Re: RMS removed from the GCC Steering Committee

[Andrea Corallo <akrl@sdf.org>]

Giacomo Tesio <giacomo@tesio.it> writes:

> Hi David, thanks for sharing!
>
> On Wed, 31 Mar 2021 14:27:29 -0400 David Edelsohn via Gcc wrote:
>
>> In 2012 RMS was added to the GCC Steering Committee web page
>> based on his role in the GNU Project [...]
>> we are removing him from the page.
>
> I have to admit that I had never carefully observed the list of members
> of the GCC steering committee. As I explained before in this thread,
> the presence of Stallman gave me enough reassurance that GCC would have
> honoured the values of Free Software.
>
> As I said, enough to chose to port GCC to Jehanne instead of another
> C compiler, in the hope to contribute back the port upstream, to GNU.
>
>
> But now that I'm comparing the old web page [1] and the new one [2],
> I realized something entirely new to me.
>
>
> 10 out of 13 members of the GCC steering committee work either for
> American corporations (8), their subsidiaries (1) or an American 
> University (1) recently covered by the press in India [3].
> Also, 4 of these work for the same corporation (IBM / Red Hat).
>
> The other 3 are from German GmbH (2) or from a Nederlands public agency.
>
[...]

Hi Giacomo,

thanks for your mail.

Unfortunately I think is clear at this points what's the "Open Source"
corporates position on this affair.

A weak and malleable FSF and Free Software community is to many a very
comfortable situation.  Excluding RMS leveraging cancel culture proved
to be the perfect strategy.  Cancel culture is extremely powerful, it
induces strong emotions and participation on people in good faith,
freedom of speech and rationality go quickly in background (reminds me
something of the past).

Fighting against that often proves to be a desperate task, this is
really just the perfect storm.

Those who loses is just us, a divided and weaker movement.

Regards

  Andrea