaving
>> in a
>>     non-constructive manner can be pointed.
>>
>> 2/ if those guidelines *are the consensus* of this group and someone is
>> unable to
>>     follow them (given some reasonable chance to amend as is customary in matters
>>     such as employment law here, at least), then they are treated no differently from
>>     any other spam.
>
> Proposing the guidelines essentially means that the community accepts the  
> fact
> that many of us are incapable of navigate everyday problems and dilemmas  
> by making
> “right” decisions based on the use of good judgment and values rather  
> than sterile
> sets of rules and conventions that typically disregard the individual,  
> the particular,
> or the discrete.

However, that isn’t what I wrote - what I wrote was the opposite; that  
history shows
that almost everyone communicating on these lists can do so constructively  
*without*
recourse to written guidelines.

It is not the general case that has precipitated this discussion but,  
rather, the exceptional.

>  Thusly, it is wrong to suggest that the problems are simply associated with RMS, FSF and GNU.

My mail contains no reference to any of these, but simply to identifying  
processes
that have failed to work in discussions (about those topics, granted).

> Human beings have the capacity to be wise and develop their thoughts on  
> wise
> decision-making skills that evolve from a combination of experience,  
> empathy,
> and intellect.  Many times, this means having the capacity to break those
> guidelines and rules.

“rules are for the obedience of fools and the guidance of wise men”?

As noted above, 99.99% (guessed of course) of the list traffic is carried  
out in
the guise you mention, and probably would continue to be so…

… the proposal is to have a mechanism to deal with the exceptional.

> In the World Trade Center Disaster, many people who were used  to following
> the rules died because they did what they were told by authority figures.
> I know about these things as part of my industrial work experience.

Probably almost no-one “here” would be able to substantiate or deny this -  
am I to
take it that it is a serious data point suggesting that absence of control  
is a better
process?

There is no counter experiment to determine the outcome in the case that  
there
were no authority figures and no rules (nor would anyone wish to conduct  
such an
experiment).

To me this is spurious input, I cannot see how it could be used to make any  
guidance
to the progress here.

Iain

>
>>    * although one might lose some notionally valuable input, the judgement here is that
>>    the net benefit of such input is negative.
>>
>> 3/ I would recommend on the basis of another online community (about  
>> music)
>> to
>>    which I belong, to suggest that Politics (party or international) and Religion are better
>>    discussed in other forums and are exceedingly unlikely to affect a technical decision
>>    on the progress of GCC - such discussions almost never end well.
>>
>>   (I’d believe that any valid exception to the need to heed some political situation would
>>    be readily recognised by the participants here).
>>
>> 4/ It is likely that we can extract much of the basic guidelines from any
>> other writing on
>>   communicating constructively - after all, it is how 99.99% of this list traffic is managed
>>   without intervention.
>>
>> my 0.02GBP only, "patches welcome",
>> Iain

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Chris Punches]

What I see here in sum is another high level tightly integrated Red Hat
employee saying the gist of "I'm really not saying it out of my
employer's interest and it has nothing to do with my personal
feelings".

Every single proponent of this argument that I have seen so far is
employed by one of the same 5 companies and "really isn't doing it on
behalf of my company I swear".  

Why is it almost exclusively that specific crowd saying it here, then?

I just don't buy it.  Please say anything that would not support the
emerging theory that these companies are using integrated employees to
try to emulate justification/pretext for a rift to attack the free
software world.  Anything at all.

-C

On Thu, 2021-04-15 at 13:31 -0400, David Malcolm via Gcc wrote:
> On Thu, 2021-04-15 at 09:49 -0400, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> > Joseph Myers <joseph@codesourcery.com>:
> > > On Wed, 14 Apr 2021, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> > > 
> > > > I'm not judging RMS's behavior (or anyone else's) one way or
> > > > another. I am simply pointing out that there is a Schelling
> > > > point
> > > > in
> > > > possible community norms that is well expressed as "you shall
> > > > judge
> > > > by
> > > > the code alone".  This list is not full of contention from
> > > > affirming
> > > > that norm, but from some peoples' attempt to repudiate it.
> > > 
> > > Since RMS, FSF and GNU are not contributing code to the toolchain
> > > and
> > > haven't been for a very long time, the most similar basis to
> > > judge
> > > them 
> > > would seem to be based on their interactions with toolchain
> > > development.  
> > > I think those interactions generally show that FSF and GNU have
> > > been
> > > bad 
> > > umbrella organizations for the toolchain since at least when the
> > > GCC
> > > 4.4 
> > > release was delayed waiting for a slow process of developing the
> > > GCC 
> > > Runtime Library Exception.
> > 
> > I do not have standing to argue this point.
> > 
> > I will, however, point out that it is a very *different* point from
> > "RMS has iupset some people and should therefore be canceled".
> 
> [I'm sorry to everyone who's sick of these threads, but I feel I have
> to respond to this one; sorry about writing another long email]
> 
> Eric: I don't know if you're just being glib, or you're deliberately
> trying to caricature those of us who are upset by RMS's behavior.
> 
> I think the words "canceled" and "cancel culture" have effectively
> become meaningless and should be avoided if we want to have a nuanced
> discussion - no-one seems to have a definition of what counts as
> "canceling" vs "consequences" vs "fair and measured responses".
> 
> At one time, both you and RMS were heroes of mine, and I was a true
> believer (of what, I'm no longer sure); I own copies of both "The
> Cathedral and the Bazaar" and "Free Software - Free Society", though
> both are currently in my attic, gathering dust.
> 
> I've long felt that there was a massive hole in the GNU project and
> FSF
> where effective technical leadership should have been - various
> maintainers on gcc, gdb, etc have been implementing things, and
> things
> were humming along, and those of us in Red Hat working on them tried
> to
> coordinate on features we felt were important - but where was the
> top-
> level response to, say, LLVM/clang? (to name just one of many changes
> in the industry)  In many ways the last 8 years of my career have
> been
> an attempt to get gcc to respond to the appearance of LLVM/clang
> (I've
> added JIT-compilation, improved diagnostics, and I'm implementing a
> static analysis pass) - I'm lucky that my managers inside Red Hat are
> happy to pay me to hack on this stuff and make GCC better - it helps
> our customers, but it also helps GCC, and the broader FLOSS
> communities
> using both toolchains).
> 
> Where has the technical leadership from RMS been?  Instead the long-
> standing opposition by RMS to exposing the compiler's IR has hobbled
> GCC, and partly contributed to the pile of technical debt we have to
> dig our way out of.  The only "leadership" coming out of GNU/FSF seem
> to me to be dictats from on high about ChangeLog formats and coding
> conventions.  The GNU project seems to me to be stuck in the 1980s. 
> Perhaps a pronouncement like: "try to make everything be consumable
> as
> libraries with APIs, as well as as standalone binaries" might have
> helped (and still could; can we do that please?)
> 
> Similarly, I agree with Joseph's observations of the ways that the
> FSF
> and GNU have been bad umbrella organizations for the toolchain.
> 
> But beyond the failure of technical leadership, and the
> organizational
> incompetence/incoherence, is RMS's behavior, and the extent to which
> it, as you put it "upset some people".
> 
> RMS's defenders seem to have fixated on his 2019 comments on Marvin
> Minsky, the uproar over those, and his responses to them (then and
> recently), and seem keen to assure us that everything's OK now, or,
> at
> least on a road to improvement.
> 
> But in the time since those 2019 comments, I've been reconsidering my
> views on RMS.  In particular, I have read of many alleged incidents
> such as:
>  - spontaneously licking a female conference member on the arm
>  - appearing to hit on anyone female, even if they're underage
>  - asking which female audience members at his talk were virgins
> 
> At least one of the above was from a former colleage of mine, which
> when I read it was about the point that broke me.
> 
> As part of my reconsidering my views on RMS, I recalled an event
> described in Sam Williams' biography of RMS in which Williams
> describes
> RMS's then girlfriend talking about how she "admired the way Richard
> built up an entire political movement to address an issue of profound
> personal concern", which she identified as "crushing loneliness".
> 
> When I first read that, years ago, I felt sorry and pity for RMS, and
> a
> vague feeling that community is an important part of FLOSS, or
> somesuch
> sentiment (and a feeling of trying to recreate a lost utopia from the
> 1980s).
> 
> But in the light of the various reports of RMS's awkard behavior
> around
> women, I decided to reread that section.  I looked online, and found
> that the book is available here:
>   https://www.fsf.org/faif
> 
> I noticed this passage immediately after the reference to "crushing
> loneliness":
> 
> "During dinner, I let the women do the talking and spent most of the 
> time trying to detect clues as to whether the last 12 months had 
> softened Stallman in any significant way.  I didn’t see anything to
> suggest they had.  Although more flirtatious than I remembered,
> Stallman retained the same general level of prickliness.  At one
> point,
> my wife uttered an emphatic "God forbid" only to receive a typical
> Stallman rebuke."
> 
> Something about the reference to "flirtatious" caught me eye in the
> light of the stories I've read about RMS's behavior around women.  It
> turns out that the original text is available on Project Gutenberg
> here:
>   http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5768
> where that passage reads:
> 
> "During dinner, I let the women do the talking and spent most of the
> time trying to detect clues as to whether the last 12 months had
> softened Stallman in any significant way. I didn't see anything to
> suggest they had. Although more flirtatious than I remembered - a
> flirtatiousness spoiled somewhat by the number of times Stallman's
> eyes
> seemed to fixate on my wife's chest - Stallman retained the same
> general level of prickliness. At one point, my wife uttered an
> emphatic
> "God forbid" only to receive a typical Stallman rebuke."
> 
> Spot the difference?
> 
> https://www.fsf.org/faif says:
>   "It is a rare kind of biography, where the reader has the benefit
> of
> both the biographer's original words and the subject's response."
> 
> which is certainly one way of describing it.  It's unclear to me
> whether Williams removed that sentence, or RMS did.  It may be unfair
> to Williams and his wife to draw attention to this in this email, and
> I'm sorry if it is - I mention it here as it's something that no-one
> else seemed to have noticed.  I don't want biography to become
> hagiography - it's unhealthy to put people up on a pedestal - for
> them
> and us.
> 
> I don't know if your retort about "upset[ing] some people" was
> referring to the Minsky comments, or to the behaviors RMS seems to be
> prone to around women, which although I'm not a woman, appear to me
> to
> be very alienating.  If the latter, you might want to consider that
> women and girls are roughly half the population of the world at large
> (if not this project), and referring to them as "some people" might
> be
> seen as patronizing.
> 
> I don't want FLOSS to be a boy's club, but also, merely, from the
> existing narrow perspective of the political mission of the FSF, I
> think having more women involved would help keep software freedom
> relevant to today's tech enviroment.  For example, I think this
> article
> has an excellent take on the power relationship between smartphones
> and
> their users, comparing a smartphone to an abusive partner:
>   
> https://conversationalist.org/2019/09/13/feminism-explains-our-toxic-relationships-with-our-smartphones/
> and it makes many points that I think are very relevant to the FSF's
> political mission (if not on-topic to the nuts and bolts of GCC
> development; I'm just posting it here by way of example).
> 
> Most of the above issues involve gender, but not all of them.
> 
> For example, the staff of the FSF appear to have had to unionize
> specifically as a response to having to constantly deal with
> unreasonable behavior from RMS (and the management apparently wanted
> to
> join the union too, but couldn't due to laws on such matters).
> 
> Reading that made me regret if any harsh words I've had for the
> organization of the FSF have hurt the staffers there; it seems to
> have
> been a very difficult place to work.
> 
> To try to sum up, it's not just RMS's remarks about Minsky that
> bothered me.  I think there are technical, governance, *and* social
> issues here.  To be fair, I'm not sure how much of my own visceral
> reaction to RMS's recent return to the FSF board is due to the amount
> of code I've had to write to deal with technical decisions he's
> imposed
> on the project, versus a feeling of "ick" having now read the stories
> from women who've felt deeply uncomfortable around him.  Maybe I'm
> just
> bitter about having to fix the code.  To what extent should we accept
> eccentric and/or antisocial behavior in FLOSS communities, or does
> doing so make us "enablers"?  I'm not sure what the boundaries here
> should be.
> 
> I think that the idea that some have that list moderation is always
> wrong closely relates to "Geek Social Fallacy #1: Ostracizers Are
> Evil":
>   https://plausiblydeniable.com/five-geek-social-fallacies/
> and is equally invalid.
> 
> I still admire much of what RMS has written, and have spent much of
> my
> career trying to implement part of a vision inspired by him.  I'm sad
> about the way things have turned out.  Twitter seems to turn
> everything
> into a pitched battle between two camps.  I hope there's room for a
> nuanced view of him - the good and the less good.  I don't know what
> role he should have, but I think it should not be a leadership one,
> and
> I think the FSF and GNU need to greatly change to stay relevant,
> including on governance and on succession plans.  None of us are
> getting any younger, and the vision of the FSF and GNU seems to me to
> be stuck in the 1990s (or earlier).
> 
> I don't have the emotional bandwidth to contribute more meaningfully
> to
> the future of GNU/FSF beyond my contributions to GCC, and this
> email. 
> I've posted the following link to Luis Villa's blog before, which in
> my
> view has many good ideas on ways to save the FSF from itself, so I'll
> repost it again in case anyone hasn't seen it yet who might find
> benefit in it:
>   https://lu.is/blog/2021/04/07/values-centered-npos-with-kmaher/
> 
> I reject the idea that a FLOSS community should be judged purely on
> the
> code it generates - I want to work in a "professional" environment,
> for
> some definition of "professional", with basic standards of behavior,
> or, to quote the late Anthony Bourdain:
> 
> "It is truly a privilege to live by what I call the "no asshole"
> rule.
> I don't do business with assholes. I don't care how much money they
> are
> offering me, or what project. Life is too short. Quality of life is
> important. I'm fortunate to collaborate with a lot of people who I
> respect and like, and I’d like to keep it that way."
> 
> In general, my experiences with the GCC community is that it is full
> of
> people I respect and like, but with dysfunction when it comes to
> anything to do with GNU/FSF/RMS. (and thank you to the Steering
> Committee for helping shelter us from that dysfunction).
> 
> This may have turned into a rant, for which I'm sorry, but I hope
> it's
> constructive.  I've used "I and "me" a lot - the views here are my
> own,
> although I'm paid to care about GCC (which I do), and these are not
> the
> opinions of Red Hat, or of my colleagues.
> 
> Sorry again about prolonging this thread; I will try to get back to
> coding now.
> 
> Dave
> 

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Ian Lance Taylor]

On Thu, Apr 15, 2021 at 1:26 PM Chris Punches via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org> wrote:
>
> Every single proponent of this argument that I have seen so far is
> employed by one of the same 5 companies and "really isn't doing it on
> behalf of my company I swear".
>
> Why is it almost exclusively that specific crowd saying it here, then?

For better or for worse, since the early '90s the majority of people
who do serious work on GCC have been hired by companies that want to
do serious work on GCC.  After all, it's a win-win: the company gets
work done, the GCC programmer gets well paid.  The effect is that most
of the major GCC contributors work for a relatively small number of
companies.  There are of course many exceptions, but that is the
general rule.

Ian

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Christopher Dimech]

> >> ===
> >>
> >> So .. in summary:
> >>
> >> 1/ I propose that we do have written guidelines, to which someone behaving
> >> in a
> >>     non-constructive manner can be pointed.
> >>
> >> 2/ if those guidelines *are the consensus* of this group and someone is
> >> unable to
> >>     follow them (given some reasonable chance to amend as is customary in matters
> >>     such as employment law here, at least), then they are treated no differently from
> >>     any other spam.
> >
> > Proposing the guidelines essentially means that the community accepts the  
> > fact
> > that many of us are incapable of navigate everyday problems and dilemmas  
> > by making
> > “right” decisions based on the use of good judgment and values rather  
> > than sterile
> > sets of rules and conventions that typically disregard the individual,  
> > the particular,
> > or the discrete.
> 
> However, that isn’t what I wrote - what I wrote was the opposite; that  
> history shows
> that almost everyone communicating on these lists can do so constructively  
> *without*
> recourse to written guidelines.
> 
> It is not the general case that has precipitated this discussion but,  
> rather, the exceptional.

There have been many discussions emanating from Nathan's messages, that 
toxity is endemic.  I disagree with that in practice as you do.
 
But there are some discussions that potentially lead to the opposite.
I feel that when the issues at hand produce a series of contrasting
views that are significant. taking a guideline approach could result

   

> >  Thusly, it is wrong to suggest that the problems are simply associated with RMS, FSF and GNU.
> 
> My mail contains no reference to any of these, but simply to identifying  
> processes
> that have failed to work in discussions (about those topics, granted).

No, your message did not reference that.  But was a general assessment of what
I have seen developing.  Indeed, the discussion started with the same
person suggesting "white male privilege", the source of all toxicity coming
from one individual and those associated with him, etc.
 
> > Human beings have the capacity to be wise and develop their thoughts on  
> > wise
> > decision-making skills that evolve from a combination of experience,  
> > empathy,
> > and intellect.  Many times, this means having the capacity to break those
> > guidelines and rules.
> 
> “rules are for the obedience of fools and the guidance of wise men”?
> 
> As noted above, 99.99% (guessed of course) of the list traffic is carried  
> out in
> the guise you mention, and probably would continue to be so…
> 
> … the proposal is to have a mechanism to deal with the exceptional.

That depends on the arguments of the discussion.  It is acceptable at times
to respond roughly to some kinds of discursive treatment.  Although Nathan
was allowed to write, he was surely aware of the implications - that a 
schism was likely.
 
> > In the World Trade Center Disaster, many people who were used  to following
> > the rules died because they did what they were told by authority figures.
> > I know about these things as part of my industrial work experience.
> 
> Probably almost no-one “here” would be able to substantiate or deny this -  
> am I to
> take it that it is a serious data point suggesting that absence of control  
> is a better
> process?

There have been numerous historical instances - let's say in the journalistic
realm where I do operate - when that was true.

Still, I am not against moderation when required in principle.  Indeed, it 
is part of the job as maintainer (and co-maintainers, etc.) to exercise 
authority on these points when they arise.  Personally, I am not afraid to
exercise them when associated with my own work.  

Customarily, I would not oppose to intervention, except on special instances
when the assessments was faulty - I specifically mention Gnu Health and the
arguments Dr. Luis Falcon had with Savannah regarding package admin.  May I
remind everybody that Argentina opted for GNU Health for COVID19 observatory
and contact tracing.  At the time, I was also doing my own work on COVID19
and considered my intervention necessary.

> There is no counter experiment to determine the outcome in the case that  
> there
> were no authority figures and no rules (nor would anyone wish to conduct  
> such an
> experiment).
> 
> To me this is spurious input, I cannot see how it could be used to make any  
> guidance
> to the progress here.
> 
> Iain
> 
> >
> >>    * although one might lose some notionally valuable input, the judgement here is that
> >>    the net benefit of such input is negative.
> >>
> >> 3/ I would recommend on the basis of another online community (about  
> >> music)
> >> to
> >>    which I belong, to suggest that Politics (party or international) and Religion are better
> >>    discussed in other forums and are exceedingly unlikely to affect a technical decision
> >>    on the progress of GCC - such discussions almost never end well.
> >>
> >>   (I’d believe that any valid exception to the need to heed some political situation would
> >>    be readily recognised by the participants here).
> >>
> >> 4/ It is likely that we can extract much of the basic guidelines from any
> >> other writing on
> >>   communicating constructively - after all, it is how 99.99% of this list traffic is managed
> >>   without intervention.
> >>
> >> my 0.02GBP only, "patches welcome",
> >> Iain
> 
> 
>

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Christopher Dimech]

> Sent: Friday, April 16, 2021 at 8:51 AM
> From: "Ian Lance Taylor via Gcc" <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>
> To: chris.punches@silogroup.org
> Cc: "GCC Development" <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>
> Subject: Re: removing toxic emailers
>
> On Thu, Apr 15, 2021 at 1:26 PM Chris Punches via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org> wrote:
> >
> > Every single proponent of this argument that I have seen so far is
> > employed by one of the same 5 companies and "really isn't doing it on
> > behalf of my company I swear".
> >
> > Why is it almost exclusively that specific crowd saying it here, then?
>
> For better or for worse, since the early '90s the majority of people
> who do serious work on GCC have been hired by companies that want to
> do serious work on GCC.  After all, it's a win-win: the company gets
> work done, the GCC programmer gets well paid.  The effect is that most
> of the major GCC contributors work for a relatively small number of
> companies.  There are of course many exceptions, but that is the
> general rule.
>
> Ian

Such contributions are valued, and companies where talent is allowed to flow
towards the public is commendable, even for those with a history of exploitation.
Many of us pay their taxes, not because we see crowds of people sent to jail.
But because spontaneous compliance is the way for things to work.  That's what
I hope for.

Re: removing toxic emailers

[David Malcolm]

On Thu, 2021-04-15 at 16:26 -0400, Chris Punches wrote:
> What I see here in sum is another high level tightly integrated Red
> Hat
> employee saying the gist of "I'm really not saying it out of my
> employer's interest and it has nothing to do with my personal
> feelings".

I'm not sure I'm "high level", but I guess I'll take that as a
compliment.

I stated that the opinions in my screed were my own, but I'm a former
FLOSS enthusiast in the fortunate position of being paid to work on
GCC.  I've tried to be open about my biases.

> 
> Every single proponent of this argument that I have seen so far is
> employed by one of the same 5 companies and "really isn't doing it on
> behalf of my company I swear".  
> 
> Why is it almost exclusively that specific crowd saying it here,
> then?

Because, sadly, there's only a small group of companies that employ GCC
developers.  These developers tend to have an emotional attachment to
the project (e.g. a broad agreement with the professed goals of the
FSF).  Part of the reason I work at Red Hat is that its own internal
culture aligns with mine, much of the time, anyway (and I know we're
not perfect).

Hence there's some correlation between those with strong opinions on
the project and those who are being paid to work on it.  I don't see
that as malicious or a conspiracy - just that we, reasonably, care
about the work we do and its context.  It's not necessarily just a job
for me.

> 
> I just don't buy it.  Please say anything that would not support the
> emerging theory that these companies are using integrated employees
> to
> try to emulate justification/pretext for a rift to attack the free
> software world.  Anything at all.

I hope I just did.

