Re: Remove RMS from the GCC Steering Committee

[Christopher Dimech <dimech@gmx.com>]

> Sent: Thursday, April 01, 2021 at 1:28 AM
> From: "Giacomo Tesio" <giacomo@tesio.it>
> To: "Mark Wielaard" <mark@klomp.org>
> Cc: "GCC Development" <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>, "Nathan Sidwell" <nathan@acm.org>
> Subject: Re: Remove RMS from the GCC Steering Committee
>
> Hi Mark,
>
> I'm a bit in a hurry and do not really want to focus on what happened
> in Harvey: to my eyes that story just show you cannot trust people just
> because they are nice and well known "open source" contributors, or
> because they work for big multinational that "do no evil" or even
> join the Good Guys (TM) of Software Freedom Conservancy.
>
> But let me clarify
>
> On Wed, 31 Mar 2021 13:34:17 +0200 Mark Wielaard wrote:
>
> > I looked a bit at that issue you filed and how they handled your
> > request to remove your code from the project. And I must say I don't
> > really understand what you believe they did wrong, they seemed to have
> > acknowledged and corrected their mistake and then removed all the code
> > you wanted to have removed.
>
> I asked them to `git revert` my changes referencing the issue, so that
> the code I reused in my own fork of Plan 9 was safe that nobody could
> claim copyright of my work after, say, a change in the version control
> system adopted by the project.
>
> Instead they did a `git rebase` over which, I was pretty surprised
> actually, they "accidentaly" squashed some of my own commits verbatim
> (but without my name) in incredibly large commits.
> And you know, they had to git push -f such rebase, breaking all the
> existing github forks (while the `git revert` approach would not have
> caused any issue to anybody)
>
> > There is some disagreement over whether a
> > mass change of function declarations is copyrightable or not.
>
> And implementations. And kernel changes that took a couple of days to
> get right (Harvey kernel was pretty unstable back then). And more I did
> not remember but I noticed back then:
>
>
> > But I happen to agree with them that if there is only one way to do
> > it, then having someone else do the same transformation is a correct
> > way to resolve this.
>
> Sure!
>
> But first, there were several different ways to do that (several
> equivalent typedefs were already in place in u.h, without even
> mentioning macros and so on), and more importantly if you actually
> redo the same work in the same way because there is a single way
> to do that, you do in a dedicated commit with an author that takes
> the clear responsibility for change.
>
> Instead my work (or a totally, byte-for-byte equivalent, one) got
> squashed into gigantic commits that include several very large commits
> of several authors (all mentioned in the commit message... but me).
>
>
> > To make this copyright issue somewhat relevant to GCC. GCC doesn't
> > currently contain individual copyright statements and most of the code
> > is currently assigned to the FSF. So the above mistake won't happen
> > when contributing to GCC, but mostly because of the technicality that
> > you sign away your copyright up front.
>
> Oh sorry, I wasn't clear enough about this.
>
> I'm SURE that this specific issue would not happen on GCC.
> Nor on Linux. Nor in several other Free Software and Open Source
> communities.
>
> But I think you are missing the valuable lesson that the Harvey team
> (some of which actually signed the rms-open-letter) tauht me: I didn't
> expected ANYTHING like this to happen. And I didn't expect SFC to not
> expell a project doing something like this.
>
> I trusted them both. All of them.
>
>
> So ultimately I do not expect this specific issue to occur in a
> hypothetical GCC lead by a Stallman-less Steering Comittee.
>
> But I DO expect that, in the long run, a Stallman-less Steering
> Comittee might do something not aligned with the long-term
> interests of Free Software, abusing my trust again.
>
> Maybe not you. Maybe not the CURRENT Steering Committee.
>
> But people, groups and incentives changes.
> Stallman does not.

It is likely that anothep person or group will evolve, which
although not Stallman-Like, work within the free software idea.

After Newton, there were other illustrious people.  Does not mean
everything stops forever after the demise of Richard.

> Giacomo
>