Re: Remove RMS from the GCC Steering Committee

[Christopher Dimech <dimech@gmx.com>]

> Sent: Tuesday, March 30, 2021 at 12:20 PM
> From: "Joseph Myers" <joseph@codesourcery.com>
> 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
>
> On Sun, 28 Mar 2021, Mark Wielaard wrote:
>
> > He does indeed show up randomly claiming authority even if the GNU
> > community has told him no. And it is important to say upfront he has
> > no authority and that his attempts to cancel the work of hardworking
> > GNU contributors is unwelcome. IMHO for the GCC community this means
> > to be explicit he doesn't have any authority and he shouldn't be on
> > the GCC steering committee.
>
> For example, consider the October 2019 discussion on libc-alpha of
> removing the abort "joke" from the glibc manual.  We rejected RMS's claims
> of authority to say that the joke should be kept, or kept indefinitely
> until various general points could be decided, and removed it from the
> manual anyway without waiting for conclusions on all those general points.
>
> RMS only has authority over decisions taken about individual GNU packages
> where the people developing those packages let him have that authority and
> make or refrain from making changes based on what he says.  We should not
> give him such authority by treating his views as having some significance
> not given to such views expressed by other people; changes he suggests can
> be considered, and accepted or rejected, on their merits.  And the abort
> joke case illustrates that in fact he is not given such authority, when
> package developers are confident to stand up to claims he makes of
> authority, and provides an example that can speed up the rejection of any
> such assertion of authority to micromanage things that might be made in
> future.
>
> I agree with the conclusion of Nathan's original message, that RMS behaves
> in a toxic way, it is harmful to have him listed as being in a leadership
> role that might suggest what he does is acceptable within the project, and
> he should not be on the SC.

Insofar as Stallman is the foundation of all authority, He exercises that foundation because He is the founder of His own work.  He is the foundation upon which all other authority stands or falls. We use the term foundation with respect to the imagery of a building - houses and commercial buildings are erected upon a foundation.

To say that Stallman defended Epstein for comments he made about his former
teacher are from an oceanic distance.  The person who really had ties with
Epstein was Bill Gates, who, instructed Bill Gates to donate $2 million to
MIT.

Stallman simply did not take into account the era of diminishing freedom
(not only in the digital world). Nowadays, with the left (communist) thought
police, who are always on the lookout for any subject to fire their cannons
on, free speech could be gone. If an opinion expressed goes against the prevailing inquisition of the time, the subject and the person is in hot waters.

Well, screw the inquisition.   Seems like World War I has just begun and martial
law has been declared, and this is reason enough, it seems, to expel the firebrand
without much ado, so he can eventually end up in concentration camps in Egypt.

> This is based on the longstanding,
> well-documented patterns of how he has misbehaved towards women, *not* on
> the opinions he has expressed on other subjects, *not* on his choices
> regarding the use of language, *not* on his attempts to insist on language
> being used in particular ways, and *not* on where or when he has chosen to
> express such views.
>
> For the same reasons, I think it is harmful for him to be Chief GNUisance
> (but as above, I think GNU packages should not give a Chief GNUisance
> authority to micromanage decisions, beyond ensuring GNU packages follow
> basic GNU free software principles and cooperate with each other and with
> their development communities), harmful for him to be on the FSF board,
> and harmful for him to be seen as leader of the free software movement.
> (For the last point, I don't think the free software movement needs a
> single leader; it needs many people advocating free software, and
> discussing issues related to free software, from diverse perspectives.
> RMS's ideas that form the foundation of the free software movement are
> still of fundamental importance today.  But other people can now build
> better on those ideas in today's context.)
>
> RMS does not, in fact, contribute usefully to the SC.  Any time he
> suggests some feature for GCC, whether a good or a bad idea, that could be
> done just as well on the public mailing list (which would be a better
> place to find someone possibly interested in implementing a feature, and
> to discuss a feature's merits, in any case) without being an SC member.
> He's sufficiently far removed from toolchain development that he's not
> good at making reasonable suggestions for toolchain changes in any case.
>
> We can consider individual proposals or patches from anyone on their
> merits.  We can have leaders who are accepted as leaders because
> contributors can see their relevant expertise that gives them legitimacy
> as leaders, and can see a good basis for decisions they make as leaders.
> But longstanding patterns of bad conduct by a leader, even when formally
> unrelated to the project, can reach the point where considering that
> person a leader is harmful to the project.  I think the ways RMS has
> behaved have long since reached the point where it is harmful for him to
> be considered a leader for GCC or GNU, and that's sufficient to stop
> considering him a leader (even if he were sufficiently involved to be able
> to contribute much more usefully on a technical level).
>
> --
> Joseph S. Myers
> joseph@codesourcery.com
>