Dave

Re: Gcc as callable libraries (was: removing toxic emailers)

[David Edelsohn]

On Thu, Apr 15, 2021 at 5:04 PM Thomas Koenig via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org> wrote:
>
> David,
>
> for some reason or other, I did not get your mail, so I will
> just reply copying in from the archive.
>
> First, thanks for injecting some sanity into the discussion.
>
> I will not discuss RMS' personal shortcomings or the lack of them.
> In today's toxic political climate, such allegations are often
> made up and weaponized without an effective defense for the
> alleged wrongdoer.  I don't know the truth of the matter, and I make
> a point of not finding out.
>
>  > In many ways the last 8 years of my career have been
>  > an attempt to get gcc to respond to the appearance of LLVM/clang (I've
>  > added JIT-compilation, improved diagnostics, and I'm implementing a
>  > static analysis pass)
>
> And this is highly welcome, and has made gcc (including gfortran) a much
> better compiler.  I well remember how you implemented the much better
> colored error messages that gfortran has now.
>
>  > Perhaps a pronouncement like: "try to make everything be consumable as
>  > libraries with APIs, as well as as standalone binaries" might have
>  > helped (and still could; can we do that please?)
>
> That makes perfect sense, as LLVM shows, and is something that the
> steering committee could decide for the project (or rather, it could
> issue a pronouncement that this will not be opposed if some volunteer
> does it).
>
> I think this could be as close to an unanimous decision as there can
> be among such a diverse community as the gcc developers.  If the FSF
> takes umbrage at this, the ball is in their court.

Andrew Macleod led a BOF at GNU Cauldron 2013 that discussed
re-architecting and modularizing GCC along these same lines.  The
header flattening was one step.

Thanks, David

Re: Gcc as callable libraries (was: removing toxic emailers)

[David Malcolm]

On Thu, 2021-04-15 at 21:48 +0200, Thomas Koenig wrote:
> David,
> 
> for some reason or other, I did not get your mail, so I will
> just reply copying in from the archive.
> 
> First, thanks for injecting some sanity into the discussion.

Thanks Thomas

> I will not discuss RMS' personal shortcomings or the lack of them.
> In today's toxic political climate, such allegations are often
> made up and weaponized without an effective defense for the
> alleged wrongdoer.  I don't know the truth of the matter, and I make
> a point of not finding out.

Fair enough.

>  > In many ways the last 8 years of my career have been
>  > an attempt to get gcc to respond to the appearance of LLVM/clang
> (I've
>  > added JIT-compilation, improved diagnostics, and I'm implementing
> a
>  > static analysis pass)
> 
> And this is highly welcome, and has made gcc (including gfortran) a
> much
> better compiler.  I well remember how you implemented the much better
> colored error messages that gfortran has now.

I've added a bunch of features to the C and C++ frontends (underlined
ranges, labelling of such reanges, fix-it hints, etc), but I don't have
the Fortran skills to know what would be appropriate to gfortran.  Let
me know if you have ideas for specific improvements to how gfortran
diagnostics work that I might be able to help implement.

> 
>  > Perhaps a pronouncement like: "try to make everything be
> consumable as
>  > libraries with APIs, as well as as standalone binaries" might have
>  > helped (and still could; can we do that please?)
> 
> That makes perfect sense, as LLVM shows, and is something that the
> steering committee could decide for the project (or rather, it could
> issue a pronouncement that this will not be opposed if some volunteer
> does it).
> 
> I think this could be as close to an unanimous decision as there can
> be among such a diverse community as the gcc developers.  If the FSF
> takes umbrage at this, the ball is in their court.

I deliberately added the weasel-words "try to", because these things
are, of course, much easier said that done.

I attempted to reduce gcc's use of global state back in 2013 with a
view to making it a shared library, but eventually the sheer size of
the task overwhelmed me.  In libgccjit I hid everything behind a
separate API, with a bug mutex guarding all of gcc's global state,
which feels like something of a cop-out.

One idea I had would be to refactor out our diagnostics code into a
libdiagnostics (or similar), so that all of the source-
printing/underlining/fix-it logic etc could be used outside of gcc, and
the use of diagnostic_context might help towards that.  But even "just"
that's decidedly non-trivial.

Hope this is constructive
Dave

Re: Gcc as callable libraries (was: removing toxic emailers)

[David Malcolm]

On Thu, 2021-04-15 at 17:31 -0400, David Malcolm via Gcc wrote:
> On Thu, 2021-04-15 at 21:48 +0200, Thomas Koenig wrote:

[...snip...]

> >  > Perhaps a pronouncement like: "try to make everything be
> > consumable as
> >  > libraries with APIs, as well as as standalone binaries" might
> > have
> >  > helped (and still could; can we do that please?)
> > 
> > That makes perfect sense, as LLVM shows, and is something that the
> > steering committee could decide for the project (or rather, it
> > could
> > issue a pronouncement that this will not be opposed if some
> > volunteer
> > does it).
> > 
> > I think this could be as close to an unanimous decision as there
> > can
> > be among such a diverse community as the gcc developers.  If the
> > FSF
> > takes umbrage at this, the ball is in their court.
> 
> I deliberately added the weasel-words "try to", because these things
> are, of course, much easier said that done.
> 
> I attempted to reduce gcc's use of global state back in 2013 with a
> view to making it a shared library, but eventually the sheer size of
> the task overwhelmed me.  In libgccjit I hid everything behind a
> separate API, with a bug mutex guarding all of gcc's global state,
                       ~~~
                       big, I meant to write.

> which feels like something of a cop-out.

libgccjit calls into as and ld, which shows up in the profile, so
another idea I dabbled in the whole "libraries rather than just
executables" area is to make as and ld buildable as shared libraries;
hence this 2015 experiment:

"[PATCH 00/16] RFC: Embedding as and ld inside gcc driver and into
libgccjit"
crossposted between gcc-patches and binutils here:
  https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc-patches/2015-06/msg00116.html
  https://sourceware.org/legacy-ml/binutils/2015-06/msg00010.html

(admittedly my prototype had a barely-existent API, but it gave me a 5x
speedup on a synthetic benchmark, which was dominated by the overhead
of dynamically linking libbfd into as and ld on each invocation IIRC;
better to do it once when libgccjit is linked into the process).

> 
> One idea I had would be to refactor out our diagnostics code into a
> libdiagnostics (or similar), so that all of the source-
> printing/underlining/fix-it logic etc could be used outside of gcc, and
> the use of diagnostic_context might help towards that.  But even "just"
> that's decidedly non-trivial.
> 
> Hope this is constructive
> Dave
> 
> 

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Christopher Jefferson]

On Thu, 15 Apr 2021 at 21:26, Chris Punches via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org> wrote:
>
> What I see here in sum is another high level tightly integrated Red Hat
> employee saying the gist of "I'm really not saying it out of my
> employer's interest and it has nothing to do with my personal
> feelings".
>
> Every single proponent of this argument that I have seen so far is
> employed by one of the same 5 companies and "really isn't doing it on
> behalf of my company I swear".
>
> Why is it almost exclusively that specific crowd saying it here, then?
>
> I just don't buy it.  Please say anything that would not support the
> emerging theory that these companies are using integrated employees to
> try to emulate justification/pretext for a rift to attack the free
> software world.  Anything at all.
>

One reason you might be seeing this is people who (a) are not paid to
work on GCC, and (b) found RMS and parts of the GNU community
unpleasant to work with, left years ago.

Chris

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Jeff Law]

On 4/15/2021 2:26 PM, Chris Punches via Gcc wrote:
> What I see here in sum is another high level tightly integrated Red Hat
> employee saying the gist of "I'm really not saying it out of my
> employer's interest and it has nothing to do with my personal
> feelings".
>
> Every single proponent of this argument that I have seen so far is
> employed by one of the same 5 companies and "really isn't doing it on
> behalf of my company I swear".
>
> Why is it almost exclusively that specific crowd saying it here, then?
>
> I just don't buy it.  Please say anything that would not support the
> emerging theory that these companies are using integrated employees to
> try to emulate justification/pretext for a rift to attack the free
> software world.  Anything at all.

[ Again, speaking or myself, not my employer or for the steering 
committee. ]


So first, my employer (Tachyum) has had absolutely no clue what's going 
on with this discussion until yesterday afternoon when I mentioned it in 
passing.  We're much more focused on getting our bits where they need to 
be rather than policy, procedures and politics of the upstream 
projects.  However they have repeatedly, up to the CEO level emphasized 
that upstreaming our work and being good players in the various relevant 
communities is important and the various concerns I raised around that 
prior to joining were answered to my satisfaction.


Second, I was the technical lead for Red Hat's tools team until about a 
month ago.  I've also held management positions in Red Hat (and Cygnus 
prior to the acquisition) during my 25+ year career there.  Red Hat and 
Cygnus have consistently worked through the years to be good stewards 
for the GNU tools.  Management  has consistently had a hands-off 
approach to the upstream community, allowing engineers to exercise their 
own judgment on if when and how to engage in various discussions.  The 
only time management got involved in these kinds of discussions was to 
throw support behind EGCS -- including being supportive of bringing in 
outside advisors for what ultimately became the steering committee.


You may not buy it, but that's OK.   That's ultimately your decision to 
make.


I do buy it.  It's consistent with what I've seen over nearly three 
decades of dealing with GNU tools and what I've *directly observed* as 
part of the leadership and management teams.


Jeff

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Frosku]

On Thu Apr 15, 2021 at 9:51 PM BST, Ian Lance Taylor via Gcc wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 15, 2021 at 1:26 PM Chris Punches via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>
> wrote:
> >
> > Every single proponent of this argument that I have seen so far is
> > employed by one of the same 5 companies and "really isn't doing it on
> > behalf of my company I swear".
> >
> > Why is it almost exclusively that specific crowd saying it here, then?
>
> For better or for worse, since the early '90s the majority of people
> who do serious work on GCC have been hired by companies that want to
> do serious work on GCC. After all, it's a win-win: the company gets
> work done, the GCC programmer gets well paid. The effect is that most
> of the major GCC contributors work for a relatively small number of
> companies. There are of course many exceptions, but that is the
> general rule.
>
> Ian

In my view, if people employed by a small number of American companies
succeed in disassociating GCC from GNU/FSF, which is representative of
the free software grassroots community, this is not a win-win. This is
powerful US corporations removing something our community created from
our community's oversight and moving it into a space where it's governed
by representatives of Silicon Valley rather than a membership-based non
profit.

Whilst everyone's contributions to the software should be welcomed, I
don't think you'll find many FSF members celebrating the impact of paid
Corporate engineers on GCC if this sorry state of affairs comes to be.

>>= %frosku = { os => 'gnu+linux', editor => 'emacs', coffee => 1 } =<<

Re: removing toxic emailers

[JeanHeyd Meneide]

On Thu, Apr 15, 2021 at 6:30 PM David Malcolm via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 2021-04-15 at 16:26 -0400, Chris Punches wrote:
> > What I see here in sum is another high level tightly integrated Red
> > Hat
> > employee saying the gist of "I'm really not saying it out of my
> > employer's interest and it has nothing to do with my personal
> > feelings".
>
> I'm not sure I'm "high level", but I guess I'll take that as a
> compliment.
>
> I stated that the opinions in my screed were my own, but I'm a former
> FLOSS enthusiast in the fortunate position of being paid to work on
> GCC.  I've tried to be open about my biases.

     Then let me offer my perspective, again.

     I am not affiliated with RedHat, IBM, or what have you. I do not
work for them, never have worked for them, and have contributed to the
C, C++, and other Systems Programming communities entirely
out-of-pocket or through scholarship and donation.

    I submitted my Copyright Revocation to the Free Software
Foundation after giving the greenlight to merge the last of my
already-submitted patches into GCC.

     Stallman is an exceptionally poor leader for Free Software. We
routinely complain about LLVM here but Stallman had the chance to get
on top of LLVM and guide it into the Free Software world; he missed
the e-mail and "found" it 10 years later. Stallman was horrible to the
people employed by the Free Software Foundation and apparently the
board was barely able to keep him in check, resulting in his employees
needing to have Shop Stewards with a Union in order to keep it
workable for employees.

     Stallman is terrible at his job, and this group's inability to
have a secondary or tertiary copyright assignment has cost them my
contributions for the foreseeable future. Stallman's defenders are
ableist, because Stallman himself - in the FSF book and more - have
publicly stated that he is not autistic or neurodivergent. Stallman
has also stated this publicly, but the fact that Bruce Perens, Eric S.
Raymond, and more feel the need to show up and claim on behalf of all
Neuroatypical people and Neurodivergent people that they are fighting
for us while pushing a disgusting, ableist theory that "Neurodivergent
== Definitely An Asshole And Needs To Be Deprived Of Agency For Their
Actions" is disgusting.

     That people feel the need to stereotype neurodivergent people
like me for the sake of Stallman's defense is horrible. That people
would stand by and claim this is some kind of great advocacy for
someone like me is a series of mental gymnastics I do not want to be
apart of. This place is fetid, and contrary to Raymond's idea that
toxicity has no cost, it most certainly did cost it myself and many
other people like me.

Sincerely,
JeanHeyd

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Eric S. Raymond]

David Malcolm <dmalcolm@redhat.com>:
> > I will, however, point out that it is a very *different* point from
> > "RMS has iupset some people and should therefore be canceled".
> 
> Eric: I don't know if you're just being glib, or you're deliberately
> trying to caricature those of us who are upset by RMS's behavior.

My intent was not caricature.  I was being dismissive and snarky
because I genuinely consider the personality complaints against RMS to
be pretty trivial.  Not the managerial ones Joseph Myers listed; those
are serious.  But they're not the cause of the current ruckus.

To make the "triviality" point in the most forceful possible way, I
will take the bull by the horns and directly address RMS's behavior towards
women.  And I will reveal a few things that I haven't talked about in
public for 40 years.

I've known RMS since 1979; I'm fully aware of how obnoxious he can be
towards both men and women. There have been occasions on which I have
thought the state of the universe would have been improved if he'd
gotten a swift slap in the face.

In fact, the first or second time I met him face to face it was
because he was rather determinedly pursuing my then-girlfriend.
A hostile witness might have said he was creeping on her, though
that slang for it wouldn't be invented until much later.

I think an explanation of how how I reasoned about that situation has
some value in light of the current attempt to ostracize RMS.

I paid very careful attention to whether my girlfriend appeared to
need any help dealing with him. I regarded her as an adult fully
capable of making her own decisions.  One of those decisions could
have been to slap his face.  If a more severe sanction had been
required, and she had yelled for help, I would cheerfully have
punched his lights out.

No fisticuffs were required.  She gently discouraged him, and we both
established friendly relations with him.  In later years RMS and I
remained fairly close long after I broke up with that girlfriend.  He
made passes at at least two of my later girlfriends that I know of,
including the woman I am still married to.  In all cases, I trusted
these ladies to handle the situation like adults, and they did.  It
really would not have occurred to me to do otherwise.

I hear a lot of talk about RMS's behavior towards women being some sort
of vast horrible transgression that will drive all women everywhere to
flee from ever being contributors to FSF projects.  To me this seems
just silly, and very infantilizing of women in general.  My
girlfriends were emtirely able to

(1) short-stop his advances when they became unwelcome

(2) understand that some men have poor social skills and
    trouble recognizing boundaries,

(3) and *stay on friendly terms with him anyway*.

I mean I saw this not just more than once, but every single time it
came up.

I don't assume that any adult female is incapable of these things; I
respect women as fully capable of asserting and defending their
interests, I *expect* women to do that, and I thus consider a lot of the
white-knighting on their behalf to be at best empty virtue signaling
and at worst a cover for much more discreditable motives.

Of course, he offends men too.  When I deal with RMS, I know that I'm
going to have to cope with a certain amount of unpleasantness because
he has autism-like deficits amplified by some unfortunate personal
history.  Yes.  So what?  He's one of my oldest friends anyway.  He
has many admirable qualities; I respect and value him even when I have
to argue with him.  And I can work with him when I need to.

Why in the *hell* should I assume anyone with female genitalia is
incapable of doing the same?  More to the point, why is anybody else
making such a silly, reductive assumption and then turning it into a
galloping moral panic that somehow justifies stoning RMS and driving
him out of the village?

*grumble* Get *over* yourselves.  You want to be "welcoming" to
women?  Don't patronize or infantilize them - respect their ability to
tell off RMS for themselves *and then keep working with him*!
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Christopher Dimech]

> Sent: Friday, April 16, 2021 at 11:11 AM
> From: "Frosku" <frosku@frosku.com>
> To: "Ian Lance Taylor" <iant@google.com>, chris.punches@silogroup.org
> Cc: "GCC Development" <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>
> Subject: Re: removing toxic emailers
>
> On Thu Apr 15, 2021 at 9:51 PM BST, Ian Lance Taylor via Gcc wrote:
> > On Thu, Apr 15, 2021 at 1:26 PM Chris Punches via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>
> > wrote:
> > >
> > > Every single proponent of this argument that I have seen so far is
> > > employed by one of the same 5 companies and "really isn't doing it on
> > > behalf of my company I swear".
> > >
> > > Why is it almost exclusively that specific crowd saying it here, then?
> >
> > For better or for worse, since the early '90s the majority of people
> > who do serious work on GCC have been hired by companies that want to
> > do serious work on GCC. After all, it's a win-win: the company gets
> > work done, the GCC programmer gets well paid. The effect is that most
> > of the major GCC contributors work for a relatively small number of
> > companies. There are of course many exceptions, but that is the
> > general rule.
> >
> > Ian
>
> In my view, if people employed by a small number of American companies
> succeed in disassociating GCC from GNU/FSF, which is representative of
> the free software grassroots community, this is not a win-win. This is
> powerful US corporations removing something our community created from
> our community's oversight and moving it into a space where it's governed
> by representatives of Silicon Valley rather than a membership-based non
> profit.
>
> Whilst everyone's contributions to the software should be welcomed, I
> don't think you'll find many FSF members celebrating the impact of paid
> Corporate engineers on GCC if this sorry state of affairs comes to be.

The commercial use of free software is our hope, not our fear.  When people
at IBM began to come to free software, wanting to recommend it and use it,
and maybe distribute it themselves or encourage other people to distribute
it for them, we did not criticise them for not being non-profit virtuous
enough, or said "we are suspicious of you", let alone threatening them.


> >>= %frosku = { os => 'gnu+linux', editor => 'emacs', coffee => 1 } =<<
>

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Frosku]

On Fri Apr 16, 2021 at 12:36 AM BST, Christopher Dimech wrote:
>
> The commercial use of free software is our hope, not our fear. When
> people
> at IBM began to come to free software, wanting to recommend it and use
> it,
> and maybe distribute it themselves or encourage other people to
> distribute
> it for them, we did not criticise them for not being non-profit virtuous
> enough, or said "we are suspicious of you", let alone threatening them.
>

There is a colossal difference between commercial use and commercial
entities buying control of projects currently governed by entities
which are answerable to the grassroots (GNU) and then toppling that
governance structure in favor of one which is only answerable to
boardrooms in Silicon Valley and Seattle WA.

>>= %frosku = { os => 'gnu+linux', editor => 'emacs', coffee => 1 } =<<

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Paul Koning]

> On Apr 15, 2021, at 7:44 PM, Frosku <frosku@frosku.com> wrote:
> 
> On Fri Apr 16, 2021 at 12:36 AM BST, Christopher Dimech wrote:
>> 
>> The commercial use of free software is our hope, not our fear. When
>> people
>> at IBM began to come to free software, wanting to recommend it and use
>> it,
>> and maybe distribute it themselves or encourage other people to
>> distribute
>> it for them, we did not criticise them for not being non-profit virtuous
>> enough, or said "we are suspicious of you", let alone threatening them.
>> 
> 
> There is a colossal difference between commercial use and commercial
> entities buying control of projects currently governed by entities
> which are answerable to the grassroots (GNU) and then toppling that
> governance structure in favor of one which is only answerable to
> boardrooms in Silicon Valley and Seattle WA.

There are, or would be if that were a real issue.  It's not something that is feasible with GPL licensed code, whether the copyright is held by the FSF as it is for GCC, or by all the authors as for Linux.

	paul

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Eric S. Raymond]

Christopher Dimech via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>:
> The commercial use of free software is our hope, not our fear.  When people
> at IBM began to come to free software, wanting to recommend it and use it,
> and maybe distribute it themselves or encourage other people to distribute
> it for them, we did not criticise them for not being non-profit virtuous
> enough, or said "we are suspicious of you", let alone threatening them.

Actually, some of us did *exactly* those things late in the last century.

One of the challenges I faced in my early famous years was persuading
the hacker culture as a whole to treat the profit-centered parts of the
economy as allies rather than enemies.

I won't say that a *majority* of us were resistent to this, but I
did have to work hard on the problem for a while, between 1997
and about 2003.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Frosku]

On Fri Apr 16, 2021 at 12:52 AM BST, Paul Koning wrote:
>
>
> > On Apr 15, 2021, at 7:44 PM, Frosku <frosku@frosku.com> wrote:
> > 
> > On Fri Apr 16, 2021 at 12:36 AM BST, Christopher Dimech wrote:
> >> 
> >> The commercial use of free software is our hope, not our fear. When
> >> people
> >> at IBM began to come to free software, wanting to recommend it and use
> >> it,
> >> and maybe distribute it themselves or encourage other people to
> >> distribute
> >> it for them, we did not criticise them for not being non-profit virtuous
> >> enough, or said "we are suspicious of you", let alone threatening them.
> >> 
> > 
> > There is a colossal difference between commercial use and commercial
> > entities buying control of projects currently governed by entities
> > which are answerable to the grassroots (GNU) and then toppling that
> > governance structure in favor of one which is only answerable to
> > boardrooms in Silicon Valley and Seattle WA.
>
> There are, or would be if that were a real issue. It's not something
> that is feasible with GPL licensed code, whether the copyright is held
> by the FSF as it is for GCC, or by all the authors as for Linux.
>
> paul

Paul,

Short of maintaining the FSF branch of the fork, I don't see a way to
keep the project's direction accountable to end users.

>>= %frosku = { os => 'gnu+linux', editor => 'emacs', coffee => 1 } =<<

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Joseph Myers]

On Fri, 16 Apr 2021, Frosku wrote:

> There is a colossal difference between commercial use and commercial
> entities buying control of projects currently governed by entities
> which are answerable to the grassroots (GNU) and then toppling that

RMS's notion of GNU is as something under his personal direction and 
control, not answerable to the grassroots at all.

For answerability to the grassroots, whatever organization the toolchain 
falls under, it's better for it to *explicitly* act only as an umbrella 
organization, serving the toolchain community rather than having any 
authority to direct it.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Frosku]

On Fri Apr 16, 2021 at 12:52 AM BST, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> Christopher Dimech via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>:
> > The commercial use of free software is our hope, not our fear.  When people
> > at IBM began to come to free software, wanting to recommend it and use it,
> > and maybe distribute it themselves or encourage other people to distribute
> > it for them, we did not criticise them for not being non-profit virtuous
> > enough, or said "we are suspicious of you", let alone threatening them.
>
> Actually, some of us did *exactly* those things late in the last
> century.
>
> One of the challenges I faced in my early famous years was persuading
> the hacker culture as a whole to treat the profit-centered parts of the
> economy as allies rather than enemies.
>
> I won't say that a *majority* of us were resistent to this, but I
> did have to work hard on the problem for a while, between 1997
> and about 2003.

ESR,

My criticism has nothing to do with profit and everything to do with
accountability. GCC is a project which is used by almost everyone in the
ecosystem, and whose future direction is important to almost everyone in
the ecosystem. Right now, the ultimate oversight of GCC sits with GNU &
FSF -- both institutions with a mandate to represent the ecosystem based
on level of membership and time spent fighting for free software.

