Re: GCC association with the FSF

[Christopher Dimech <dimech@gmx.com>]

> Sent: Sunday, April 11, 2021 at 7:52 AM
> From: "Thomas Rodgers" <rodgert@appliantology.com>
> To: "Giacomo Tesio" <giacomo@tesio.it>
> Cc: gcc@gcc.gnu.org, "Pankaj Jangid" <pankaj@codeisgreat.org>
> Subject: Re: GCC association with the FSF
>
> On 2021-04-10 09:01, Giacomo Tesio wrote:
>
> > It's fantastic how inclusive you are, isn't it?  :-D
> >
> > Indeed you ARE inclusive to those who share your interests, like
> > Nathan.
> > Just not to everybody else.
> >
>
> I share with Nathan an interest in making GCC the best C++ compiler and
> standard library, and like Nathan, I work to help make that the case. It
> is certainly true I don't have a lot of concern for the concerns of
> those, whose only apparent contribution to the discussion is 'oooh evil
> bad bigcorp's subverting mah compiler. I will go away now'.

Companies have serious problems right now.  The internet used to run
as a US Benign Dictatorship, under the assumption that the US was generally
behaving in the world's best interest.  That trust has been lost.  If you are
someone in some country somewhere, and you hear that the NSA is getting a copy
of everything.  And IBM and Google have a Press Release saying that they
have fixed a problem.  Do you believe it?  I sure don't.  And many others don't,
and for good reasons.  I also think that will be a bunch of other countries
that will do way worse than what the United States has done.  If we are against
national means of intelligence, all bets are off.  This is compounded by the fact
that attack in much easier than defense.  I don't think that's what we are trying
to defend against.  We are trying to defend against bulk collection.

But I tend to be optimistic, than humanity as a species tend to solve these problems.
It might take one or a few generations.  We might have some terrible world wars
while we're solving it.  But till now we have managed to have more freedom,
more rights, more liberty, century by century.

People have to understand that companies and governments are not made of magic, that
they are not breaking systems to anywhere near the extent that we thought they were.
This is the most important conclusion that can be taken from Snowden's documents.
The reality in that there are many things we can do to make ourselves much more secure.
I might have some reservations about Nathan and others regarding the RMS debate, but
not that many of them are likely to be consciously injecting malicious code
or introducing vulnerabilities.

If business leaders change the way they look at life, instead of making a whole lot
of money and then contributing to some cause, they can structure their business
in such a way that every customer is in some way a partner with them.

However if companies and governments try to conquer people, they will have to keep
sitting on top of their head, and they will do everything to make the life of business
leaders miserable.

Traditionally, military leaders were the most powerful people.  In the last hundred
years, political leaders were the most powerful.  But now and in the future, economic leaders will be the most powerful.

We have to start working with economic leaders to make a difference in the way they
make decisions, and in the way they conduct their businesses.   This is being done,
but is being done very discreetly because it is something that today cannot be
handled publicly.

> > Yet I only asked to fix the Steering Committee AFTER the only credible
> > no-profit protecting free software (FSF) was removed.
> >
> > But I'm a "concern troll", right?
> >
> > I think everybody can see who is who. ;-)
> >
>
> Indeed.
>