Re: Remove RMS from the GCC Steering Committee

[JeanHeyd Meneide <phdofthehouse@gmail.com>]

Dear GCC Community,

    Hi. My name is JeanHeyd Meneide, my online moniker is "ThePhD"
(not an actual Doctor. Yet!). I spend a lot of my time hacking on C
and C++. Some of the things I've done include:

- Contributing (mostly) a <span> Implementation [1]
- Doing a GSoC for GCC and writing up about fixes for vector<bool> and
other data structures that can be helpful [2] (a lot of these
optimizations were rolled into libstdc++'s normal vector<bool> by
François Dumont, thank you!!)
- Implementing part of my own proposal's [[nodiscard("should have a
reason")]] [3]
- Macros for identifying literal and wide literal encoding, to aid in
code portability and pre-emptively solving a user concern while
preparing for a new C++ proposal that allows identifying the execution
and wide execution character sets deployed by the compiler [4]

     I'm also helping to solve the intmax_t problems in C and C++ so
we can have wider integer types beyond "long long" blessed by
numeric_limits.[5]

     I am also, recently, the ISO/IEC JTC1 SC22 WG14 - Programming
Languages, C: Project Editor. I do not speak for ISO/IEC, the C
Committee, or my National Body here; this e-mail is sent in a person
capacity, but my affiliations should be known (not that they are
hidden with a cursory search, either).

    Asides from many other things, last and most importantly I am a
GCC advocate, a libstdc++ contributor, and an individual who spent an
exorbitant and extraordinary amount of my free time contributing to
these projects and the wider ecosystems in the hope that C, C++, Rust,
and related Systems Programming languages would continue to flourish
under the leadership done by the people here. By the time I was going
to finish my education, the goal was to ramp up these contributions
10-fold. There is much room for improvements in fundamental C and C++
architecture and library, leading me on a long, long journey, to where
I am today.

     I am exactly one of the "future contributors" referenced in the
e-mails by Wakely, Rodgers, Wielaard, Poyarekar, and others here, even
if they were not explicitly thinking of me. Or, I would be:

On Sun, Mar 28, 2021 Mark Wielaard <mark@klomp.org> wrote:
>
> ...
>
> I witnessed something similar recently when we had setup the
> mailinglist to discuss improving governance of the GNU project. When a
> female GNU (GCC) volunteer spoke up she got attacked and harassed. We
> told the harassers that was totally unacceptable and blocked them from
> sending more emails to the list. RMS arranged for those people to get
> unblocked to continue their hate campaign on the public GNU list so
> they could "defend him and the GNU project". That was followed by a
> torrent of hate to the list making any discussion impossible and
> making women feel like they were specifically targeted. He still
> hasn't learned that his words and actions are dog whistles for
> misogynists, transphobics and racists. This really has to stop.
>
> ...

     This is unacceptable. The only reason I was told - as early as
yesterday, by Free Software advocates, to my socially distanced face -
that Stallman was still here is because he was powerless and had no
effect on the project. That it was run by the caring,
community-oriented stewardship of the "real volunteers" doing the
"actual work".

     That is not what this e-mail reveals.

     Further digging into Stallman's own words and behavior also
reveals that he continues to flex this influence throughout the
project (and in other places), showing up (generally unsolicited) into
places to do this kind of gross and extreme harassment and engaging in
canceling our own hardworking contributors that actually write code
and do work. This is not a person who is just here for "historical
reasons" and who has "no power"; this is an active, perpetual threat
to hardworking and contributing members of the Free Software movement.

     I refuse to spend my free time supporting a single bigot and an
entire globe's worth of toxic enthusiasts who actively support his
behavior while letting people like him create horrible ecosystems for
other developers. At the start of this conversation, I was much like
Nathan; I wanted an explanation. Having reviewed the facts of the
situation, I can now unequivocally say that an explanation is not even
close to enough.

      I will never, ever contribute another line of code, another
proposal implementation[6], another optimization, or another
new/better library implementation to GCC and all of its affiliated
projects, including the compilers, glibc, libstdc++, the potential
upcoming Rust implementation, and more until this problem is not
"address", but *fixed*. If you never fix it, I will never return.

Wish you and your community all the best in sorting this out,
JeanHeyd Meneide

[#]: References -
https://gist.github.com/ThePhD/bcfad83f01e6a641c3fda5cfc013a72d