GCC forking away from those institutions removes that oversight, and
unless something which is equally or more representative is brought in to
replace that oversight role, I find it difficult to believe that this
doesn't represent a huge step backwards in terms of who ultimately has
an input into the future direction of GCC. It should be, at the very
minimum, challenging for representatives of Google, Red Hat and other
corporations to convince anyone -- after wrestling the project away from
GCC -- that their interests are not at odds with GCC users'.

I would say *exactly* the same thing if you replaced Google/Red Hat with
nonprofits which have less trust in free software than GNU/FSF.

>>= %frosku = { os => 'gnu+linux', editor => 'emacs', coffee => 1 } =<<

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Joseph Myers]

On Fri, 16 Apr 2021, Frosku wrote:

> Right now, the ultimate oversight of GCC sits with GNU &
> FSF -- both institutions with a mandate to represent the ecosystem based
> on level of membership and time spent fighting for free software.

I think the oversight of glibc by development working through discussion 
seeking consensus, and rejecting any attempt to override such consensus 
"from above", is much more effective than any attempt GNU or FSF makes at 
oversight.  An umbrella organization for the toolchain should not act as 
an "above" that can override the community at all; it should provide 
services to the toolchain (e.g. legal support) as needed.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Christopher Dimech]

I fully agree with your assessment.

Have in the past organised meetings for him and never seen any bs.
Having led the discussions, RMS was always cooperative and at no point
disrupted procedure.  This was 2017-2018 when I was in Barcelona coordinating
all this - leading to the CaixaForum conversation on digital cities with
Barcelona City Council Chief of Technology Francesca Bria.  And other
interactions, e.g. with Behavioral Expert Dr Diane Hamilton.  If anyone
thinks the two women needed white-knighting, people who think this way,
should go and get their head tested.  Although the 14th century is long past,
many educated people today are either uneducated, or education has educated
them out of it.


---------------------
Christopher Dimech
General Administrator - Naiad Informatics - GNU Project (Geocomputation)
- Geophysical Simulation
- Geological Subsurface Mapping
- Disaster Preparedness and Mitigation
- Natural Resource Exploration and Production
- Free Software Advocacy


> Sent: Friday, April 16, 2021 at 11:28 AM
> From: "Eric S. Raymond" <esr@thyrsus.com>
> To: "David Malcolm" <dmalcolm@redhat.com>
> Cc: gcc@gcc.gnu.org, "Nathan Sidwell" <nathan@acm.org>, "Joseph Myers" <joseph@codesourcery.com>
> Subject: Re: removing toxic emailers
>
> David Malcolm <dmalcolm@redhat.com>:
> > > I will, however, point out that it is a very *different* point from
> > > "RMS has iupset some people and should therefore be canceled".
> >
> > Eric: I don't know if you're just being glib, or you're deliberately
> > trying to caricature those of us who are upset by RMS's behavior.
>
> My intent was not caricature.  I was being dismissive and snarky
> because I genuinely consider the personality complaints against RMS to
> be pretty trivial.  Not the managerial ones Joseph Myers listed; those
> are serious.  But they're not the cause of the current ruckus.
>
> To make the "triviality" point in the most forceful possible way, I
> will take the bull by the horns and directly address RMS's behavior towards
> women.  And I will reveal a few things that I haven't talked about in
> public for 40 years.
>
> I've known RMS since 1979; I'm fully aware of how obnoxious he can be
> towards both men and women. There have been occasions on which I have
> thought the state of the universe would have been improved if he'd
> gotten a swift slap in the face.
>
> In fact, the first or second time I met him face to face it was
> because he was rather determinedly pursuing my then-girlfriend.
> A hostile witness might have said he was creeping on her, though
> that slang for it wouldn't be invented until much later.
>
> I think an explanation of how how I reasoned about that situation has
> some value in light of the current attempt to ostracize RMS.
>
> I paid very careful attention to whether my girlfriend appeared to
> need any help dealing with him. I regarded her as an adult fully
> capable of making her own decisions.  One of those decisions could
> have been to slap his face.  If a more severe sanction had been
> required, and she had yelled for help, I would cheerfully have
> punched his lights out.
>
> No fisticuffs were required.  She gently discouraged him, and we both
> established friendly relations with him.  In later years RMS and I
> remained fairly close long after I broke up with that girlfriend.  He
> made passes at at least two of my later girlfriends that I know of,
> including the woman I am still married to.  In all cases, I trusted
> these ladies to handle the situation like adults, and they did.  It
> really would not have occurred to me to do otherwise.
>
> I hear a lot of talk about RMS's behavior towards women being some sort
> of vast horrible transgression that will drive all women everywhere to
> flee from ever being contributors to FSF projects.  To me this seems
> just silly, and very infantilizing of women in general.  My
> girlfriends were emtirely able to
>
> (1) short-stop his advances when they became unwelcome
>
> (2) understand that some men have poor social skills and
>     trouble recognizing boundaries,
>
> (3) and *stay on friendly terms with him anyway*.
>
> I mean I saw this not just more than once, but every single time it
> came up.
>
> I don't assume that any adult female is incapable of these things; I
> respect women as fully capable of asserting and defending their
> interests, I *expect* women to do that, and I thus consider a lot of the
> white-knighting on their behalf to be at best empty virtue signaling
> and at worst a cover for much more discreditable motives.
>
> Of course, he offends men too.  When I deal with RMS, I know that I'm
> going to have to cope with a certain amount of unpleasantness because
> he has autism-like deficits amplified by some unfortunate personal
> history.  Yes.  So what?  He's one of my oldest friends anyway.  He
> has many admirable qualities; I respect and value him even when I have
> to argue with him.  And I can work with him when I need to.
>
> Why in the *hell* should I assume anyone with female genitalia is
> incapable of doing the same?  More to the point, why is anybody else
> making such a silly, reductive assumption and then turning it into a
> galloping moral panic that somehow justifies stoning RMS and driving
> him out of the village?
>
> *grumble* Get *over* yourselves.  You want to be "welcoming" to
> women?  Don't patronize or infantilize them - respect their ability to
> tell off RMS for themselves *and then keep working with him*!
> --
> 		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>
>
>
>

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Frosku]

On Fri Apr 16, 2021 at 1:16 AM BST, Joseph Myers wrote:
> On Fri, 16 Apr 2021, Frosku wrote:
>
> > Right now, the ultimate oversight of GCC sits with GNU &
> > FSF -- both institutions with a mandate to represent the ecosystem based
> > on level of membership and time spent fighting for free software.
>
> I think the oversight of glibc by development working through discussion
> seeking consensus, and rejecting any attempt to override such consensus
> "from above", is much more effective than any attempt GNU or FSF makes
> at
> oversight. An umbrella organization for the toolchain should not act as
> an "above" that can override the community at all; it should provide
> services to the toolchain (e.g. legal support) as needed.
>
> --
> Joseph S. Myers
> joseph@codesourcery.com

The way I see it, the developers represent the interests of the developers,
and FSF/GNU represent the interests of the users. The users should always
have some level of representation in any steering discussion, especially
for a project like GCC where any poor decision could have a negative effect
on so many other free software projects.

>>= %frosku = { os => 'gnu+linux', editor => 'emacs', coffee => 1 } =<<

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Christopher Dimech]

> Sent: Friday, April 16, 2021 at 11:52 AM
> From: "Eric S. Raymond" <esr@thyrsus.com>
> To: "Christopher Dimech" <dimech@gmx.com>
> Cc: "Frosku" <frosku@frosku.com>, "GCC Development" <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>
> Subject: Re: removing toxic emailers
>
> Christopher Dimech via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>:
> > The commercial use of free software is our hope, not our fear.  When people
> > at IBM began to come to free software, wanting to recommend it and use it,
> > and maybe distribute it themselves or encourage other people to distribute
> > it for them, we did not criticise them for not being non-profit virtuous
> > enough, or said "we are suspicious of you", let alone threatening them.
>
> Actually, some of us did *exactly* those things late in the last century.

When I worked in ocean acoustics, everything was kept secret.  Yet russian
oceanographers (e.g. Leonid Brekhovshkikh who was working in the Sea Japan)
had themselves figured out the same phenomena independently at around the
same time.

> One of the challenges I faced in my early famous years was persuading
> the hacker culture as a whole to treat the profit-centered parts of the
> economy as allies rather than enemies.
>
> I won't say that a *majority* of us were resistent to this, but I
> did have to work hard on the problem for a while, between 1997
> and about 2003.

About ten years ago, free software was chosen as the operating system of
the International Space Station.  Things have been changing, but I agree
that there is much work to be done.  Our approach has been a noticeable
proposition, not just to us - though we understand why it is socially and
politically desirable that the world works this way.

> --
> 		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>
>
>
>

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Christopher Dimech]

> Sent: Friday, April 16, 2021 at 12:16 PM
> From: "Joseph Myers" <joseph@codesourcery.com>
> To: "Frosku" <frosku@frosku.com>
> Cc: esr@thyrsus.com, "Christopher Dimech" <dimech@gmx.com>, "GCC Development" <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>
> Subject: Re: removing toxic emailers
>
> On Fri, 16 Apr 2021, Frosku wrote:
>
> > Right now, the ultimate oversight of GCC sits with GNU &
> > FSF -- both institutions with a mandate to represent the ecosystem based
> > on level of membership and time spent fighting for free software.
>
> I think the oversight of glibc by development working through discussion
> seeking consensus, and rejecting any attempt to override such consensus
> "from above", is much more effective than any attempt GNU or FSF makes at
> oversight.  An umbrella organization for the toolchain should not act as
> an "above" that can override the community at all; it should provide
> services to the toolchain (e.g. legal support) as needed.

It should act as an umbrella organization for distributing useful code
under robust legal theory during the production of software in commons.

That's my position, anyway.

> --
> Joseph S. Myers
> joseph@codesourcery.com
>

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Ian Lance Taylor]

On Thu, Apr 15, 2021 at 4:29 PM Eric S. Raymond <esr@thyrsus.com> wrote:
>
> *grumble* Get *over* yourselves.  You want to be "welcoming" to
> women?  Don't patronize or infantilize them - respect their ability to
> tell off RMS for themselves *and then keep working with him*!

Thank you for sharing your experiences.

I just want to note that I think this last paragraph misses the point.
Patronizing or infantilizing anybody doesn't come into this at all.

This is about work.  There are social aspects to free software, but
it's not fundamentally a social activity.  It's about getting
something done, and for many people it's their job.  For the sake of
argument, I'm going to temporarily set aside all consideration of how
people should behave in a professional setting, not because it doesn't
matter, but just to try to clarify matters.  Let's just think about
the project.

We want free software to succeed.  Free software is more likely to
succeed if more people work on it.  If you are a volunteer, as many
are, you can choose to spend your time on the project where you have
to short-stop unwelcome advances, where you are required to deal with
"men with poor social skills."  Or you can choose to spend your time
on the project where people treat you with respect.  Which one do you
choose?

Or perhaps you have a job that requires you to work on free software.
Now, if you work on a project where the people act like RMS, you are
being forced by your employer to work in a space where you face
unwelcome advances and men who have "trouble recognizing boundaries."
That's textbook hostile environment, and a set up for you to sue your
employer.  So your employer will never ask anyone to work on a project
where people act like that--at least, they won't do it more than once.

In other words, having people who act in the way that you describe RMS
as acting is actively harmful for a free software project, because it
will discourage people from working on it.

(Entirely separately, I don't get the slant of your whole e-mail.  You
can put up with RMS despite the boorish behavior you describe.  Great.
You're a saint.  Why do you expect everyone else to be a saint?  I
don't meet with people who act like that, not more than once.  Life is
too short.  I'll work with them if I must, but not if I don't have
to.)

Ian

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Frosku]

On Fri Apr 16, 2021 at 3:47 AM BST, Ian Lance Taylor via Gcc wrote:
> This is about work. There are social aspects to free software, but
> it's not fundamentally a social activity. It's about getting
> something done, and for many people it's their job. For the sake of
> argument, I'm going to temporarily set aside all consideration of how
> people should behave in a professional setting, not because it doesn't
> matter, but just to try to clarify matters. Let's just think about
> the project.
>
> We want free software to succeed. Free software is more likely to
> succeed if more people work on it. If you are a volunteer, as many
> are, you can choose to spend your time on the project where you have
> to short-stop unwelcome advances, where you are required to deal with
> "men with poor social skills." Or you can choose to spend your time
> on the project where people treat you with respect. Which one do you
> choose?

The one where technical excellence is prioritized over social skills,
personally. If I have a choice between partaking in a project where I
have to walk on eggshells for fear of people coming with torches and
pitchforks to expel me because I was a bit too harsh in my critique or
posted an opinion on my personal blog which wasn't something they
agreed with, or a project where some of the other people are people I
wouldn't share a beer with but the technical standard is high and free
expression is generally valued, I would choose the latter.

This comes down to culture. I did not grow up in a culture where I was
taught that other people need to wrap me in cotton wool. I grew up in a
culture where arguments were judged on merit and generally as people we
accepted other peoples' rights to hold shitty opinions. For many of us,
the latter is more comfortable.

> Or perhaps you have a job that requires you to work on free software.
> Now, if you work on a project where the people act like RMS, you are
> being forced by your employer to work in a space where you face
> unwelcome advances and men who have "trouble recognizing boundaries."
> That's textbook hostile environment, and a set up for you to sue your
> employer. So your employer will never ask anyone to work on a project
> where people act like that--at least, they won't do it more than once.

I have never seen RMS act like that in a technical setting though, and
if he did, I think that would be a valid reason to remove him from the
mailing list and demand that GNU chooses someone else to represent
itself when communicating with GCC.

> In other words, having people who act in the way that you describe RMS
> as acting is actively harmful for a free software project, because it
> will discourage people from working on it.
>
> (Entirely separately, I don't get the slant of your whole e-mail. You
> can put up with RMS despite the boorish behavior you describe. Great.
> You're a saint. Why do you expect everyone else to be a saint? I
> don't meet with people who act like that, not more than once. Life is
> too short. I'll work with them if I must, but not if I don't have
> to.)

I don't think anyone needs to be a saint, but we do need to be able to
collaborate with people from different cultural, political, and personal
backgrounds to our own. Enforcing a social code which is exclusive to
the coasts of the United States on a global community seems to me to be
even more exclusionary than allowing people with poor social skills.

>>= %frosku = { os => 'gnu+linux', editor => 'emacs', coffee => 1 } =<<

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Ian Lance Taylor]

On Thu, Apr 15, 2021 at 8:02 PM Frosku <frosku@frosku.com> wrote:
>
> > We want free software to succeed. Free software is more likely to
> > succeed if more people work on it. If you are a volunteer, as many
> > are, you can choose to spend your time on the project where you have
> > to short-stop unwelcome advances, where you are required to deal with
> > "men with poor social skills." Or you can choose to spend your time
> > on the project where people treat you with respect. Which one do you
> > choose?
>
> The one where technical excellence is prioritized over social skills,
> personally. If I have a choice between partaking in a project where I
> have to walk on eggshells for fear of people coming with torches and
> pitchforks to expel me because I was a bit too harsh in my critique or
> posted an opinion on my personal blog which wasn't something they
> agreed with, or a project where some of the other people are people I
> wouldn't share a beer with but the technical standard is high and free
> expression is generally valued, I would choose the latter.

Those are not the only two possible ways that a project can work.

Also, you seem to be making the implicit assumption that there is some
sort of trade off between technical excellence and social skills.
That is false.  They are independent axes.

Ian

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Frosku]

On Fri Apr 16, 2021 at 4:19 AM BST, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 15, 2021 at 8:02 PM Frosku <frosku@frosku.com> wrote:
> >
> > > We want free software to succeed. Free software is more likely to
> > > succeed if more people work on it. If you are a volunteer, as many
> > > are, you can choose to spend your time on the project where you have
> > > to short-stop unwelcome advances, where you are required to deal with
> > > "men with poor social skills." Or you can choose to spend your time
> > > on the project where people treat you with respect. Which one do you
> > > choose?
> >
> > The one where technical excellence is prioritized over social skills,
> > personally. If I have a choice between partaking in a project where I
> > have to walk on eggshells for fear of people coming with torches and
> > pitchforks to expel me because I was a bit too harsh in my critique or
> > posted an opinion on my personal blog which wasn't something they
> > agreed with, or a project where some of the other people are people I
> > wouldn't share a beer with but the technical standard is high and free
> > expression is generally valued, I would choose the latter.
>
> Those are not the only two possible ways that a project can work.
>
> Also, you seem to be making the implicit assumption that there is some
> sort of trade off between technical excellence and social skills.
> That is false. They are independent axes.

I shouldn't really use the term 'social skills' when what I really mean is
conformance to a specific set of cultural norms. I don't necessarily think
that social skills are quantifiable in the way that i.e. writing performant
and secure code is. Someone could be highly compliant with social norms in
their own culture, in their first language, without necessarily being as
conformant with foreign cultural norms in a second language, for example.

I agree with you that a project which creates a hostile atmosphere to women
would drive people away, not just women but men with a sense of decency. I
would not want to be a part of such a project. I would differ from you on
whether RMS has created such a thing given his seemingly limited
interactions with the project spaces. If I am wrong, and he has been here
harassing women, or on other project-related spaces, I am very willing to
admit I'm wrong.

On the other hand, I also think that a project which goes too far in
policing speech, especially speech unrelated to the project, will drive away
talented people who are more than willing to comply with the project's norms
within the project's spaces. Trying to enforce the 'California cultural
standard' on not only someone's interactions with the project but their
entire life (which may be lived in a very different cultural setting) seems
very invasive and culturally exclusionary.

I'd be interested to know where you draw the line as to what behavior is
related to the project, or if you don't draw a line, why volunteers in China,
Russia, Poland etc should be expected to accept an entire political doctrine
over their life to contribute to a compiler toolchain.

>>= %frosku = { os => 'gnu+linux', editor => 'emacs', coffee => 1 } =<<

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Eric S. Raymond]

Ian Lance Taylor <iant@google.com>:
> Patronizing or infantilizing anybody doesn't come into this at all.

I am not even *remotely* persuaded of this.  This whole attitude that if
a woman is ever exposed to a man with less than perfect American
upper-middle-class manners it's a calamity requiring intervention
and mass shunning, that *reeks* of infantilizing women.

> We want free software to succeed.  Free software is more likely to
> succeed if more people work on it.  If you are a volunteer, as many
> are, you can choose to spend your time on the project where you have
> to short-stop unwelcome advances, where you are required to deal with
> "men with poor social skills."  Or you can choose to spend your time
> on the project where people treat you with respect.  Which one do you
> choose?

The one where your expected satisfaction is higher, with boorishness
from autistic males factored in as one of the overheads.  Don't try to
tell me that's a deal-killer, I've known too many women who would
laugh at you for that assumption.

> Or perhaps you have a job that requires you to work on free software.
> Now, if you work on a project where the people act like RMS, you are
> being forced by your employer to work in a space where you face
> unwelcome advances and men who have "trouble recognizing boundaries."
> That's textbook hostile environment, and a set up for you to sue your
> employer.  So your employer will never ask anyone to work on a project
> where people act like that--at least, they won't do it more than once.

Here's what happens in the real world (and I'm not speculating, I was
a BoD member of a tech startup at one time, stuff like this came up).
You say "X is being a jerk - can I work on something else?"  Your
employer, rightly terrified of the next step, is not going to "force"
you to do a damn thing. He's going to bend over backwards to
accommodate you.

> (Entirely separately, I don't get the slant of your whole e-mail.  You
> can put up with RMS despite the boorish behavior you describe.  Great.
> You're a saint.  Why do you expect everyone else to be a saint?

I'm no saint, I'm merely an adult who takes responsibility for my own
choices when dealing with people who have minimal-brain-damage
syndromes.  OK, I have probably acquired a bit more tolerance for
their quirks than average from long experience, but I don't believe I'm
an extreme outlier that way.

What I am pushing for is for everyone to recognize that *women are
adults* - they have their own agency and are in general perfectly
capable of treating an RMS-class jerk as at worst a minor annoyance.

Behaving as though he's some sort of icky monster who should be
shunned by all right-thinking people and taints everything he touches
is ... just unbelievably disconnected from reality.  Bizarre
neo-Puritan virtue signaling of no help to anyone.

If I needed more evidence that many Americans lead pampered,
cossetted, hyper-insulated lives that require them to make up their
own drama, this whole flap would be it.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Iain Sandoe]

Ian Lance Taylor via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org> wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 15, 2021 at 8:02 PM Frosku <frosku@frosku.com> wrote:
>>> We want free software to succeed. Free software is more likely to
>>> succeed if more people work on it. If you are a volunteer, as many
>>> are, you can choose to spend your time on the project where you have
>>> to short-stop unwelcome advances, where you are required to deal with
>>> "men with poor social skills." Or you can choose to spend your time
>>> on the project where people treat you with respect. Which one do you
>>> choose?
>>
>> The one where technical excellence is prioritized over social skills,
>> personally. If I have a choice between partaking in a project where I
>> have to walk on eggshells for fear of people coming with torches and
>> pitchforks to expel me because I was a bit too harsh in my critique or
>> posted an opinion on my personal blog which wasn't something they
>> agreed with, or a project where some of the other people are people I
>> wouldn't share a beer with but the technical standard is high and free
>> expression is generally valued, I would choose the latter.
>
> Those are not the only two possible ways that a project can work.
>
> Also, you seem to be making the implicit assumption that there is some
> sort of trade off between technical excellence and social skills.
> That is false.  They are independent axes.

Absolutely!

This forum (barring the current discussion where, frankly, the dissent is not
coming from people who are actually active contributors), does not usually
have a problem.

Nor is this isolated; I participate in two other forums where there are many
excellent software engineers with good social and communication skills (and
those that would not, perhaps, do this naturally have managed to adapt).

The world has changed (for the better in my view) this is 2021, not 1971;  
it is
not a passing fashion to treat each other with respect, but a steady
progression that I’ve witnessed over my adult life.

Perpetuating the stereotypical “excellent” engineer (this problem is not
confined to software) as a beer-drinking male social misfit is a huge  
disservice
to engineering everywhere.

It is already a considerable leap for many engineers to post code for public
review; it is essential (IMO) that review of code is carried out on a fair  
and
technical basis without personal attack or harrassment (or unwelcome  
unrelated
attention).

“Grow a thicker skin” is an appalling advertising slogan.

