Re: removing toxic emailers

[Christopher Dimech <dimech@gmx.com>]

> 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
> 
>