Iain

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Kalamatee]

On Fri, 16 Apr 2021 at 05:59, Eric S. Raymond <esr@thyrsus.com> wrote:

> Ian Lance Taylor <iant@google.com>:
> > Patronizing or infantilizing anybody doesn't come into this at all.
>
> I am not even *remotely* persuaded of this.  This whole attitude that if
> a woman is ever exposed to a man with less than perfect American
> upper-middle-class manners it's a calamity requiring intervention
> and mass shunning, that *reeks* of infantilizing women.
>
> > We want free software to succeed.  Free software is more likely to
> > succeed if more people work on it.  If you are a volunteer, as many
> > are, you can choose to spend your time on the project where you have
> > to short-stop unwelcome advances, where you are required to deal with
> > "men with poor social skills."  Or you can choose to spend your time
> > on the project where people treat you with respect.  Which one do you
> > choose?
>
> The one where your expected satisfaction is higher, with boorishness
> from autistic males factored in as one of the overheads.  Don't try to
> tell me that's a deal-killer, I've known too many women who would
> laugh at you for that assumption.
>
> > Or perhaps you have a job that requires you to work on free software.
> > Now, if you work on a project where the people act like RMS, you are
> > being forced by your employer to work in a space where you face
> > unwelcome advances and men who have "trouble recognizing boundaries."
> > That's textbook hostile environment, and a set up for you to sue your
> > employer.  So your employer will never ask anyone to work on a project
> > where people act like that--at least, they won't do it more than once.
>
> Here's what happens in the real world (and I'm not speculating, I was
> a BoD member of a tech startup at one time, stuff like this came up).
> You say "X is being a jerk - can I work on something else?"  Your
> employer, rightly terrified of the next step, is not going to "force"
> you to do a damn thing. He's going to bend over backwards to
> accommodate you.
>
> > (Entirely separately, I don't get the slant of your whole e-mail.  You
> > can put up with RMS despite the boorish behavior you describe.  Great.
> > You're a saint.  Why do you expect everyone else to be a saint?
>
> I'm no saint, I'm merely an adult who takes responsibility for my own
> choices when dealing with people who have minimal-brain-damage
> syndromes.  OK, I have probably acquired a bit more tolerance for
> their quirks than average from long experience, but I don't believe I'm
> an extreme outlier that way.
>
> What I am pushing for is for everyone to recognize that *women are
> adults* - they have their own agency and are in general perfectly
> capable of treating an RMS-class jerk as at worst a minor annoyance.
>
> Behaving as though he's some sort of icky monster who should be
> shunned by all right-thinking people and taints everything he touches
> is ... just unbelievably disconnected from reality.  Bizarre
> neo-Puritan virtue signaling of no help to anyone.
>
> If I needed more evidence that many Americans lead pampered,
> cossetted, hyper-insulated lives that require them to make up their
> own drama, this whole flap would be it.
>
>
Im glad there are people like you on the project Eric, because you express
exactly what a lot of people see - even if a minority of people chose to
ignore it,

To a lot of "non americans", the events on here appear as nothing more than
a power grab by a small minority of developers, abusing their position and
american corporate ideologies to enact change, ignoring any one who dares
question or disagree unless they fit into a clique they have built (and
want to maintain by ostracizing people they deem unworthy),
brandishing them jerks, trolls, toxic and other childish names. Im glad
there are a few devs that can see this, but it feels like they are stepping
on egg shells (despite the rhetoric about how well the people in said
clique can communicate on technical matters).

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Frosku]

On Fri Apr 16, 2021 at 10:39 AM BST, Kalamatee via Gcc wrote:
> On Fri, 16 Apr 2021 at 05:59, Eric S. Raymond <esr@thyrsus.com> wrote:
>
> > Ian Lance Taylor <iant@google.com>:
> > > Patronizing or infantilizing anybody doesn't come into this at all.
> >
> > I am not even *remotely* persuaded of this.  This whole attitude that if
> > a woman is ever exposed to a man with less than perfect American
> > upper-middle-class manners it's a calamity requiring intervention
> > and mass shunning, that *reeks* of infantilizing women.
> >
> > > We want free software to succeed.  Free software is more likely to
> > > succeed if more people work on it.  If you are a volunteer, as many
> > > are, you can choose to spend your time on the project where you have
> > > to short-stop unwelcome advances, where you are required to deal with
> > > "men with poor social skills."  Or you can choose to spend your time
> > > on the project where people treat you with respect.  Which one do you
> > > choose?
> >
> > The one where your expected satisfaction is higher, with boorishness
> > from autistic males factored in as one of the overheads.  Don't try to
> > tell me that's a deal-killer, I've known too many women who would
> > laugh at you for that assumption.
> >
> > > Or perhaps you have a job that requires you to work on free software.
> > > Now, if you work on a project where the people act like RMS, you are
> > > being forced by your employer to work in a space where you face
> > > unwelcome advances and men who have "trouble recognizing boundaries."
> > > That's textbook hostile environment, and a set up for you to sue your
> > > employer.  So your employer will never ask anyone to work on a project
> > > where people act like that--at least, they won't do it more than once.
> >
> > Here's what happens in the real world (and I'm not speculating, I was
> > a BoD member of a tech startup at one time, stuff like this came up).
> > You say "X is being a jerk - can I work on something else?"  Your
> > employer, rightly terrified of the next step, is not going to "force"
> > you to do a damn thing. He's going to bend over backwards to
> > accommodate you.
> >
> > > (Entirely separately, I don't get the slant of your whole e-mail.  You
> > > can put up with RMS despite the boorish behavior you describe.  Great.
> > > You're a saint.  Why do you expect everyone else to be a saint?
> >
> > I'm no saint, I'm merely an adult who takes responsibility for my own
> > choices when dealing with people who have minimal-brain-damage
> > syndromes.  OK, I have probably acquired a bit more tolerance for
> > their quirks than average from long experience, but I don't believe I'm
> > an extreme outlier that way.
> >
> > What I am pushing for is for everyone to recognize that *women are
> > adults* - they have their own agency and are in general perfectly
> > capable of treating an RMS-class jerk as at worst a minor annoyance.
> >
> > Behaving as though he's some sort of icky monster who should be
> > shunned by all right-thinking people and taints everything he touches
> > is ... just unbelievably disconnected from reality.  Bizarre
> > neo-Puritan virtue signaling of no help to anyone.
> >
> > If I needed more evidence that many Americans lead pampered,
> > cossetted, hyper-insulated lives that require them to make up their
> > own drama, this whole flap would be it.
> >
> >
> Im glad there are people like you on the project Eric, because you
> express
> exactly what a lot of people see - even if a minority of people chose to
> ignore it,
>
> To a lot of "non americans", the events on here appear as nothing more
> than
> a power grab by a small minority of developers, abusing their position
> and
> american corporate ideologies to enact change, ignoring any one who
> dares
> question or disagree unless they fit into a clique they have built (and
> want to maintain by ostracizing people they deem unworthy),
> brandishing them jerks, trolls, toxic and other childish names. Im glad
> there are a few devs that can see this, but it feels like they are
> stepping
> on egg shells (despite the rhetoric about how well the people in said
> clique can communicate on technical matters).

A lot of Americans see it too, just many are petrified of speaking out
against this new illiberal orthodoxy.

>>= %frosku = { os => 'gnu+linux', editor => 'emacs', coffee => 1 } =<<

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Thomas Koenig]

On 16.04.21 10:54, Iain Sandoe via Gcc wrote:
> This forum (barring the current discussion where, frankly, the dissent 
> is not
> coming from people who are actually active contributors),

Maybe I should have been less diplomatic :-)

I dissent, strongly.

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Iain Sandoe]

Kalamatee <kalamatee@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 16 Apr 2021 at 11:05, Kalamatee <kalamatee@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Fri, 16 Apr 2021 at 10:42, Iain Sandoe via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org> wrote:


> It is already a considerable leap for many engineers to post code for  
> public
> review; it is essential (IMO) that review of code is carried out on a fair
> and
> technical basis without personal attack or harrassment (or unwelcome
> unrelated
> attention).
>
> “Grow a thicker skin” is an appalling advertising slogan.
>
> I just want to clarify -  i am not posting these things to be a "troll"  
> or awkward, but as someone that uses "your" toolchain, because we depend  
> on it to build "our" operating system, and the actions (and inactions!)  
> on this list are a bit disturbing when taken in context of the whole  
> thread.
>
> I have a massive amount of respect for the people involved in developing  
> gcc (which is far beyond my capabilities, of just developing patches to  
> support the OS I contribute to), but I still have a vested interest in  
> what happens because of the actions here - as do many corporate,  
> commercial and academic institutes that invest money and time on "your"  
> toolchain - so to exclude everyone except a group of people who have  
> built a rapport in discussions that affect us feels a bit offensive to be  
> honest.

I am saddened by the prospect that there might be no consensus available  
here.

----

This thread has become so intertwined with different discussions it seems  
that people are mistaking who has said what.

For the record (on-one needs to take my word for it, the list is archived).

* I am not being paid to work on GCC, I have been once (some time ago now)  
- however almost all my input is voluntary over the 12 years or so since I  
made my first commit.

* I have not:

   expressed any opinion re RMS
   expressed any opinion re FSF or the desirability of a fork

   said that people need to agree (technically or procedurally)
   required people to have rapport (I doubt that there is as much as folks think).

I have said:

   if people are not willing to resolve differences in a civilised manner, that perhaps indicates that they have no interest in resolving anything.  This does not seem contrary to general GNU guidelines either: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/kind-communication.en.html

   I am not willing to spend my spare time working in a hostile environment.

well, I did post in good faith,
Iain

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Christopher Dimech]

> Sent: Saturday, April 17, 2021 at 2:42 AM
> From: "Iain Sandoe via Gcc" <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>
> To: "GCC Development" <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>
> Cc: "Thomas Koenig" <tkoenig@netcologne.de>
> Subject: Re: removing toxic emailers
>
> Kalamatee <kalamatee@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Fri, 16 Apr 2021 at 11:05, Kalamatee <kalamatee@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > On Fri, 16 Apr 2021 at 10:42, Iain Sandoe via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> > It is already a considerable leap for many engineers to post code for  
> > public
> > review; it is essential (IMO) that review of code is carried out on a fair
> > and
> > technical basis without personal attack or harrassment (or unwelcome
> > unrelated
> > attention).
> >
> > “Grow a thicker skin” is an appalling advertising slogan.
> >
> > I just want to clarify -  i am not posting these things to be a "troll"  
> > or awkward, but as someone that uses "your" toolchain, because we depend  
> > on it to build "our" operating system, and the actions (and inactions!)  
> > on this list are a bit disturbing when taken in context of the whole  
> > thread.
> >
> > I have a massive amount of respect for the people involved in developing  
> > gcc (which is far beyond my capabilities, of just developing patches to  
> > support the OS I contribute to), but I still have a vested interest in  
> > what happens because of the actions here - as do many corporate,  
> > commercial and academic institutes that invest money and time on "your"  
> > toolchain - so to exclude everyone except a group of people who have  
> > built a rapport in discussions that affect us feels a bit offensive to be  
> > honest.
> 
> I am saddened by the prospect that there might be no consensus available  
> here.
> 
> ----
> 
> This thread has become so intertwined with different discussions it seems  
> that people are mistaking who has said what.
> 
> For the record (on-one needs to take my word for it, the list is archived).
> 
> * I am not being paid to work on GCC, I have been once (some time ago now)  
> - however almost all my input is voluntary over the 12 years or so since I  
> made my first commit.
> 
> * I have not:
> 
>    expressed any opinion re RMS
>    expressed any opinion re FSF or the desirability of a fork
> 
>    said that people need to agree (technically or procedurally)
>    required people to have rapport (I doubt that there is as much as folks think).
> 
> I have said:
> 
>    if people are not willing to resolve differences in a civilised manner, that perhaps indicates that they have no interest in resolving anything.  This does not seem contrary to general GNU guidelines either: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/kind-communication.en.html

It has been occurring to me that Nathan-and-Associates do not want a fork. 
This has became problematic because they do not seem to be able to successfully
run a Gnu Package because they would have to deal with RMS.  Although I have not
campaigned against their continuation as maintainers, they lobbied for my removal.  
And that's definitely not on! 

   

 
>    I am not willing to spend my spare time working in a hostile environment.
> 
> well, I did post in good faith,
> Iain
> 
>

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Ian Lance Taylor]

On Thu, Apr 15, 2021 at 9:09 PM Eric S. Raymond <esr@thyrsus.com> wrote:
>
> Ian Lance Taylor <iant@google.com>:
> > Patronizing or infantilizing anybody doesn't come into this at all.
>
> I am not even *remotely* persuaded of this.  This whole attitude that if
> a woman is ever exposed to a man with less than perfect American
> upper-middle-class manners it's a calamity requiring intervention
> and mass shunning, that *reeks* of infantilizing women.

I just don't see it.  Maybe occasionally.  But in general you see
someone acting badly, and you think "I don't want to associate with
that person."  Preferring to work with people who treat others
decently is not about infantilizing others.


> > We want free software to succeed.  Free software is more likely to
> > succeed if more people work on it.  If you are a volunteer, as many
> > are, you can choose to spend your time on the project where you have
> > to short-stop unwelcome advances, where you are required to deal with
> > "men with poor social skills."  Or you can choose to spend your time
> > on the project where people treat you with respect.  Which one do you
> > choose?
>
> The one where your expected satisfaction is higher, with boorishness
> from autistic males factored in as one of the overheads.  Don't try to
> tell me that's a deal-killer, I've known too many women who would
> laugh at you for that assumption.

I'm not saying either option is a deal killer, I'm saying you have to
make a choice.  And more generally a project has to make a choice.


> > Or perhaps you have a job that requires you to work on free software.
> > Now, if you work on a project where the people act like RMS, you are
> > being forced by your employer to work in a space where you face
> > unwelcome advances and men who have "trouble recognizing boundaries."
> > That's textbook hostile environment, and a set up for you to sue your
> > employer.  So your employer will never ask anyone to work on a project
> > where people act like that--at least, they won't do it more than once.
>
> Here's what happens in the real world (and I'm not speculating, I was
> a BoD member of a tech startup at one time, stuff like this came up).
> You say "X is being a jerk - can I work on something else?"  Your
> employer, rightly terrified of the next step, is not going to "force"
> you to do a damn thing. He's going to bend over backwards to
> accommodate you.

Yes.


> What I am pushing for is for everyone to recognize that *women are
> adults* - they have their own agency and are in general perfectly
> capable of treating an RMS-class jerk as at worst a minor annoyance.

OK, you got it.  Not sure it's relevant to what I'm saying, though.

Ian

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Ian Lance Taylor]

On Thu, Apr 15, 2021 at 9:08 PM Frosku <frosku@frosku.com> wrote:
>
> On the other hand, I also think that a project which goes too far in
> policing speech, especially speech unrelated to the project, will drive away
> talented people who are more than willing to comply with the project's norms
> within the project's spaces. Trying to enforce the 'California cultural
> standard' on not only someone's interactions with the project but their
> entire life (which may be lived in a very different cultural setting) seems
> very invasive and culturally exclusionary.

I do live in California, but I don't know what the "California
cultural standard" is.  It's a big place, and it's full of people who
behave in all kinds of different ways.  Harvey Weinstein and
brogrammer culture are California cultures.  You presumably have
something in mind, but I'm not sure it's a real thing.


> I'd be interested to know where you draw the line as to what behavior is
> related to the project, or if you don't draw a line, why volunteers in China,
> Russia, Poland etc should be expected to accept an entire political doctrine
> over their life to contribute to a compiler toolchain.

How did we get to accepting an entire political doctrine?

What I have in mind is treating people with respect.  For example, I'm
involved with the Go programming language.  The Go community has a
code of conduct: https://golang.org/conduct.  The key elements are:

- Be friendly and welcoming
- Be patient
  Remember that people have varying communication styles and that not
everyone is using their native language. (Meaning and tone can be lost
in translation.)
- Be thoughtful
  Productive communication requires effort. Think about how your words
will be interpreted.
  Remember that sometimes it is best to refrain entirely from commenting.
- Be respectful
  In particular, respect differences of opinion.
- Be charitable
  Interpret the arguments of others in good faith, do not seek to disagree.
  When we do disagree, try to understand why.

  Avoid destructive behavior:

  Derailing: stay on topic; if you want to talk about something else,
start a new conversation.
  Unconstructive criticism: don't merely decry the current state of
affairs; offer—or at least solicit—suggestions as to how things may be
improved.
  Snarking (pithy, unproductive, sniping comments)
  Discussing potentially offensive or sensitive issues; this all too
often leads to unnecessary conflict.
  Microaggressions: brief and commonplace verbal, behavioral and
environmental indignities that communicate hostile, derogatory or
negative slights and insults to a person or group.


That is what I would aim for.  And in general that is how the GCC
community behaves.  I don't know whether that is "California culture"
or not.


And I have to note that I have seen very few people here saying "RMS
must never participate in GCC in any way."  What I see most people
saying is "RMS should not be in a position of leading the GCC project
and telling people what to do."

Ian

Re: removing toxic emailers

[NightStrike]

On Thu, Apr 15, 2021, 23:42 Iain Sandoe via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org> wrote:

> it is essential (IMO) that review of code is carried out on a fair and
> technical basis without personal attack or harrassment (or
> unwelcome unrelated attention).
>

Is this not the case on gcc-patches?

>

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Frosku]

On Fri Apr 16, 2021 at 5:28 PM BST, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 15, 2021 at 9:08 PM Frosku <frosku@frosku.com> wrote:
> >
> > On the other hand, I also think that a project which goes too far in
> > policing speech, especially speech unrelated to the project, will drive away
> > talented people who are more than willing to comply with the project's norms
> > within the project's spaces. Trying to enforce the 'California cultural
> > standard' on not only someone's interactions with the project but their
> > entire life (which may be lived in a very different cultural setting) seems
> > very invasive and culturally exclusionary.
>
> I do live in California, but I don't know what the "California
> cultural standard" is. It's a big place, and it's full of people who
> behave in all kinds of different ways. Harvey Weinstein and
> brogrammer culture are California cultures. You presumably have
> something in mind, but I'm not sure it's a real thing.

There isn't a real name for any given culture because culture is such an organic
thing. When I think of codes of conduct I come back to i.e. Linus giving people
a hard time in code reviews, or Coraline Ada Ehmke's critiques of meritocracy.
Neither of these beliefs about what culture should be (Linus' or Coraline's) are
objectively right or objectively wrong, but both are likely to attract different
people, and result in different outcomes.

When I refer to a 'California cultural standard', that's not prescriptive. It's
just a reference to the fact that a *lot* of the SC live in California, and any
culture prescribed by the steering committee will be overly influenced by that
commonality. You will have ideas about what is welcoming, what is polite, etc
which are shaped by your upbringing just as I or anyone else does. These are
not objective truths, or internationally accepted as such.

> > I'd be interested to know where you draw the line as to what behavior is
> > related to the project, or if you don't draw a line, why volunteers in China,
> > Russia, Poland etc should be expected to accept an entire political doctrine
> > over their life to contribute to a compiler toolchain.
>
> How did we get to accepting an entire political doctrine?
>
> What I have in mind is treating people with respect. For example, I'm
> involved with the Go programming language. The Go community has a
> code of conduct: https://golang.org/conduct. The key elements are:
>
> - Be friendly and welcoming
> - Be patient
> Remember that people have varying communication styles and that not
> everyone is using their native language. (Meaning and tone can be lost
> in translation.)
> - Be thoughtful
> Productive communication requires effort. Think about how your words
> will be interpreted.
> Remember that sometimes it is best to refrain entirely from commenting.
> - Be respectful
> In particular, respect differences of opinion.
> - Be charitable
> Interpret the arguments of others in good faith, do not seek to
> disagree.
> When we do disagree, try to understand why.
>
> Avoid destructive behavior:
>
> Derailing: stay on topic; if you want to talk about something else,
> start a new conversation.
> Unconstructive criticism: don't merely decry the current state of
> affairs; offer—or at least solicit—suggestions as to how things may
> be
> improved.
> Snarking (pithy, unproductive, sniping comments)
> Discussing potentially offensive or sensitive issues; this all too
> often leads to unnecessary conflict.
> Microaggressions: brief and commonplace verbal, behavioral and
> environmental indignities that communicate hostile, derogatory or
> negative slights and insults to a person or group.

I certainly prefer it to the Contributor Covenant, however the last
point ('microaggressions') is an example of 'California culture'. In
most of the world, we do not have any such concept. The examples I've
seen online for what counts as a microaggression include asking questions
like "where are you from?"

I'm assuming this is considered offensive because there's a trend of using
it to imply that someone "isn't welcome" in the local area, but in most of
the world this isn't considered an offensive question. As someone who
spends the vast majority of my time in countries that aren't my birthplace,
it's one of the questions I hear the most.

I'm not sure that most of us who live outside of cultures where "micro-
-aggressions" are a commonly referenced 'thing' would know if we're making
one or just being friendly. As an aside, would this be applied to
communication in GCC spaces or to all off-list communications i.e. Twitter
/ Weibo postings, e-mails, things said at unrelated conferences?

> And I have to note that I have seen very few people here saying "RMS
> must never participate in GCC in any way." What I see most people
> saying is "RMS should not be in a position of leading the GCC project
> and telling people what to do."

My concern here is that if not RMS/GNU -- an institution which most free
software users outside of the corporate space trust -- then who? I mean no
personal offense to you or anyone else, but as (I assume) a fairly typical
GNU+Linux user, I do not have a large amount of trust built up for Silicon
Valley technology companies which have shown outright hostility to us for
years. I, and I assume many others, would feel very aggrieved if the GNU's
oversight were to be replaced with a group of representatives of those same
corporations (even if you are all good people).

GNU's primary mission is to be a free operating system, and GCC is supposed
to be a part of that operating system. I understand that GCC now has plenty
of usage outside of hacker culture & GNU -- it has outgrown us -- but it
is still the tool we turn to when we need to compile something. For that
reason, I'd like to think that there's some representation of that 'hacker'
culture and that OS within the leadership, even if it's not RMS, to respect
that we are still a large constituency of the users and historically were a
large constituency of the contributors.

I can't speak for others, but for me at least, replacing ties with GNU with
ties to another well-respected (non-corporate) entity in the free software
world like Debian or the Apache foundation would go a long way in allaying
my worries about this shift.

>>= %frosku = { os => 'gnu+linux', editor => 'emacs', coffee => 1 } =<<

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Christopher Dimech]

> Sent: Saturday, April 17, 2021 at 11:15 AM
> From: "Frosku" <frosku@frosku.com>
> To: "Ian Lance Taylor" <iant@google.com>
> Cc: "GCC Development" <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>
> Subject: Re: removing toxic emailers
>
> On Fri Apr 16, 2021 at 5:28 PM BST, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
> > On Thu, Apr 15, 2021 at 9:08 PM Frosku <frosku@frosku.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > On the other hand, I also think that a project which goes too far in
> > > policing speech, especially speech unrelated to the project, will drive away
> > > talented people who are more than willing to comply with the project's norms
> > > within the project's spaces. Trying to enforce the 'California cultural
> > > standard' on not only someone's interactions with the project but their
> > > entire life (which may be lived in a very different cultural setting) seems
> > > very invasive and culturally exclusionary.
> >
> > I do live in California, but I don't know what the "California
> > cultural standard" is. It's a big place, and it's full of people who
> > behave in all kinds of different ways. Harvey Weinstein and
> > brogrammer culture are California cultures. You presumably have
> > something in mind, but I'm not sure it's a real thing.
> 
> There isn't a real name for any given culture because culture is such an organic
> thing. When I think of codes of conduct I come back to i.e. Linus giving people
> a hard time in code reviews, or Coraline Ada Ehmke's critiques of meritocracy.
> Neither of these beliefs about what culture should be (Linus' or Coraline's) are
> objectively right or objectively wrong, but both are likely to attract different
> people, and result in different outcomes.

We will certainly have to adapt to the recognition that the human race is in great
danger because of our politics going crazy and nationalism being a serious treat.  
Our world must turn itself into a new set of people that is unlike the generation
that brought us in free software - just one corner of the western world.  In 2016, Cosmologist Stephen Hawking warned us to stop reaching out to aliens before it's 
too late.  His assessment was that distant alien civilisations might view us as
inferior, weak, and perfect to conquer.  

We barely averted nuclear annihilation in the later half of last century.  The problem
is that we have not adapted ourselves to control all the power we already have.  Science and technology has empowered us too much.  After destroying much of the vegetal and animal species on Earth, we have started destroying ourselves, like other civilisations have destroyed themselves in the past.  But this time, the collapse may be global.

Good luck with death! 
 
> When I refer to a 'California cultural standard', that's not prescriptive. It's
> just a reference to the fact that a *lot* of the SC live in California, and any
> culture prescribed by the steering committee will be overly influenced by that
> commonality. You will have ideas about what is welcoming, what is polite, etc
> which are shaped by your upbringing just as I or anyone else does. These are
> not objective truths, or internationally accepted as such.
> 
> > > I'd be interested to know where you draw the line as to what behavior is
> > > related to the project, or if you don't draw a line, why volunteers in China,
> > > Russia, Poland etc should be expected to accept an entire political doctrine
> > > over their life to contribute to a compiler toolchain.
> >
> > How did we get to accepting an entire political doctrine?
> >
> > What I have in mind is treating people with respect. For example, I'm
> > involved with the Go programming language. The Go community has a
> > code of conduct: https://golang.org/conduct. The key elements are:
> >
> > - Be friendly and welcoming
> > - Be patient
> > Remember that people have varying communication styles and that not
> > everyone is using their native language. (Meaning and tone can be lost
> > in translation.)
> > - Be thoughtful
> > Productive communication requires effort. Think about how your words
> > will be interpreted.
> > Remember that sometimes it is best to refrain entirely from commenting.
> > - Be respectful
> > In particular, respect differences of opinion.
> > - Be charitable
> > Interpret the arguments of others in good faith, do not seek to
> > disagree.
> > When we do disagree, try to understand why.
> >
> > Avoid destructive behavior:
> >
> > Derailing: stay on topic; if you want to talk about something else,
> > start a new conversation.
> > Unconstructive criticism: don't merely decry the current state of
> > affairs; offer—or at least solicit—suggestions as to how things may
> > be
> > improved.
> > Snarking (pithy, unproductive, sniping comments)
> > Discussing potentially offensive or sensitive issues; this all too
> > often leads to unnecessary conflict.
> > Microaggressions: brief and commonplace verbal, behavioral and
> > environmental indignities that communicate hostile, derogatory or
> > negative slights and insults to a person or group.
> 
> I certainly prefer it to the Contributor Covenant, however the last
> point ('microaggressions') is an example of 'California culture'. In
> most of the world, we do not have any such concept. The examples I've
> seen online for what counts as a microaggression include asking questions
> like "where are you from?"
> 
> I'm assuming this is considered offensive because there's a trend of using
> it to imply that someone "isn't welcome" in the local area, but in most of
> the world this isn't considered an offensive question. As someone who
> spends the vast majority of my time in countries that aren't my birthplace,
> it's one of the questions I hear the most.
> 
> I'm not sure that most of us who live outside of cultures where "micro-
> -aggressions" are a commonly referenced 'thing' would know if we're making
> one or just being friendly. As an aside, would this be applied to
> communication in GCC spaces or to all off-list communications i.e. Twitter
> / Weibo postings, e-mails, things said at unrelated conferences?
> 
> > And I have to note that I have seen very few people here saying "RMS
> > must never participate in GCC in any way." What I see most people
> > saying is "RMS should not be in a position of leading the GCC project
> > and telling people what to do."
> 
> My concern here is that if not RMS/GNU -- an institution which most free
> software users outside of the corporate space trust -- then who? I mean no
> personal offense to you or anyone else, but as (I assume) a fairly typical
> GNU+Linux user, I do not have a large amount of trust built up for Silicon
> Valley technology companies which have shown outright hostility to us for
> years. I, and I assume many others, would feel very aggrieved if the GNU's
> oversight were to be replaced with a group of representatives of those same
> corporations (even if you are all good people).
> 
> GNU's primary mission is to be a free operating system, and GCC is supposed
> to be a part of that operating system. I understand that GCC now has plenty
> of usage outside of hacker culture & GNU -- it has outgrown us -- but it
> is still the tool we turn to when we need to compile something. For that
> reason, I'd like to think that there's some representation of that 'hacker'
> culture and that OS within the leadership, even if it's not RMS, to respect
> that we are still a large constituency of the users and historically were a
> large constituency of the contributors.
> 
> I can't speak for others, but for me at least, replacing ties with GNU with
> ties to another well-respected (non-corporate) entity in the free software
> world like Debian or the Apache foundation would go a long way in allaying
> my worries about this shift.
> 
> >>= %frosku = { os => 'gnu+linux', editor => 'emacs', coffee => 1 } =<<
>

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Ian Lance Taylor]

On Fri, Apr 16, 2021 at 4:16 PM Frosku <frosku@frosku.com> wrote:
>
> When I refer to a 'California cultural standard', that's not prescriptive. It's
> just a reference to the fact that a *lot* of the SC live in California, and any
> culture prescribed by the steering committee will be overly influenced by that
> commonality.

To the best of my knowledge, 2 of the 13 members of the GCC steering
committee live in California.

Ian

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Frosku]

On Sat Apr 17, 2021 at 5:05 AM BST, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 16, 2021 at 4:16 PM Frosku <frosku@frosku.com> wrote:
> >
> > When I refer to a 'California cultural standard', that's not prescriptive. It's
> > just a reference to the fact that a *lot* of the SC live in California, and any
> > culture prescribed by the steering committee will be overly influenced by that
> > commonality.
>
> To the best of my knowledge, 2 of the 13 members of the GCC steering
> committee live in California.
>
> Ian

And the rest of the west coast United States / New England?

>>= %frosku = { os => 'gnu+linux', editor => 'emacs', coffee => 1 } =<<

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Andrew Pinski]

On Fri, Apr 16, 2021 at 9:56 PM Frosku <frosku@frosku.com> wrote:
>
> On Sat Apr 17, 2021 at 5:05 AM BST, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
> > On Fri, Apr 16, 2021 at 4:16 PM Frosku <frosku@frosku.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > When I refer to a 'California cultural standard', that's not prescriptive. It's
> > > just a reference to the fact that a *lot* of the SC live in California, and any
> > > culture prescribed by the steering committee will be overly influenced by that
> > > commonality.
> >
> > To the best of my knowledge, 2 of the 13 members of the GCC steering
> > committee live in California.
> >
> > Ian
>
> And the rest of the west coast United States / New England?

I count 5 which are not in the United States or Canada.

Thanks,
Andrew Pinski

>
> >>= %frosku = { os => 'gnu+linux', editor => 'emacs', coffee => 1 } =<<

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Jeff Law]

On 4/16/2021 10:08 PM, Frosku wrote:
> On Sat Apr 17, 2021 at 5:05 AM BST, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
>> On Fri, Apr 16, 2021 at 4:16 PM Frosku <frosku@frosku.com> wrote:
>>> When I refer to a 'California cultural standard', that's not prescriptive. It's
>>> just a reference to the fact that a *lot* of the SC live in California, and any
>>> culture prescribed by the steering committee will be overly influenced by that
>>> commonality.
>> To the best of my knowledge, 2 of the 13 members of the GCC steering
>> committee live in California.
>>
>> Ian
> And the rest of the west coast United States / New England?

I'm not aware of anywhere in the US that is a monoculture in the way you 
seem to be implying.  And if you really believe there are those kinds of 
monocultures , then you're showing a high degree of ignorance.

FTR, I've never resided on the west coast of the US or in the 
traditionally defined New England states.


Jeff

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Frosku]

On Sat Apr 17, 2021 at 7:21 AM BST, Chris Punches wrote:
> I've lived in most states in the US and can confirm exclusionary
> regional cultures not only exist but are more common than the absence
> of them.
>
> You might not see it in Sioux City, but you'll see it in LA, you'll see
> it in Dallas, Bangor, Miami, Baton Rouge, Chickasha, pretty much
> anywhere you travel to will have that, and some of their elements
> aren't pretty -- they do have one thing common among all of them --
> they are aversive to each other based on perceived lifestyle, legacy,
> and value system superiority.
>
> California culture has earned theirs as much as any of the other US
> regions have. I would find it difficult to believe that someone who
> didn't notice that had actually been to these places and examined for
> this -- it is no secret, and many people in those places generally
> pride themselves over it.
>
> I think there may be a tendency in some academic communities to ignore
> or marginilize the prominnence in their worldview the parts of society
> that do not fit within their value systems as well.

I wasn't even implying that these cultures are 'good' or 'bad', just
that they exist and differ from the various regional cultures which
exist all over the world. I think people were quite touchy at my line
of questioning. I recognise that there are differences between i.e.
LA and Seattle or SF and NY, but those differences pale in comparison
to the differences between Moscow and LA, Beijing and NY, or Sydney
and SF -- and those are all still large international cities.

The fact that over 50% of the SC is based in (probably?) urban North
America should give pause to some humility that it may not represent
the truly global nature of hackerdom. On a technical front this isn't
important, but if you're trying to impose *culture* on a global group,
it might be useful to remember that you have a steering group in which
over 50% of its members represent urban North America, but in the
world, only about 2% of the population live in urban North America.

>>= %frosku = { os => 'gnu+linux', editor => 'emacs', coffee => 1 } =<<

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Aaron Gyes]

> I wasn't even implying that these cultures are 'good' or 'bad', just
> that they exist and differ from the various regional cultures which
> exist all over the world. I think people were quite touchy at my line
> of questioning. I recognise that there are differences between i.e.
> LA and Seattle or SF and NY, but those differences pale in comparison
> to the differences between Moscow and LA, Beijing and NY, or Sydney
> and SF -- and those are all still large international cities.


Give me a break Forsku.

Could you care to share how you feel imposed upon or feel disenfranchised by
this discussion not being sensitive to your culture? How does a code of conduct,
or how would discouraging “micro-aggressions” disrespect your lived experiences
or make it uncomfortable for you to contribute to GCC?

> The fact that over 50% of the SC is based in (probably?) urban North
> America should give pause to some humility that it may not represent
> the truly global nature of hackerdom. On a technical front this isn't
> important, but if you're trying to impose *culture* on a global group,
> it might be useful to remember that you have a steering group in which
> over 50% of its members represent urban North America, but in the
> world, only about 2% of the population live in urban North America.


As far as I understand it Chris Punches lives in North America.

Only 2% of the world population lives in the US, indeed, most live in China.

It’s interesting the unkind reaction Liu Hao received in this very thread
when they encountered the arguments making a false equivalency of these proposals
to their countries’ history. I’m sure he felt not great, being forced to either
defend the CCP or not share their views on the questions of this conversation.

What is even the argument you are making at this point?

Aaron

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Frosku]

On Sat Apr 17, 2021 at 9:27 AM BST, Aaron Gyes via Gcc wrote:
> Give me a break Forsku.
>
> Could you care to share how you feel imposed upon or feel
> disenfranchised by
> this discussion not being sensitive to your culture? How does a code of
> conduct,
> or how would discouraging “micro-aggressions” disrespect your lived
> experiences
> or make it uncomfortable for you to contribute to GCC?

I have no idea what "micro-aggressions" are other than what I read on the
news. It's not a concept that is known outside of a bubble in parts of the
United States. I have never lived in that bubble, it is not a term I have
ever heard face-to-face, therefore I have no idea whether it affects me or
not. I do know that I'd feel pretty uncomfortable signing up to not cause
something when I have no idea what it is.

I feel imposed upon when, as a volunteer, I'm expected to submit not just
my volunteered time but all of my time in every venue to your cultural
norms. This is not normal. Just because some of you are paid very nice
salaries to hack on free software doesn't mean all of us are.

> It’s interesting the unkind reaction Liu Hao received in this very
> thread
> when they encountered the arguments making a false equivalency of these
> proposals
> to their countries’ history. I’m sure he felt not great, being
> forced to either
> defend the CCP or not share their views on the questions of this
> conversation.

I didn't see that, but yes it's unreasonable to expect anyone to defend the
CCP (or any government for that matter) in order to contribute views to an
argument. Everyone should be encouraged to share their views on something
which is important to all of us: the wellbeing of GCC going forwards.

Language like "give me a break", btw, or expecting someone to explain how a
code of conduct which hasn't been written yet 'imposes' on them personally
is also not encouraging.

>>= %frosku = { os => 'gnu+linux', editor => 'emacs', coffee => 1 } =<<

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Aaron Gyes]

On Apr 17, 2021, at 1:36 AM, Frosku <frosku@frosku.com> wrote:
> I feel imposed upon when, as a volunteer, I'm expected to submit not just
> my volunteered time but all of my time in every venue to your cultural
> norms. This is not normal. Just because some of you are paid very nice
> salaries to hack on free software doesn't mean all of us are.

I don’t make a dime. I find it hard to imagine it would take you
all of your time not to act like an asshole. Nobody has even
asserted professionalism should be required of professionals.

Yet you seem extremely uncomfortable with some bare minimum standards.

I assumed as a technical, somewhat obsessive person, you have already
Googled “microagressions”, imagined what they would be in the context
of a major open source project, and what in-group and out-groups exist in
this context, then came to some kind of conclusion that explains your hostility.

Aaron

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Giacomo Tesio]

Hi Andrew and GCC,

On April 17, 2021 5:04:55 AM UTC, Andrew Pinski via Gcc
<gcc@gcc.gnu.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 16, 2021 at 9:56 PM Frosku <frosku@frosku.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Sat Apr 17, 2021 at 5:05 AM BST, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
> > > On Fri, Apr 16, 2021 at 4:16 PM Frosku <frosku@frosku.com> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > When I refer to a 'California cultural standard', that's not
> > > > prescriptive. It's just a reference to the fact that a *lot* of
> > > > the SC live in California, and any culture prescribed by the
> > > > steering committee will be overly influenced by that
> > > > commonality.
> > >
> > > To the best of my knowledge, 2 of the 13 members of the GCC
> > > steering committee live in California.
> >
> > And the rest of the west coast United States / New England?
> 
> I count 5 which are not in the United States or Canada.

And how many are affiliated with (controversial) US corporations
(or their subsidiaries)?

Here are the numbers:
https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-April/235285.html


Ultimately the culture and behavious that you are trying to prescribe
here, are those of US tech workplaces.

The ones where "hiring for culture fit" was invented.


A culture that works strongly against unions, for example.
https://theintercept.com/2020/06/11/facebook-workplace-unionize/

Yes, the exact same Facebook that Nathan described here as "a joy
because of the huge step towards gender equality amongst the
engineers": https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-March/235091.html
Inclusive to some, but eager to exclude others for political reasons,
as you see in Nathan's long request.

We are talking about culture where people do NOT start a strike when a
scientist like Timnit Gebru is fired for what she wrote in a paper and
so on. Nor when Google doubled down by firing Margaret Mitchell.

THIS is the culture you are trying to impose to global Free Software.


Is this a culture that is safe for Free Software?
To me, it's not. To Stallman, neither. Terry Davis? Nope.

As for me, I have been depicted as a "jerk" and "concern troll" here.
My contribution is unwelcome. My code is welcome, the problem is me.
Because I refuse to bow down to US workspace moralism and hypocrisy.
I'm a toxic emailer, right?

But in fact, millions of people outside the US would feel excluded.
And threatened. But we are all "jerks", right?



Such culture is also dominated by RICH men, but it's unable to see the
problem in term of global and local distribution of wealth and power
and thus interprets it as a matter of sex, gender and race.

Which is obviously totally fine for rich men, as it distract people's
attention from the root of their power and won't really fix the problem.

And it's also fine for most leaders in this activist space, because
they can focus attivists' attention and outrage against easier preys,
like Stallman.

After all, it's easier to obtain corporate support (and money) if you
problematize these issues instead of the distribution of wealth and
power that causes them. They need to fight, but cannot afford to win.



Giacomo

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Aaron Gyes]

> I feel imposed upon when, as a volunteer, I'm expected to submit not just
> my volunteered time but all of my time in every venue to your cultural
> norms.

Can you not imagine… some people have already felt that way for quite some
time, and became excluded? That it is not a hypothetical for them?

Aaron

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Gerald Pfeifer]

On Fri, 16 Apr 2021, Frosku wrote:
> In my view, if people employed by a small number of American companies
> succeed in disassociating GCC from GNU/FSF, which is representative of
> the free software grassroots community

I find this insistant focus by some on "American companies" 
interesting - and quite pointless. And my passport is burgundy.

It also is a completely unwarranted attack on the integrity of the
maintainers, contributors, and other leaders of GCC. Regardless of
the color of their passports. 

Personally I care about quality of what we ship, supporting our 
users, and upholding the principles of free software/open source.
And I am willing to bet this applies to the vast majority of us.

So please stop those unfounded allegations.

Gerald

PS: Our release managers, for example, are British (Joseph), Czech 
(Jakub), and German (Richi), IIRC.  The majority of the FSF board, 
FSF leadership, and RMS himself are American from what I can tell.

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Frosku]

On Sat Apr 17, 2021 at 10:04 AM BST, Aaron Gyes via Gcc wrote:
> On Apr 17, 2021, at 1:36 AM, Frosku <frosku@frosku.com> wrote:
> > I feel imposed upon when, as a volunteer, I'm expected to submit not just
> > my volunteered time but all of my time in every venue to your cultural
> > norms. This is not normal. Just because some of you are paid very nice
> > salaries to hack on free software doesn't mean all of us are.
>
> I don’t make a dime. I find it hard to imagine it would take you
> all of your time not to act like an asshole. Nobody has even
> asserted professionalism should be required of professionals.
>
> Yet you seem extremely uncomfortable with some bare minimum standards.
>
> I assumed as a technical, somewhat obsessive person, you have already
> Googled “microagressions”, imagined what they would be in the
> context
> of a major open source project, and what in-group and out-groups exist
> in
> this context, then came to some kind of conclusion that explains your
> hostility.

Aaron,

If you could kindly refrain from making repeated character attacks and
trying to imply that because I disagree with you on policy I must be
some kind of knuckle-dragging bigot, that would be a really good start
to having a productive discussion. Perhaps instead of talking about
whether I'm "obsessive", want to "act like an asshole", etc we can
pretend we've been through that tiring exercise and discuss substance.

My "hostility" to codes of conduct is that I have little confidence that
they would be applied evenly (in which case, the way you've spoken to me
thus far would surely not be considered proper conduct as you've taken
little time to drop to the level of ad hominem attacks and implications)
and would instead be used as a battering ram against people who are a)
neurodivergent and struggle with social norms or b) are from different
cultures which are more direct in communication style.

It's all well and good to talk the talk of diversity and inclusion, but
it seems to me that what's actually achieved is locking out some of the
most isolated and vulnerable people -- who have found a home in our
community -- in order to make some of the most privileged people in
society more comfortable. *That* is the source of my hostility to what
I believe is for the most part a noble but misguided proposal.

>>= %frosku = { os => 'gnu+linux', editor => 'emacs', coffee => 1 } =<<

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Giacomo Tesio]

Beware with what you desire, Frosku.

On April 16, 2021 11:15:57 PM UTC, Frosku <frosku@frosku.com> wrote:
> 
> I can't speak for others, but for me at least, replacing ties with GNU
> with ties to another well-respected (non-corporate) entity in the free
> software world like Debian or the Apache foundation would go a long way in
> allaying my worries about this shift.

Pretending to defend Free Software is way cheaper that to actually defend it.
In particular against a Google employee that violate GPL during his working hours.

https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-March/235224.html


Giacomo

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Frosku]

On Sat Apr 17, 2021 at 10:08 AM BST, Aaron Gyes via Gcc wrote:
> > I feel imposed upon when, as a volunteer, I'm expected to submit not just
> > my volunteered time but all of my time in every venue to your cultural
> > norms.
>
> Can you not imagine… some people have already felt that way for quite
> some
> time, and became excluded? That it is not a hypothetical for them?
>
> Aaron

Absolutely, and we should find ways to re-include them without swapping
their exclusion for the exclusion of other vulnerable people.

>>= %frosku = { os => 'gnu+linux', editor => 'emacs', coffee => 1 } =<<

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Frosku]

On Sat Apr 17, 2021 at 10:29 AM BST, Giacomo Tesio wrote:
> Beware with what you desire, Frosku.
>
> On April 16, 2021 11:15:57 PM UTC, Frosku <frosku@frosku.com> wrote:
> > 
> > I can't speak for others, but for me at least, replacing ties with GNU
> > with ties to another well-respected (non-corporate) entity in the free
> > software world like Debian or the Apache foundation would go a long way in
> > allaying my worries about this shift.
>
> Pretending to defend Free Software is way cheaper that to actually
> defend it.
> In particular against a Google employee that violate GPL during his
> working hours.
>
> https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-March/235224.html

What I desire is that GCC stay a part of GNU, a project that exists solely
to create a free operating system for the entire world to use. What I fear
most is a GCC steered by essentially a monoculture of paid big-tech coders
with no input from the free software community or GCC's non-corporate
users. Therefore, if a childish and ultimately unwarranted split is to
happen, it should be with the oversight of an organization friendly to free
software values. Not Google and not Facebook.

>>= %frosku = { os => 'gnu+linux', editor => 'emacs', coffee => 1 } =<<

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Frosku]

On Sat Apr 17, 2021 at 10:08 AM BST, Giacomo Tesio wrote:
> But in fact, millions of people outside the US would feel excluded.
> And threatened. But we are all "jerks", right?
>
> ...
>
> Such culture is also dominated by RICH men, but it's unable to see the
> problem in term of global and local distribution of wealth and power
> and thus interprets it as a matter of sex, gender and race.
>
> Which is obviously totally fine for rich men, as it distract people's
> attention from the root of their power and won't really fix the problem.

Did you ever notice that income group (in a global sense) is never a
protected characteristic in these COCs which proclaim to defend the
disenfranchised and the disadvantaged? It would seem to me that low income
is the greatest predictor of disadvantage globally.

>>= %frosku = { os => 'gnu+linux', editor => 'emacs', coffee => 1 } =<<

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Giacomo Tesio]

Hi Gerald,,

On April 17, 2021 9:09:19 AM UTC, Gerald Pfeifer <gerald@pfeifer.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 16 Apr 2021, Frosku wrote:
> > In my view, if people employed by a small number of American
> companies
> > succeed in disassociating GCC from GNU/FSF, which is representative
> > of the free software grassroots community
> 
> I find this insistant focus by some on "American companies" 
> interesting - and quite pointless. And my passport is burgundy.


So much that in fact, we are talking about some of the most controversial
corporation in the whole world.

And while we are talking about "toxic emailers", it's not lost to me
the irony that all this divisive debate about inclusive and righteous 
behaviour started with an email of a Facebook employee that defines
working in Facebook "a joy".
https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-March/235091.html

Yeah the same Facebook that still does what Cambridge Analytica used to.

> It also is a completely unwarranted attack on the integrity of the
> maintainers, contributors, and other leaders of GCC. Regardless of
> the color of their passports.

This is a strawman.

People are just concerned about the undue influence that these controversial corporations can have on GCC through the influence they have on their employees.

It would be overly naive to pretend that the Steering Committee members' 
are not influenced by their affiliations, even if we were not talking about the
champions of surveillance capitalism.

And this has nothing to do with their integrity.

Why should they have declared such affiliations in the SC's web page,
if they were irrelevant?

Because they acknowledge that their affiliations have a non-negligible
influence on what they do and what they do not.


Also this has nothing to do with their passports.

In fact, as you say,

> The majority of the FSF board, 
> FSF leadership, and RMS himself are American from what I can tell.


It was Nathan who framed his request in term of culture, politics and
whiteness and priviledge...

And since the GCC Steering Committe did what he requested, we have to
assume that these are the kind of arguments that we have to debunk,
providing you with a more varied perspective.

But unfortunately you keep invalidating our perspective because... we are "jerks".


Giacomo

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Liu Hao]

[-- Attachment #1.1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1070 bytes --]

在 17/04/2021 16.27, Aaron Gyes 写道:
> 
> As far as I understand it Chris Punches lives in North America.
> 
> Only 2% of the world population lives in the US, indeed, most live in China.
> 
> It’s interesting the unkind reaction Liu Hao received in this very thread
> when they encountered the arguments making a false equivalency of these proposals
> to their countries’ history. I’m sure he felt not great, being forced to either
> defend the CCP or not share their views on the questions of this conversation.
> 
> What is even the argument you are making at this point?
> 

The history is written with many coincidences. Something is there just because it happened, while 
other didn't. I don't see anything wrong why a moderate number of all developers are from the US: 
Because modern computers were invented by American people. It's simply that people who contribute 
more deserve more, and who contribute less deserve less. That's fair. It's a natural law. There is 
no reason to go against that.


-- 
Best regards,
Liu Hao


[-- Attachment #2: OpenPGP digital signature --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 840 bytes --]

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Christopher Dimech]

> Sent: Saturday, April 17, 2021 at 9:09 PM
> From: "Gerald Pfeifer" <gerald@pfeifer.com>
> To: "Frosku" <frosku@frosku.com>
> Cc: gcc@gcc.gnu.org
> Subject: Re: removing toxic emailers
>
> On Fri, 16 Apr 2021, Frosku wrote:
> > In my view, if people employed by a small number of American companies
> > succeed in disassociating GCC from GNU/FSF, which is representative of
> > the free software grassroots community
>
> I find this insistant focus by some on "American companies"
> interesting - and quite pointless. And my passport is burgundy.
>
> It also is a completely unwarranted attack on the integrity of the
> maintainers, contributors, and other leaders of GCC. Regardless of
> the color of their passports.

> Personally I care about quality of what we ship, supporting our
> users, and upholding the principles of free software/open source.
> And I am willing to bet this applies to the vast majority of us.
>
> So please stop those unfounded allegations.
>
> Gerald
>
> PS: Our release managers, for example, are British (Joseph), Czech
> (Jakub), and German (Richi), IIRC.  The majority of the FSF board,
> FSF leadership, and RMS himself are American from what I can tell.

It all depends on the quality of the people running it and in it.
RMS is certainly top quality considering he got so many minds to
start thinking straight about how software is developed and used.
Nation is just an idea.  The idea of nation is made because of
sameness, of race, religion, ethnicity, ideologies, languages.

The free software movement is in defiance of all those things.
A total defiance of the sameness.  Many people in our community
have still to figure out *how to be* in our community.  Many
are getting it wrong.  And it shows.

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Christopher Dimech]

> Sent: Saturday, April 17, 2021 at 9:25 PM
> From: "Frosku" <frosku@frosku.com>
> To: "Aaron Gyes" <aaronite@icloud.com>, gcc@gcc.gnu.org
> Subject: Re: removing toxic emailers
>
> On Sat Apr 17, 2021 at 10:04 AM BST, Aaron Gyes via Gcc wrote:
> > On Apr 17, 2021, at 1:36 AM, Frosku <frosku@frosku.com> wrote:
> > > I feel imposed upon when, as a volunteer, I'm expected to submit not just
> > > my volunteered time but all of my time in every venue to your cultural
> > > norms. This is not normal. Just because some of you are paid very nice
> > > salaries to hack on free software doesn't mean all of us are.
> >
> > I don’t make a dime. I find it hard to imagine it would take you
> > all of your time not to act like an asshole. Nobody has even
> > asserted professionalism should be required of professionals.
> >
> > Yet you seem extremely uncomfortable with some bare minimum standards.
> >
> > I assumed as a technical, somewhat obsessive person, you have already
> > Googled “microagressions”, imagined what they would be in the
> > context
> > of a major open source project, and what in-group and out-groups exist
> > in
> > this context, then came to some kind of conclusion that explains your
> > hostility.
> 
> Aaron,
> 
> If you could kindly refrain from making repeated character attacks and
> trying to imply that because I disagree with you on policy I must be
> some kind of knuckle-dragging bigot, that would be a really good start
> to having a productive discussion. Perhaps instead of talking about
> whether I'm "obsessive", want to "act like an asshole", etc we can
> pretend we've been through that tiring exercise and discuss substance.
> 
> My "hostility" to codes of conduct is that I have little confidence that
> they would be applied evenly (in which case, the way you've spoken to me
> thus far would surely not be considered proper conduct as you've taken
> little time to drop to the level of ad hominem attacks and implications)
> and would instead be used as a battering ram against people who are a)
> neurodivergent and struggle with social norms or b) are from different
> cultures which are more direct in communication style.
> 
> It's all well and good to talk the talk of diversity and inclusion, but
> it seems to me that what's actually achieved is locking out some of the
> most isolated and vulnerable people -- who have found a home in our
> community -- in order to make some of the most privileged people in
> society more comfortable. *That* is the source of my hostility to what
> I believe is for the most part a noble but misguided proposal.

There are times where *not to act* is the solution.  If the United States
and the Soviet Union acted upon aggressiveness by the other during tho last
century, the global ecosystem would have been wiped out.  Human development
and progress brought us the capability for complete annihilation.  More
like "Star Wars" than "Star Trek".  More like 1984 and a Utopia. 
 
> >>= %frosku = { os => 'gnu+linux', editor => 'emacs', coffee => 1 } =<<
>

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Christopher Dimech]

> Sent: Saturday, April 17, 2021 at 11:56 PM
> From: "Giacomo Tesio" <giacomo@tesio.it>
> To: gcc@gcc.gnu.org, "Gerald Pfeifer" <gerald@pfeifer.com>, "Frosku" <frosku@frosku.com>
> Subject: Re: removing toxic emailers
>
> Hi Gerald,,
> 
> On April 17, 2021 9:09:19 AM UTC, Gerald Pfeifer <gerald@pfeifer.com> wrote:
> > On Fri, 16 Apr 2021, Frosku wrote:
> > > In my view, if people employed by a small number of American
> > companies
> > > succeed in disassociating GCC from GNU/FSF, which is representative
> > > of the free software grassroots community
> > 
> > I find this insistant focus by some on "American companies" 
> > interesting - and quite pointless. And my passport is burgundy.
> 
> 
> So much that in fact, we are talking about some of the most controversial
> corporation in the whole world.
> 
> And while we are talking about "toxic emailers", it's not lost to me
> the irony that all this divisive debate about inclusive and righteous 
> behaviour started with an email of a Facebook employee that defines
> working in Facebook "a joy".
> https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-March/235091.html
>
> Yeah the same Facebook that still does what Cambridge Analytica used to.

It's worse than that.  Facebook provides the soil and nourishment 
for companies like Cambridge Analytica to grow.   

Some early work on "The Shift News" exposed facebook profiles used
to spread rumours about the government’s perceived enemies including
the family of slain journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia in 2017.

Her police protection was removed entirely in 2013 when the Labour party
- a frequent target of her investigations - returned to power.

https://theshiftnews.com/2018/05/27/the-shift-news-disinformation-watch-fake-facebook-account-behind-unsubstantiated-attacks-on-opposition-mp/

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/11/30/europe/daphne-caruana-galizia-qa-intl/index.html
 
> > It also is a completely unwarranted attack on the integrity of the
> > maintainers, contributors, and other leaders of GCC. Regardless of
> > the color of their passports.
> 
> This is a strawman.
> 
> People are just concerned about the undue influence that these controversial corporations can have on GCC through the influence they have on their employees.
> 
> It would be overly naive to pretend that the Steering Committee members' 
> are not influenced by their affiliations, even if we were not talking about the
> champions of surveillance capitalism.
> 
> And this has nothing to do with their integrity.
> 
> Why should they have declared such affiliations in the SC's web page,
> if they were irrelevant?
> 
> Because they acknowledge that their affiliations have a non-negligible
> influence on what they do and what they do not.
> 
> 
> Also this has nothing to do with their passports.
> 
> In fact, as you say,
> 
> > The majority of the FSF board, 
> > FSF leadership, and RMS himself are American from what I can tell.
> 
> 
> It was Nathan who framed his request in term of culture, politics and
> whiteness and priviledge...
> 
> And since the GCC Steering Committe did what he requested, we have to
> assume that these are the kind of arguments that we have to debunk,
> providing you with a more varied perspective.
> 
> But unfortunately you keep invalidating our perspective because... we are "jerks".
> 
> 
> Giacomo
>

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Christopher Dimech]

> Sent: Saturday, April 17, 2021 at 9:41 PM
> From: "Frosku" <frosku@frosku.com>
> To: "Giacomo Tesio" <giacomo@tesio.it>, "Andrew Pinski" <pinskia@gmail.com>, "Andrew Pinski via Gcc" <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>
> Subject: Re: removing toxic emailers
>
> On Sat Apr 17, 2021 at 10:08 AM BST, Giacomo Tesio wrote:
> > But in fact, millions of people outside the US would feel excluded.
> > And threatened. But we are all "jerks", right?
> >
> > ...
> >
> > Such culture is also dominated by RICH men, but it's unable to see the
> > problem in term of global and local distribution of wealth and power
> > and thus interprets it as a matter of sex, gender and race.
> >
> > Which is obviously totally fine for rich men, as it distract people's
> > attention from the root of their power and won't really fix the problem.
>
> Did you ever notice that income group (in a global sense) is never a
> protected characteristic in these COCs which proclaim to defend the
> disenfranchised and the disadvantaged? It would seem to me that low income
> is the greatest predictor of disadvantage globally.

The one thing that would make a difference is if the rich take on the idea
of sharing.  The reason that communism failed was because the idea of sharing
was taken on by the poor, who had nothing to offer.

If there is going to be progress regarding the way the free software movement
sees things, mocking day and night those who have things to offer is stupid.
I have no intention of going there, or trying to buy a ticket to heaven with
my goodness.

> >>= %frosku = { os => 'gnu+linux', editor => 'emacs', coffee => 1 } =<<
>

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Christopher Dimech]

Fundamentally, "micro-aggressions" describe insults and dismissals. 
Interpreting insults and dismissals as aggression leads only to
an atrophy of the skills needed to mediate one's own disputes with
others.  I oppose the use of the term absolutely.

---------------------
Christopher Dimech
General Administrator - Naiad Informatics - GNU Project (Geocomputation)
- Geophysical Simulation
- Geological Subsurface Mapping
- Disaster Preparedness and Mitigation
- Natural Resource Exploration and Production
- Free Software Advocacy


> Sent: Saturday, April 17, 2021 at 8:27 PM
> From: "Aaron Gyes via Gcc" <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>
> To: gcc@gcc.gnu.org
> Subject: Re: removing toxic emailers
>
> > I wasn't even implying that these cultures are 'good' or 'bad', just
> > that they exist and differ from the various regional cultures which
> > exist all over the world. I think people were quite touchy at my line
> > of questioning. I recognise that there are differences between i.e.
> > LA and Seattle or SF and NY, but those differences pale in comparison
> > to the differences between Moscow and LA, Beijing and NY, or Sydney
> > and SF -- and those are all still large international cities.
> 
> 
> Give me a break Forsku.
> 
> Could you care to share how you feel imposed upon or feel disenfranchised by
> this discussion not being sensitive to your culture? How does a code of conduct,
> or how would discouraging “micro-aggressions” disrespect your lived experiences
> or make it uncomfortable for you to contribute to GCC?
> 
> > The fact that over 50% of the SC is based in (probably?) urban North
> > America should give pause to some humility that it may not represent
> > the truly global nature of hackerdom. On a technical front this isn't
> > important, but if you're trying to impose *culture* on a global group,
> > it might be useful to remember that you have a steering group in which
> > over 50% of its members represent urban North America, but in the
> > world, only about 2% of the population live in urban North America.
> 
> 
> As far as I understand it Chris Punches lives in North America.
> 
> Only 2% of the world population lives in the US, indeed, most live in China.
> 
> It’s interesting the unkind reaction Liu Hao received in this very thread
> when they encountered the arguments making a false equivalency of these proposals
> to their countries’ history. I’m sure he felt not great, being forced to either
> defend the CCP or not share their views on the questions of this conversation.
> 
> What is even the argument you are making at this point?
> 
> Aaron
> 
>

Re: removing toxic emailers

[David Brown]

On 17/04/2021 13:56, Giacomo Tesio wrote:
> Hi Gerald,,
> 
> On April 17, 2021 9:09:19 AM UTC, Gerald Pfeifer <gerald@pfeifer.com> wrote:
>> On Fri, 16 Apr 2021, Frosku wrote:
>>> In my view, if people employed by a small number of American
>> companies
>>> succeed in disassociating GCC from GNU/FSF, which is representative
>>> of the free software grassroots community
>>
>> I find this insistant focus by some on "American companies" 
>> interesting - and quite pointless. And my passport is burgundy.
> 
> 
> So much that in fact, we are talking about some of the most controversial
> corporation in the whole world.
> 
> And while we are talking about "toxic emailers", it's not lost to me
> the irony that all this divisive debate about inclusive and righteous 
> behaviour started with an email of a Facebook employee that defines
> working in Facebook "a joy".
> https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-March/235091.html
> 
> Yeah the same Facebook that still does what Cambridge Analytica used to.
> 
>> It also is a completely unwarranted attack on the integrity of the
>> maintainers, contributors, and other leaders of GCC. Regardless of
>> the color of their passports.
> 
> This is a strawman.
> 
> People are just concerned about the undue influence that these
> controversial corporations can have on GCC through the influence they
> have on their employees.
> 

Do you have any justification for thinking that the number of such
"concerned people" is significant?  It is clearly at least one - you -
and arguably a couple of the others who have posted here.  But do you
think it is many, and do you think they have any reason or justification
for this concern?  (Repeating it multiple times in these mailing list
threads is not reasoning or justification - "proof by repeated
assertion" arguments can be dismissed off-hand.)

I am not a Facebook fan myself.  I have an account that I use almost
exclusively just for keeping up with a couple of sports clubs of which I
am a member, and which use Facebook to publish information.  I don't
like the way it tracks so much information about me and other people,
and I don't see how it benefits me.  (Google tracks information too, but
I see more benefit in it.)  However, that is /my/ choice and /my/
opinion, and the way /I/ like to use (or avoid) social media.  Other
people have very different opinions, and find a lot to like about
Facebook.  That's /their/ choice.

Big companies like Facebook and Google are powerful tools.  They usually
try to be "good" most of the time - after all, they are staffed by real
people with real consciences who are, as most people are the world over,
basically good people.  They will make mistakes sometimes, and powerful
tools get abused on occasion.  But on the whole they are trying to
provide a service people want and can make use of, while also making a
living in the process.  Anything else is paranoia - and like most
conspiracy theories, it falls flat when you realise it would involve
huge numbers of people keeping quite about doing evil.


I do believe that Facebook, Google, IBM, etc., will have /some/
influence on gcc and all the other free and open source projects that
they support.  That is because they are big users of such software - it
makes sense for them to support them and help and encourage them.  And
sometimes they will be contributing towards specific features that they
want for their systems.  (This does not seem to be common for gcc, as
far as I understand it from the key developers here.)  For example,
Facebook want improvements to filesystems in Linux so they have employed
people specifically to work on btrfs.

IMHO, this is /fine/.  There is nothing wrong with that.  It is
companies "scratching their own itches", just as individual developers
often do.  We all benefit.  It may be /influence/, but it is minor and
it is certainly not /undue/ influence.


The way you go on about "controversial American companies" and "undue
influence" suggests you think these companies are forcing their
employees on the gcc steering committee to add backdoors to gcc to tell
Facebook what projects you are compiling, or make gcc only work well on
Red Hat.  That would be utter nonsense.


So what is it that you think these companies are doing wrong for gcc?
How do you think they are influencing it?  Who are all these "concerned
people" ?

If you have justification, evidence, or even a rational argument for
your concerns, please share them.  If not, please stop repeating
baseless paranoia.  You have made your point, such as it is - please
move along now.  (That is not censorship - it's just a polite request to
stop wasting people's time.)

David Brown

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Ian Lance Taylor]

This conversation has moved well off-topic for the GCC mailing lists.

Some of the posts here do not follow the GNU Kind Communication
Guidelines (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/kind-communication.en.html).

I suggest that people who want to continue this thread take it off the
GCC mailing list.

Thanks.

Ian

identifying toxic emailers (was: removing toxic emailers)

[Giacomo Tesio]

Hi David, Ian, Nathan and GCC all.

Let's start from what we agree upon:


On April 17, 2021 6:11:57 PM UTC, David Brown
<david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

> The way you go on about "controversial American companies" and "undue
> influence" suggests you think these companies are forcing their
> employees on the gcc steering committee to add backdoors to gcc to
> tell Facebook what projects you are compiling, or make gcc only work
> well on Red Hat.  That would be utter nonsense.

That's utterly nonsense, I totally agree.

And I'm afraid there is a language barrier here because this is NOT the
kind of undue corporate influence I'm scared about.


> Do you have any justification for thinking that the number of such
> "concerned people" is significant?

For sure: in Europe, awareness about the risks of relying on US bigtech
corporations is mounting fast.

The recognition of the Privacy Shield as invalid did not come in a
vacuum, and despite all of the lobbying, DMA and DSA are coming.

The global blackout of Google, fixed globally at once some months ago,
demonstrated that all the data of Europeans are effectively accessible
from Google LLC, and many many people here are realizing what incredible
and unbalanced power they are collecting.

Moreover, such data are accessible to the US security agency too,
thanks to the various laws that do not recognize any protection to the
data of non-US citizens.

And while concerned, they do not even consider how spread are Google
Analytics, Google Fonts or how many European's companies and agency
rely on its cloud services, giving them access to even more data.

And this is just Google.
IBM has been problematic since its creation.

And seeing how much GAFAM penetrated Free Software is concerning for
really many people, all over the world.


> do you think they have any reason or justification for this concern?

I think so.

We know Google is used to spy on their employees:
https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/2/22047383/google-spied-workers-before-firing-labor-complaint

And when Timnit Gebru was fired everybody learnt that Google tells his
researcher what to write and what NOT to write on their papers.

We know they partecipated in ICE.
We know that the members of the Steering Committee use their corporate
mailbox while working on GCC.

So I think it's quite reasonable to expect that their employers could
read the SC's secret exchanges (since they technically CAN read them).

And thus they could get priviledged access to dangerous zero-days far
before the end of embargo, even without the SC's members realizing it.
And they could share them.


And obviously, knowing that your employer CAN read the secret mails you
exchange in a project you lead, will be a constant burden on what you
are going to say.

And writing code is not different from writing papers.


> So what is it that you think these companies are doing wrong for gcc?
> How do you think they are influencing it? 

Well on a technical level, they are rising it's complexity so much
that the 4 freedoms became 4 priviledge years ago.

This was NOT inevitable.
But it creates a solid entry-barrier to all freedoms except the first.
And it happened on ALL projects that such US corporations "support".


But there are many another ways such companies could badly influence
the project.


For example they could weaponize it politically against people hurting
their interests.


When the rms-open-letter was still new, the first organizations that
signed it, were all heavily sponsored by the same corporation.

FSFE did not signed the attacking letter, but joined the mob with its
own. I was surprised to see FSFE trying to condition the governance of
another indipendent organization (something that is really rare among
European no-profits, almost an unicum). But soon I realized that since
2013, the exact same US company that back the early organizations that
signed the rms-open-letter, was behind 10-20% of FSFE whole incomes.


Even this whole debate on the Steering Committe was started by a
Facebook employee that asked for RMS removal that, promptly accorded,
uncoved the US corporate influence of the GCC.


>  Who are all these "concerned people" ?

Outside the US (and sometime even inside the US), anyone who knows a
bit of history, have read Wikileaks and Snowden's documents and
understand a little bit about software production and supply chain.



On April 18, 2021 1:39:02 AM UTC, Ian Lance Taylor <iant@google.com>
wrote:
> Some of the posts here do not follow the GNU Kind Communication
> Guidelines
> (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/kind-communication.en.html).
> 
> I suggest that people who want to continue this thread take it off the
> GCC mailing list.

Sorry Ian, I carefully considered wherther to reply to David or not.

Ultimately I thought it was important to answer his public questions
publicily since lack of response could be misinterpreted, as he wrote:

> If you have justification, evidence, or even a rational argument for
> your concerns, please share them. If not, please stop...


But it was important not only to clarify that our concerns are shared by
many technical and non technical people (I personally know hundreds of
them among different categories: hackers, accademics, enterpreneours,
politicians and plain users), but to clarify their nature.

It's not about people.
It's not about their personal integrity.

It's about powerful corporations with a long track record of
misbehaviours and with strong ties with US DoD, that in turn has a
long track record of huge ingerence in foreign politics AND of
violations in human rights.


I have no doubt about your good faith and good will.

But I'm not naive enough to believe that good people will can balance
systemic issues and perversse incentives in the environment they work.



This clarification was important and in topic with GCC governance
because the thread is about "removing toxic emailers" and since I was
depicted as a "jerk" and "concern troll" and you mentioned the
GNU (!!!) Kind Comunications Guidelines, I thought it was a useful
exercise to compare my post here with them to verify if one of the toxic
emailers was me. In fact, all of the political issues I expressed here
are about peoples' controlling their computing FOR REAL or not.



Now please, do the same exercise with Nathan's request and follow up.

https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-March/235091.html
https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-April/235267.html

Please compare his mails with the GNU Kind Comunications Guidelines too.
Count the violaions. Then look at what he scatenated here and tell us
whose behaviour has been more "toxic" to this project.

I'm sure you are going to do a fair analysis and stay in topic. 

It's not my intention to put shame on Nathan, but since he is looking
for policies to remove "toxic emailers", I think it would be an
interesting proof that people deciding what is "toxic" are going to be
completely blind to certain toxicities.


And this, in the long run, would perpretate and legitimate the power
imbalances that led us here.


Giacomo

Re: identifying toxic emailers (was: removing toxic emailers)

[Richard Kenner]

> So I think it's quite reasonable to expect that their employers could
> read the SC's secret exchanges (since they technically CAN read them).

I'm a bit lost here.  What do you think is the content of "the SC's
secret exchanges"?

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Eric S. Raymond]

Ian Lance Taylor via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>:
> This conversation has moved well off-topic for the GCC mailing lists.
> 
> Some of the posts here do not follow the GNU Kind Communication
> Guidelines (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/kind-communication.en.html).
> 
> I suggest that people who want to continue this thread take it off the
> GCC mailing list.
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> Ian

Welcome to the consequences of abandoning "You shall judge by the code alone."

This is what it will be like, *forever*, until you reassert that norm.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>

Re: identifying toxic emailers (was: removing toxic emailers)

[Giacomo Tesio]

Hi Kenner

On April 18, 2021 12:42:25 PM UTC, kenner@vlsi1.ultra.nyu.edu wrote:
> > So I think it's quite reasonable to expect that their employers
> could
> > read the SC's secret exchanges (since they technically CAN read them).
> 
> I'm a bit lost here.  What do you think is the content of "the SC's
> secret exchanges"?

GCC governance issues, maintainers, SC appointments, relations with FSF,
and general project management issues.

The kind of exchanges that SC members described in these weeks,
while arguing that the FSF oversight was pointless.


The "project's politics, so that programmers can focus on code".
(I'm citing by memory, but I can look for the exact quotation if you desire)

In fact, programming is a powerful political activity.
One of the most powerful, actually, despite many still haven't realized
the huge responsibility that comes with it.


Giacomo

Re: removing toxic emailers

[David Malcolm]

On Sun, 2021-04-18 at 09:10 -0400, Eric S. Raymond wrote:

Sorry for prolonging this thread-of-doom; I'm loathe to reply to Eric
because I worry that it will encourage him.  I wrote a long rebuttal to
his last email to me about his great insights into the minds of women
but didn't send it in the hope of reducing the temperature of the
conversation.

That said...

> Ian Lance Taylor via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>:
> > This conversation has moved well off-topic for the GCC mailing lists.
> > 
> > Some of the posts here do not follow the GNU Kind Communication
> > Guidelines
> > (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/kind-communication.en.html).
> > 
> > I suggest that people who want to continue this thread take it off
> > the
> > GCC mailing list.
> > 
> > Thanks.
> > 
> > Ian
> 
> Welcome to the consequences of abandoning "You shall judge by the code
> alone."
> 
> This is what it will be like, *forever*, until you reassert that norm.

Or we could ignore the false dilemma that Eric is asserting, and
instead moderate the list, or even just moderate those who have never
contributed to GCC but persist in emailing the list.

Personally, I've been moving all posts by Christopher Dimech to this
list direct from my inbox to my archive without reading them for the
last several days, and it's helped my mood considerably.  He's been
prolifically posting to the list recently, but in the 8 years I've been
involved in gcc development I've never heard of him before this thing
kicked off, and the stuff I've had the misfortune to see by him appears
to me to be full of conspiracy theories and deranged raving.  The clue
might have been when he referred to us as "bitches".

"Don't feed the trolls" might have worked once, but sometimes they
start talking to each other, and it becomes difficult for a bystander
to tell that everyone else is ignoring them, and it keeps threads like
this one alive.

I reject the idea that those of us who work on GCC have to put up with
arbitrary emails from random crazies on the internet without even the
simple recourse of being able to put individuals on moderation.  That
might have worked 20 years ago when I thought ESR was relevant, but
seems absurdly out-of-date to me today.

As usual, these are my opinions only, not necessarily those of my
employer

Dave

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Christopher Dimech]

---------------------
Christopher Dimech
General Administrator - Naiad Informatics - GNU Project (Geocomputation)
- Geophysical Simulation
- Geological Subsurface Mapping
- Disaster Preparedness and Mitigation
- Natural Resource Exploration and Production
- Free Software Advocacy


> Sent: Monday, April 19, 2021 at 2:51 AM
> From: "David Malcolm via Gcc" <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>
> To: "Ian Lance Taylor" <iant@google.com>
> Cc: "GCC Development" <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>
> Subject: Re: removing toxic emailers
>
> On Sun, 2021-04-18 at 09:10 -0400, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
>
> Sorry for prolonging this thread-of-doom; I'm loathe to reply to Eric
> because I worry that it will encourage him.  I wrote a long rebuttal to
> his last email to me about his great insights into the minds of women
> but didn't send it in the hope of reducing the temperature of the
> conversation.
>
> That said...
>
> > Ian Lance Taylor via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>:
> > > This conversation has moved well off-topic for the GCC mailing lists.
> > >
> > > Some of the posts here do not follow the GNU Kind Communication
> > > Guidelines
> > > (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/kind-communication.en.html).
> > >
> > > I suggest that people who want to continue this thread take it off
> > > the
> > > GCC mailing list.
> > >
> > > Thanks.
> > >
> > > Ian
> >
> > Welcome to the consequences of abandoning "You shall judge by the code
> > alone."
> >
> > This is what it will be like, *forever*, until you reassert that norm.
>
> Or we could ignore the false dilemma that Eric is asserting, and
> instead moderate the list, or even just moderate those who have never
> contributed to GCC but persist in emailing the list.
>
> Personally, I've been moving all posts by Christopher Dimech to this
> list direct from my inbox to my archive without reading them for the
> last several days, and it's helped my mood considerably.  He's been
> prolifically posting to the list recently, but in the 8 years I've been
> involved in gcc development I've never heard of him before this thing
> kicked off, and the stuff I've had the misfortune to see by him appears
> to me to be full of conspiracy theories and deranged raving.  The clue
> might have been when he referred to us as "bitches".

> "Don't feed the trolls" might have worked once, but sometimes they
> start talking to each other, and it becomes difficult for a bystander
> to tell that everyone else is ignoring them, and it keeps threads like
> this one alive.
>
> I reject the idea that those of us who work on GCC have to put up with
> arbitrary emails from random crazies on the internet without even the
> simple recourse of being able to put individuals on moderation.  That
> might have worked 20 years ago when I thought ESR was relevant, but
> seems absurdly out-of-date to me today.
>
> As usual, these are my opinions only, not necessarily those of my
> employer

The deranged raving is the disclaimer every time an employee posts
something.


> Dave
>
>
>

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Alexandre Oliva]

David,

On Apr 18, 2021, David Malcolm via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org> wrote:

> I reject the idea that those of us who work on GCC have to put up with
> arbitrary emails from random crazies on the internet without even the
> simple recourse of being able to put individuals on moderation.

All sides in this multi-threaded debate, since the very first message,
have put forth crazy, unfounded, unsupported, and false theories.  That
you're willing to tolerate some, because you find them believable, but
are not willing to tolerate others, because you disagree with them, is
not conducive of the tolerant and welcoming atmosphere I'd like us to
pursue.

That you claim some are entitled to share their opinions, because
they've contributed code (and you agree with them), and that others are
not because they haven't (and you disagree with them), but you do not
disqualify those who have not contributed code (but you agree with them)
and dismiss those who have (that you disagree with), you not only
confirm that the issue really is about agreement/disagreement, but
attempt to frame the intolerance to dissenting ideas as a chaste system.
Again, not conducive of the tolerant and welcoming atmosphere I'd like
us to pursue.


I recall a scene from the original Cosmos TV series, by Carl Sagan, in
which he's set within an out-of-scale model of the solar system, walking
about the planets and talking about some batshit crazy theory by some
scientist about how a planet-sized body had some day been ejected from
Jupiter and floated about the solar system causing, among other effects,
the Earth to stop spinning and then start spinning again, as described
in some religious book.

Then he proceeds to describe the most serious scientific problem
involving that theory: that some self-proclaimed scientists attempted to
prevent those ideas from being published.


Preventing ideas you don't already agree with from being shared is not
the way to do science, quite the opposite.  Being intolerant to ideas
that aren't prevalent in your filter bubble, and demanding others to
take action to protect you from as much as being exposed to them, does
not seem conducive of scientific progress, of collaboration, of
tolerance, of inclusivity, or of diversity.  I certainly don't find that
welcoming, but rather toxic.  I find it requiring alignment and
obedience rather than diversity and freedom.


Please reflect some more thoroughly about this apparent misalignment
between your actions and your words.

Thanks for reading,

-- 
Alexandre Oliva, happy hacker  https://FSFLA.org/blogs/lxo/
   Free Software Activist         GNU Toolchain Engineer
        Vim, Vi, Voltei pro Emacs -- GNUlius Caesar

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Jonathan Wakely]

On Sun, 18 Apr 2021 at 16:32, David Malcolm wrote:
>
> "Don't feed the trolls" might have worked once, but sometimes they
> start talking to each other, and it becomes difficult for a bystander
> to tell that everyone else is ignoring them, and it keeps threads like
> this one alive.
>
> I reject the idea that those of us who work on GCC have to put up with
> arbitrary emails from random crazies on the internet without even the
> simple recourse of being able to put individuals on moderation.  That
> might have worked 20 years ago when I thought ESR was relevant, but
> seems absurdly out-of-date to me today.

Hear hear. "Just ignore them" allows the trolls to dominate the
discussion, and makes it appear that the entire GCC project is full of
such people (when in fact the ones dominating the discussions have
nothing to do with the project).

Moderation is not censorship.

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Jonathan Wakely]

On Sun, 18 Apr 2021 at 19:54, Alexandre Oliva via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org> wrote:
> That you claim some are entitled to share their opinions, because
> they've contributed code (and you agree with them), and that others are
> not because they haven't (and you disagree with them), but you do not
> disqualify those who have not contributed code (but you agree with them)
> and dismiss those who have (that you disagree with), you not only
> confirm that the issue really is about agreement/disagreement, but
> attempt to frame the intolerance to dissenting ideas as a chaste system.

Utter nonsense, Alex. I think it's clear I don't agree with most of
your posts on this list in the past month, but it would be silly to
suggest that you should not be allowed to post here, given your track
record. Dave didn't say who he thinks should or shouldn't be
moderated, so why do you think he said that those he agrees with are
welcome to share their opinion? He said "those who have never
contributed to GCC but persist in emailing the list" so why do you
infer he only means those he disagrees with? Are you projecting maybe?

To me a simple rule makes sense (and is what is used on another list
that I am the moderator for, with not a single complain about my
moderation in many years): every new subscriber has their "moderated"
flag set by default. When a moderator approves their post, they have
the option of clearing the "moderated" flag, if it's clear they are
going to contribute usefully. That flag can be set again if somebody
is disruptive or refuses to follow the list policies and stay on
topic.


> Again, not conducive of the tolerant and welcoming atmosphere I'd like
> us to pursue.

Neither is making false claims about Dave's claims or his motives for
moderation. Stop it.


>
> I recall a scene from the original Cosmos TV series, by Carl Sagan, in
> which he's set within an out-of-scale model of the solar system, walking
> about the planets and talking about some batshit crazy theory by some
> scientist about how a planet-sized body had some day been ejected from
> Jupiter and floated about the solar system causing, among other effects,
> the Earth to stop spinning and then start spinning again, as described
> in some religious book.

Sounds like Velikovsky. Less ridiculous than some of the ideas posted
to this list recently.

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Apr 18, 2021, Jonathan Wakely <jwakely.gcc@gmail.com> wrote:

> Dave didn't say who he thinks should or shouldn't be moderated,

Shall we ask him to confirm what I read between the lines?

Shall we ask Nathan?

Shall we ask you?


> it would be silly to suggest that you should not be allowed to post
> here, given your track record

I happen to disagree with the underlying premise, that my opinion should
be any more legitimate or welcome because of my modest contributions to
the project.

Besides the implied chaste system that I've already objected to in the
previous message, the approach you suggested amounts to regarding people
as guilty until proven innocent.  I support the opposite alternative,
the one prescribed in the declaration of human rights and adopted in
most civilized societies, that recommends people to be regarded as
innocent until proven guilty.

I find systems in which people are not welcome by default, but rather
need to first earn a baseline of respect that every human being ought to
be entitled to, are the opposite of welcoming, and the unchecked powers
needed to implement them are too prone to abuse.  I've seen such powers
being abused, and I've found that absolutely intolerable.

Plus, there's a cautionary principle that I subscribe to, that it's
preferrable to find 10 guilty parties not-guilty and let them go free,
than to treat one single innocent party as guilty.


> so why do you think he said that those he agrees with are
> welcome to share their opinion?

Mainly because of timing, threading and general disposition.
Even if he didn't state it expressly, it has not been hard to tell.
I'd welcome certainty instead, either way.

Whose messages would you prefer to have had the power to filter out, or
that whoever did had filtered out from your view?

Nathan, how about you?

David, how about you?


> Are you projecting maybe?

I doubt it.  I don't find myself wanting or calling for people to be
prevented from expressing their opinions, no matter how much I disagree
with them, or how much I find they may be undermining what I stand for
with their stance.

I do notice, however, when people call for suppression of dissenting
voices, on arguments that apply equally or even more strongly to aligned
voices, but that did not motivate calls for suppression on the same
grounds.  It's not even like I have to actively search for such
patterns, asymmetries jump out at me and catch my attention.


-- 
Alexandre Oliva, happy hacker  https://FSFLA.org/blogs/lxo/
   Free Software Activist         GNU Toolchain Engineer
        Vim, Vi, Voltei pro Emacs -- GNUlius Caesar

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Apr 18, 2021, Jonathan Wakely via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org> wrote:

> "Just ignore them" allows the trolls to dominate the discussion

*nod*

That's why it's best to dissent politely, lest they incorrectly conclude
their opinions are consensual, or majoritary, just because they've
driven dissenters into silence.


Violent emotional responses is what trolls of all alignments aim for.
Let's not give them that.  Let's not give them reasons to denounce
censorship either.  Let's dissent politely and kindly, without calling
them names, whether trolls or jerks or crazy.  Ad troll[i]um is a very
popular fallacious argument these days, but it's just as logically
unsound as other fallacies.

The best answer to unwanted speech is not censorship, but rather more
good speech.


It's true that negotiating and settling with wildly different opinions
requires more effort than having despotic powers to dictate the right
answer.  The community has made it clear what political model it
prefers, so let's put that in practice, shall we?

-- 
Alexandre Oliva, happy hacker  https://FSFLA.org/blogs/lxo/
   Free Software Activist         GNU Toolchain Engineer
        Vim, Vi, Voltei pro Emacs -- GNUlius Caesar

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Frosku]

On Sun Apr 18, 2021 at 8:13 PM BST, Jonathan Wakely via Gcc wrote:
> Utter nonsense, Alex. I think it's clear I don't agree with most of
> your posts on this list in the past month, but it would be silly to
> suggest that you should not be allowed to post here, given your track
> record. Dave didn't say who he thinks should or shouldn't be
> moderated, so why do you think he said that those he agrees with are
> welcome to share their opinion? He said "those who have never
> contributed to GCC but persist in emailing the list" so why do you
> infer he only means those he disagrees with? Are you projecting maybe?

I'm genuinely trying to wrap my head around this. Front and centre of the
anti-RMS argument is that this is about becoming more welcoming. Is this
some kind of Orwellian doublespeak? That the project should become more
welcoming by casting off the neurodivergent leader who founded it and
putting up more barriers to participation?

Whoever heard of a free software community which bans its users from
participating? Let alone one which erects this metaphorical Trumpian wall
with its wrought iron, well-manned gates under the guise of being *more*
welcoming?

> To me a simple rule makes sense (and is what is used on another list
> that I am the moderator for, with not a single complain about my
> moderation in many years): every new subscriber has their "moderated"
> flag set by default. When a moderator approves their post, they have
> the option of clearing the "moderated" flag, if it's clear they are
> going to contribute usefully. That flag can be set again if somebody
> is disruptive or refuses to follow the list policies and stay on
> topic.

Why is it that those with the most radical ideas always seem to have the
least tolerance for dissent and feel the most threatened by discussion?
It's quite clear that your criteria for 'disruption' has more to do with
whether or not people agree with you than whether or not they're making
actual arguments or contributing in good faith. You're proposing for GCC
to act even less accountable to its (non-corporate) users than corporate
America does. How is this in the spirit of free software again?

How many values is it worth casting down the drain to achieve this promised
utopia where people never have to hear a voice they disagree with again?

>>= %frosku = { os => 'gnu+linux', editor => 'emacs', coffee => 1 } =<<

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Frosku]

On Sun Apr 18, 2021 at 9:22 PM BST, Alexandre Oliva via Gcc wrote:
> That's why it's best to dissent politely, lest they incorrectly conclude
> their opinions are consensual, or majoritary, just because they've
> driven dissenters into silence.

The problem is, Alex, that the trolls mostly haven't been on the dissenting
side. All of the childish namecalling -- "jerks", "trolls", "crazies" --
and the insinuations that our voices aren't worth listening to because we
don't get paid $250,000 a year by Google to contribute to GCC all day are
coming from the pro-forking side.

Once upon a time, free software developers understood that users' opinions
were as valid as contributor's opinions. For a project like a compiler which
exists solely to enable other projects to exist, it seems like the only users
who are deemed worthy of representation in the 'room where it happens' now
are the major Corporations with the ability to sponsor a contributor on their
behalf. It's becoming very difficult to engage in good faith against this
kind of overt hostility to the grassroots users.

> Violent emotional responses is what trolls of all alignments aim for.
> Let's not give them that. Let's not give them reasons to denounce
> censorship either. Let's dissent politely and kindly, without calling
> them names, whether trolls or jerks or crazy. Ad troll[i]um is a very
> popular fallacious argument these days, but it's just as logically
> unsound as other fallacies.

I've only seen one or two genuine 'trolls' in the discussion, as in, people
who are just here to fish for a reaction who don't have an actual vested
interest in the outcome. All of them have sent a couple of messages and then
left. Completely agree with you that 'ad trollum' is being deployed here to
conflate the legitimate voices of concerned free software advocates with
childish trolling, much to the detriment of the level of conversation.

> It's true that negotiating and settling with wildly different opinions
> requires more effort than having despotic powers to dictate the right
> answer. The community has made it clear what political model it
> prefers, so let's put that in practice, shall we?

I think there's a fundamental disagreement here where we're defining 'the
community' broadly -- to include contributors, users, and pretty much the
whole free software and GNU community -- and certain people on the pro-
fork side are taking a more corporate view that only 'the firm' should get
any input into 'internal business'. This is not the free software community
that I recognize.

>>= %frosku = { os => 'gnu+linux', editor => 'emacs', coffee => 1 } =<<

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Christopher Dimech]

> Sent: Monday, April 19, 2021 at 1:10 PM
> From: "Frosku" <frosku@frosku.com>
> To: "Alexandre Oliva" <oliva@gnu.org>, "Jonathan Wakely via Gcc" <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>
> Subject: Re: removing toxic emailers
>
> On Sun Apr 18, 2021 at 9:22 PM BST, Alexandre Oliva via Gcc wrote:
> > That's why it's best to dissent politely, lest they incorrectly conclude
> > their opinions are consensual, or majoritary, just because they've
> > driven dissenters into silence.
>
> The problem is, Alex, that the trolls mostly haven't been on the dissenting
> side. All of the childish namecalling -- "jerks", "trolls", "crazies" --
> and the insinuations that our voices aren't worth listening to because we
> don't get paid $250,000 a year by Google to contribute to GCC all day are
> coming from the pro-forking side.
>
> Once upon a time, free software developers understood that users' opinions
> were as valid as contributor's opinions. For a project like a compiler which
> exists solely to enable other projects to exist, it seems like the only users
> who are deemed worthy of representation in the 'room where it happens' now
> are the major Corporations with the ability to sponsor a contributor on their
> behalf. It's becoming very difficult to engage in good faith against this
> kind of overt hostility to the grassroots users.
>
> > Violent emotional responses is what trolls of all alignments aim for.
> > Let's not give them that. Let's not give them reasons to denounce
> > censorship either. Let's dissent politely and kindly, without calling
> > them names, whether trolls or jerks or crazy. Ad troll[i]um is a very
> > popular fallacious argument these days, but it's just as logically
> > unsound as other fallacies.
>
> I've only seen one or two genuine 'trolls' in the discussion, as in, people
> who are just here to fish for a reaction who don't have an actual vested
> interest in the outcome. All of them have sent a couple of messages and then
> left. Completely agree with you that 'ad trollum' is being deployed here to
> conflate the legitimate voices of concerned free software advocates with
> childish trolling, much to the detriment of the level of conversation.
>
> > It's true that negotiating and settling with wildly different opinions
> > requires more effort than having despotic powers to dictate the right
> > answer. The community has made it clear what political model it
> > prefers, so let's put that in practice, shall we?
>
> I think there's a fundamental disagreement here where we're defining 'the
> community' broadly -- to include contributors, users, and pretty much the
> whole free software and GNU community -- and certain people on the pro-
> fork side are taking a more corporate view that only 'the firm' should get
> any input into 'internal business'. This is not the free software community
> that I recognize.

That's quite accurate.  I can see again the emergence of the phreakers
types of the 1980's, the minority that were up to no good.  Want to join
the club Frosku?


> >>= %frosku = { os => 'gnu+linux', editor => 'emacs', coffee => 1 } =<<
>

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Jonathan Wakely]

On Mon, 19 Apr 2021, 02:41 Frosku, wrote:

> On Sun Apr 18, 2021 at 9:22 PM BST, Alexandre Oliva via Gcc wrote:
> > That's why it's best to dissent politely, lest they incorrectly conclude
> > their opinions are consensual, or majoritary, just because they've
> > driven dissenters into silence.
>
> The problem is, Alex, that the trolls mostly haven't been on the dissenting
> side. All of the childish namecalling -- "jerks", "trolls", "crazies" --
> and the insinuations that our voices aren't worth listening to because we
> don't get paid $250,000 a year by Google to contribute to GCC all day are
> coming from the pro-forking side.
>

Google doesn't pay anybody to work on GCC all day. You know nothing about
GCC or the "problems" you're complaining about. Your input to this
conversation is not constructive.



> Once upon a time, free software developers understood that users' opinions
> were as valid as contributor's opinions.



That depends on the user.

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Frosku]

On Mon Apr 19, 2021 at 7:29 AM BST, Jonathan Wakely wrote:
> On Mon, 19 Apr 2021, 02:41 Frosku, wrote:
>
> > On Sun Apr 18, 2021 at 9:22 PM BST, Alexandre Oliva via Gcc wrote:
> > > That's why it's best to dissent politely, lest they incorrectly conclude
> > > their opinions are consensual, or majoritary, just because they've
> > > driven dissenters into silence.
> >
> > The problem is, Alex, that the trolls mostly haven't been on the dissenting
> > side. All of the childish namecalling -- "jerks", "trolls", "crazies" --
> > and the insinuations that our voices aren't worth listening to because we
> > don't get paid $250,000 a year by Google to contribute to GCC all day are
> > coming from the pro-forking side.
> >
>
> Google doesn't pay anybody to work on GCC all day. You know nothing
> about
> GCC or the "problems" you're complaining about. Your input to this
> conversation is not constructive.
>
>
>
> > Once upon a time, free software developers understood that users' opinions
> > were as valid as contributor's opinions.
>
>
>
> That depends on the user.

Thanks for perfectly illustrating my point. I don't agree with you so my opinion
isn't valid and I'm stupid/clueless/etc.

>>= %frosku = { os => 'gnu+linux', editor => 'emacs', coffee => 1 } =<<

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Thomas Rodgers]

On 2021-04-18 23:29, Jonathan Wakely via Gcc wrote:

> On Mon, 19 Apr 2021, 02:41 Frosku, wrote:
> 
> On Sun Apr 18, 2021 at 9:22 PM BST, Alexandre Oliva via Gcc wrote: 
> That's why it's best to dissent politely, lest they incorrectly 
> conclude
> their opinions are consensual, or majoritary, just because they've
> driven dissenters into silence.
> The problem is, Alex, that the trolls mostly haven't been on the 
> dissenting
> side. All of the childish namecalling -- "jerks", "trolls", "crazies" 
> --
> and the insinuations that our voices aren't worth listening to because 
> we
> don't get paid $250,000 a year by Google to contribute to GCC all day 
> are
> coming from the pro-forking side.

Google doesn't pay anybody to work on GCC all day. You know nothing 
about
GCC or the "problems" you're complaining about. Your input to this
conversation is not constructive.

> Once upon a time, free software developers understood that users' 
> opinions
> were as valid as contributor's opinions.

That depends on the user.

Once upon a time, free software's developers *were* it's primary users, 
i.e. they built the technology for themselves and made it freely 
available in the hope that it would be useful to others. It's also the 
case that the vast majority of GCC *current* users are not here making 
proclamations about what GCC's project governance should be. Rather it's 
a vocal and vanishingly small minority, who have contributed nothing of 
value, code or insights, and continue to vocally do so. Many of GCC's 
users are, however, watching in horror at the absolutely amateurish way 
in which this is playing out and wondering if their long term commitment 
should be to using this piece of software to build their 
products/businesses.

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Christopher Dimech]

> Sent: Tuesday, April 20, 2021 at 3:06 AM
> From: "Thomas Rodgers" <rodgert@appliantology.com>
> To: "Jonathan Wakely" <jwakely.gcc@gmail.com>
> Cc: "Jonathan Wakely via Gcc" <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>
> Subject: Re: removing toxic emailers
>
> On 2021-04-18 23:29, Jonathan Wakely via Gcc wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, 19 Apr 2021, 02:41 Frosku, wrote:
> > 
> > On Sun Apr 18, 2021 at 9:22 PM BST, Alexandre Oliva via Gcc wrote: 
> > That's why it's best to dissent politely, lest they incorrectly 
> > conclude
> > their opinions are consensual, or majoritary, just because they've
> > driven dissenters into silence.
> > The problem is, Alex, that the trolls mostly haven't been on the 
> > dissenting
> > side. All of the childish namecalling -- "jerks", "trolls", "crazies" 
> > --
> > and the insinuations that our voices aren't worth listening to because 
> > we
> > don't get paid $250,000 a year by Google to contribute to GCC all day 
> > are
> > coming from the pro-forking side.
> 
> Google doesn't pay anybody to work on GCC all day. You know nothing 
> about
> GCC or the "problems" you're complaining about. Your input to this
> conversation is not constructive.
> 
> > Once upon a time, free software developers understood that users' 
> > opinions
> > were as valid as contributor's opinions.
> 
> That depends on the user.
> 
> Once upon a time, free software's developers *were* it's primary users, 
> i.e. they built the technology for themselves and made it freely 
> available in the hope that it would be useful to others. It's also the 
> case that the vast majority of GCC *current* users are not here making 
> proclamations about what GCC's project governance should be. Rather it's 
> a vocal and vanishingly small minority, who have contributed nothing of 
> value, code or insights, and continue to vocally do so. Many of GCC's 
> users are, however, watching in horror at the absolutely amateurish way 
> in which this is playing out and wondering if their long term commitment 
> should be to using this piece of software to build their 
> products/businesses.

Completely false.  Free software's developers were people who were disgusted
with the communities of software developers that started restricting users.
The Free Software Community wanted software that they could use and modify
code for any purpose, notwithstanding any prohibition other developers 
wanted to impose on them.

The hackers of the 70s and 80s who transformed computing and the early 
internet were known for their wit.  This included using a playboy photo
of Lena Söderberg for image processing.  They had got tired of the 
usually dull test images used at conferences.  She rapidly became 
the First Lady of Computing.  Many were very happy to meet her in person
and ask her an autograph.  n 1997, Forsén worked for a government agency
supervising  disabled employees who archived data using computers and
scanners.  In 2015, she was guest of honor at the banquet of IEEE, 
delivering a speech, and chairing the best paper award ceremony.

Those were exciting times, but by now government-sepported and
corporation-supported organizations have caught up; what was once
a liberating technology has become a conduit for surveillance and
manipulation.  

Even a chimp can write code.  So I give the reply attributed to 
Eric Raymond, after Microsoft offerred him a job.

I'd thank you for your offer of employment at Microsoft, except
that it indicates that either you or your research team (or both)
couldn't get a clue if it were pounded into you with baseball bats.
What were you going to do with the rest of your afternoon, offer jobs
to Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds?  Or were you going to stick to
something easier, like talking Pope Benedict into presiding at a
Satanist orgy? - Eric Raymond

There was a time when I felt too much at odds with Eric, but today
he has became a friend.

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Frosku]

On Mon Apr 19, 2021 at 4:06 PM BST, Thomas Rodgers wrote:
> Google doesn't pay anybody to work on GCC all day. You know nothing
> about
> GCC or the "problems" you're complaining about. Your input to this
> conversation is not constructive.

This feels like that moment in 8Mile, "pay attention, you're saying the
same shit that he said." The personal insults and technical semantic
arguments are testament to the fact that you're not willing or not able
to argue the points. It's quite incredible that two people have replied
to the same multiple-hundred word e-mail about a broad issue of trying
to gatekeep discussion and both have focused on semantics ("it's not
*all* day"). I will remember not to use hyperbole in future for fear of
it being taken literally and used as an excuse to dodge the point.

> > Once upon a time, free software developers understood that users'
> > opinions
> > were as valid as contributor's opinions.
>
> That depends on the user.
>
> Once upon a time, free software's developers *were* it's primary users,
> i.e. they built the technology for themselves and made it freely
> available in the hope that it would be useful to others. It's also the
> case that the vast majority of GCC *current* users are not here making
> proclamations about what GCC's project governance should be. Rather it's
> a vocal and vanishingly small minority, who have contributed nothing of
> value, code or insights, and continue to vocally do so. Many of GCC's
> users are, however, watching in horror at the absolutely amateurish way
> in which this is playing out and wondering if their long term commitment
> should be to using this piece of software to build their
> products/businesses.

It's obvious that the majority of current users aren't here, the majority of
current users don't use the mailing lists. What have you done to try to
consult their opinions on the matter? It's amazing how much effort is being
expended to silence opposition, whilst not even one argument has been made
as to how breaking from FSF/GNU will result in a better technical outcome.

>>= %frosku = { os => 'gnu+linux', editor => 'emacs', coffee => 1 } =<<

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Christopher Dimech]

> Sent: Tuesday, April 20, 2021 at 3:47 PM
> From: "Frosku" <frosku@frosku.com>
> To: "Thomas Rodgers" <rodgert@appliantology.com>, "Jonathan Wakely" <jwakely.gcc@gmail.com>
> Cc: "Jonathan Wakely via Gcc" <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>
> Subject: Re: removing toxic emailers
>
> On Mon Apr 19, 2021 at 4:06 PM BST, Thomas Rodgers wrote:
> > Google doesn't pay anybody to work on GCC all day. You know nothing
> > about
> > GCC or the "problems" you're complaining about. Your input to this
> > conversation is not constructive.
>
> This feels like that moment in 8Mile, "pay attention, you're saying the
> same shit that he said." The personal insults and technical semantic
> arguments are testament to the fact that you're not willing or not able
> to argue the points. It's quite incredible that two people have replied
> to the same multiple-hundred word e-mail about a broad issue of trying
> to gatekeep discussion and both have focused on semantics ("it's not
> *all* day"). I will remember not to use hyperbole in future for fear of
> it being taken literally and used as an excuse to dodge the point.
>
> > > Once upon a time, free software developers understood that users'
> > > opinions
> > > were as valid as contributor's opinions.
> >
> > That depends on the user.
> >
> > Once upon a time, free software's developers *were* it's primary users,
> > i.e. they built the technology for themselves and made it freely
> > available in the hope that it would be useful to others. It's also the
> > case that the vast majority of GCC *current* users are not here making
> > proclamations about what GCC's project governance should be. Rather it's
> > a vocal and vanishingly small minority, who have contributed nothing of
> > value, code or insights, and continue to vocally do so. Many of GCC's
> > users are, however, watching in horror at the absolutely amateurish way
> > in which this is playing out and wondering if their long term commitment
> > should be to using this piece of software to build their
> > products/businesses.
>
> It's obvious that the majority of current users aren't here, the majority of
> current users don't use the mailing lists. What have you done to try to
> consult their opinions on the matter? It's amazing how much effort is being
> expended to silence opposition, whilst not even one argument has been made
> as to how breaking from FSF/GNU will result in a better technical outcome.

Is that right!!!  Users want to build their products and businesses?
Sounds very corporate to me, with wording that suggests the provision
of resources working on other projects for personal profit.  The users
watching in horror are most likely developers who see Richard Stallman
as an obstacle.

GCC can never break from Gnu.  They can only break from gnu, clone gcc and call
it something else such as gcc-fuckup, gcc-screw and the like.  Then, if they
manage to fuckup the licensing or the compatibility with Gcc, we shall wait for
a new generation of forward thinking hackers to join us.  The success of Gcc was
achieved to large extent due to the personal efforts of Rms.

These people never learned from the Cygnus EGCS Saga, because they cannot get
beyond the short-sighted viewpoint of "always disobey every authority".
The U.S.S. Cygnus was a "Death Ship".  Reinhardt had planned to fly her
through the black hole but suffered sever damage and was torn apart.

> >>= %frosku = { os => 'gnu+linux', editor => 'emacs', coffee => 1 } =<<
>

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Jonathan Wakely]

On Tue, 20 Apr 2021 at 04:47, Frosku <frosku@frosku.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon Apr 19, 2021 at 4:06 PM BST, Thomas Rodgers wrote:
> > Google doesn't pay anybody to work on GCC all day. You know nothing
> > about
> > GCC or the "problems" you're complaining about. Your input to this
> > conversation is not constructive.
>
> This feels like that moment in 8Mile, "pay attention, you're saying the
> same shit that he said." The personal insults and technical semantic
> arguments are testament to the fact that you're not willing or not able
> to argue the points. It's quite incredible that two people have replied
> to the same multiple-hundred word e-mail about a broad issue of trying
> to gatekeep discussion and both have focused on semantics ("it's not
> *all* day"). I will remember not to use hyperbole in future for fear of
> it being taken literally and used as an excuse to dodge the point.

Check the git logs, Google employees are minor contributors these
days. The GPLv3 scared Google away from GCC years ago.

I've unsubscribed from this list now, so please stop CCing me. I'm not
interested in continuing this.

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Ian Lance Taylor]

On Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 12:54 AM Jonathan Wakely via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>
wrote:

>
> Check the git logs, Google employees are minor contributors these
> days. The GPLv3 scared Google away from GCC years ago.
>

Just for the record, Google has no problem with the GPLv3.  Google stopped
working on GCC because they made a company decision to use clang instead.
That decision was made for technical reasons, not licensing reasons.

Ian

>

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Richard Kenner]

> Just for the record, Google has no problem with the GPLv3.  Google stopped
> working on GCC because they made a company decision to use clang instead.
> That decision was made for technical reasons, not licensing reasons.

But note that some cellphone manufacturers (e.g, Samsung) have taken
steps to prevent non-signed binaries from being loaded in their phones.
This would have been problematic ("Tivoisation") if GPLv3 code was
included in Android.

Re: removing toxic emailers

[David Brown]

On 20/04/2021 16:15, Richard Kenner via Gcc wrote:
>> Just for the record, Google has no problem with the GPLv3.  Google stopped
>> working on GCC because they made a company decision to use clang instead.
>> That decision was made for technical reasons, not licensing reasons.
> 
> But note that some cellphone manufacturers (e.g, Samsung) have taken
> steps to prevent non-signed binaries from being loaded in their phones.
> This would have been problematic ("Tivoisation") if GPLv3 code was
> included in Android.
> 

That would surely only be relevant if people wanted to use their
telephones to compile code?  The license of the compiler does not matter
(except for libraries or code snippets that are copied directly by the
compiler to the binaries, and gcc has permissive license exceptions for
these.)

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Richard Kenner]

> That would surely only be relevant if people wanted to use their
> telephones to compile code? 

That's not completely clear.  It would certainly be true if the compiler
were included on the phone, whether or not the compiler was actually used.

But I was more addressing the general comment that Google doesn't care
about GPLv3 than the specific issue of GCC.  If the kernel were GPLv3,
for example, there would be an issue with what Samsung is doing.

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Soul Studios]

On 15/04/2021 10:40 am, Frosku wrote:
> On Wed Apr 14, 2021 at 9:49 PM BST, Paul Koning via Gcc wrote:
>>
>> My answer is "it depends". More precisely, in the past I would have
>> favored those who decline because the environment is unpleasant -- with
>> the implied assumption being that their objections are reasonable. Given
>> the emergency of cancel culture, that assumption is no longer
>> automatically valid.
>>
>> This is why I asked the question "who decides?" Given a disagreement in
>> which the proposed remedy is to ostracise a participant, it is necessary
>> to inquire for what reason this should be done (and, perhaps, who is
>> pushing for it to be done). My suggestion is that this judgment can be
>> made by the community (via secret ballot), unless it is decided to
>> delegate that power to a smaller body, considered as trustees, or
>> whatever you choose to call them.
>>
>> paul
> 
> I think, in general, it's fine to leave this decision to moderators. It's
> just a little disconcerting when one of the people who would probably be
> moderating is saying that he could have shut down the discussion if he
> could only ban jerks, as if to imply that everyone who dares to disagree
> with his position is a jerk worthy of a ban.


A little late to the party, but thought this was worth commenting on- 
from my perspective, as long as there is some sort of consensus amongst 
moderators about who is worth banning, as opposed to whether it can be 
fixed by calling the person out on their ongoing behaviour, it's 
probably worth doing. If that power is left to one mod, it's not a good 
thing. 3 or a larger odd number of mods is best for avoiding stalemates, 
and more is better.
As an example of a controversial mod choice and without wanting to 
reopen wounds here, if I were a mod I could quite easily ban Nathan for 
the dishonesty and divisiveness of his initial post (see below if you 
require substantive talk around that), despite the fact that I have no 
particular love for Stallman or any investment in the topic. But another 
mod might see that contribution as 'the end justifying the means' in 
terms of bringing in an inevitable debate around Stallman's offputting 
personal manner, and whether that fits in today's society. Another mod 
might have another opinion etc.

Two or three heads, are better than one, when it comes to behaviour 
judgement - particularly when an international community is at stake. 
And the more temperamentally/culturally diverse the mods are - the 
better for decision-making overall.








=====

>      1. 'skeptical that voluntarily pedophilia harms children.’ 
> stallman's own  archives 2006-mar-jun  I note that children are
> *incapable* of consenting. That’s what the age of consent means.

He has recanted on this as of 2019 
(https://www.stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html#14_September_2019_(Sex_between_an_adult_and_a_child_is_wrong))

because people took the time to point out to him why his opinion was 
wrong. Omitting his recantation is, by my standards, a lie by omission. 
It doesn't make what he initially said any less terrible. But it 
clarifies his actual position.



>      2. 'end censorship of “child pornography”’. Stallman's archives 
> 2012-jul-oct.html Notice use of “quotes” to down play what is actually
> being requested.

While I don't actually agree with Stallman in the slightest, his stated 
objection is "it's common practice for teenagers to exchange nude photos 
with their lovers, and they all potentially could be imprisoned for 
this. A substantial fraction of them are actually prosecuted. "

That's very different from how it's been presented here - a lie by omission.



>      3. 'gentle expressions of attraction’ Stallman's archives > 
2012-jul-oct.html Condoning a variant of the wolf-whistle.  Unless
> one’s talking to one’s lover, ‘gentle invitations for sex’ by a
> stranger is *grooming* (be it child or of-age).

If you ever been to a bar, or an open-air event, or god forbid a party, 
you are aware that this is an obvious lie (for adults).

Secondarily, nothing in Richard's text relates to wolf-whistling or 
variants.

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Frosku]

On Thu Apr 15, 2021 at 3:40 PM BST, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> I intended the weaker observation that driving away a large number of
> smart autistic assholes (and non-assholes with poor social skills)
> is not necessarily a good trade for the people the project might
> recruit by being "more welcoming".
>
> Possibly that *would* be a good trade. I have decades of experience
> that makes me doubt this. I think the claim needs to be examined
> skeptically, not just uncritically accepted because we value being
> "nice".

I'm not even sure that this only applies to autists, over the years
I've had various interactions where I've thought someone was being
an asshole but it turned out English wasn't their first language and
they just lacked the depth of vocabulary to express a point politely.

There are also huge disparities in what cultures deem to be polite vs
impolite (high context vs low context cultures, cultural sensitivities
to particular phrases or concepts, etc). I remain unconvinced that
trying to define 'jerks' by a narrow-minded west coast American ideal
and enforce that on a global community is not, itself, jerkish.

More often than not, strict speech codes just encourage people to
assume bad faith of each other, and to tone police each other instead
of engaging in substantive debate on the issues. I also cannot remember
ever seeing one enforced equally against everyone, rather than become
a tool of an entrenched majority culture against a minority culture.

I have yet to see a project where a strict speech code has improved the
dialectic, rather than degraded it.

>>= %frosku = { os => 'gnu+linux', editor => 'emacs', coffee => 1 } =<<

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Eric S. Raymond]

Adrian via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>:
> Eric S. Raymond <esr@thyrsus.com>:
> > there is actually a value conflict between being "welcoming" in that
> sense and the actual purpose of this list, which is to ship code.
> 
> Speaking as a "high functioning autist", I'm aware of the difficulties that
> some of us have with social interactions - and also that many of us
> construct a persona or multiple personae to interact with others, a
> phenomenon known as "masking".
> 
> I understand why "Asshole" can function as a viable mask for many people,
> because there are cultures where it's tolerated, particularly in
> remote-working groups like mailing lists, where physical altercations are
> unlikely and no-one has to confront the results of their interactions with
> others if they don't want to.
> 
> It doesn't necessarily follow that "smart" == "asshole" though.

I did not intend that claim.

I intended the weaker observation that driving away a large number of
smart autistic assholes (and non-assholes with poor social skills)
is not necessarily a good trade for the people the project might
recruit by being "more welcoming".

Possibly that *would* be a good trade.  I have decades of experience
that makes me doubt this.  I think the claim needs to be examined
skeptically, not just uncritically accepted because we value being
"nice".

In general, I think efforts to guilt-bomb hackers into being "more
inclusive" should be resisted without a clear grasp on what we might
be throwing away by accepting them.  Just because you live inside a
culture doesn't mean you can predict what mutating its assumptions
will do to it, and we have work to do that should not be casually
disrupted.

Note: I am not an autist myself, so I'm not guarding my own flanks
here.  I'm sort of autist-sympathetic, in that I think it is a good
thing autists can join the hacker culture and have a place where their
quirks are useful and tolerated.  I would be a little sad if that were
lost.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Soul Studios]

On 15/04/2021 11:09 am, Adrian via Gcc wrote:
> Eric S. Raymond <esr@thyrsus.com>:
> Speaking as a "high functioning autist", I'm aware of the difficulties that
> some of us have with social interactions - and also that many of us
> construct a persona or multiple personae to interact with others, a
> phenomenon known as "masking".
> 
> I understand why "Asshole" can function as a viable mask for many people,
> because there are cultures where it's tolerated, particularly in
> remote-working groups like mailing lists, where physical altercations are
> unlikely and no-one has to confront the results of their interactions with
> others if they don't want to.
> 

Just wanted to say thanks for this Adrian-
regardless of which position people take on this, I think this serves as 
a collection of useful insights - as does Eric's contribution.
cheers

Re: removing toxic emailers

[Adrian]

Eric S. Raymond <esr@thyrsus.com>:
> there is actually a value conflict between being "welcoming" in that
sense and the actual purpose of this list, which is to ship code.

Speaking as a "high functioning autist", I'm aware of the difficulties that
some of us have with social interactions - and also that many of us
construct a persona or multiple personae to interact with others, a
phenomenon known as "masking".

I understand why "Asshole" can function as a viable mask for many people,
because there are cultures where it's tolerated, particularly in
remote-working groups like mailing lists, where physical altercations are
unlikely and no-one has to confront the results of their interactions with
others if they don't want to.

It doesn't necessarily follow that "smart" == "asshole" though.

I disagree fundamentally that the assessment that the code contributions of
such people are necessarily more positive than those of the people they
drive away - *especially* people like me, another high-functioning autist,
because our difficulty with social interaction often includes a phenomenon
called RSD - Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria - characterised by a
disproportionately overwhelming response to criticism amongst other things.

I've been coding for the better part of 4 decades and generally have
confidence in my ability, and still balk at participating in Free and OSS
projects where the lead members have an abrasive and confrontational style.
I learned to avoid these people (well, maybe the less smart people whose
mask they are copying) at school. Note - I'm not talking about constructive
criticism, I'm specifically talking about being unnecessarily unpleasant.

In contrast I still remember (and talk about) experiences contributing to
projects where the leads have been nothing but friendly and helpful.

It's not just about "the code alone" of one or a few talented "autist"
persons. These projects are intrinsically about community - that's baked
into the license. No-one really "codes alone". The code you never see
because people don't want to join in _could_ be just as great - but if
presenting as assholes has always been and always will be tolerated, maybe
you'll never see it.

Adrian Wilkins