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I agree with RMS on this. People need to grow up. It's ok to be offended, but not ok to try and correct everyone just because you are offended. A line needs to

I agree with RMS on this. People need to grow up. It's ok to be offended, but not ok to try and correct everyone just because you are offended. A line needs to be drawn somewhere and this is harmless.

RIMR 8y ago
I agree with RMS's pro-choice opinion, but I honestly see no reason a 20-something year old joke about abortion needed to remain in the documentation. The consensus was that it be removed. It was removed. Just because HMS is a FOSS legend doesn't make him God.
- matthewbauer 8y ago
  Yes I'm 100% with you on this. I mainly dislike how the LWN article is framed.
- 8_hours_ago 8y ago
  > Just because RMS is a FOSS legend doesn't make him God. According to RMS he does have ultimate authority over all GNU packages, including Glibc: https://lwn.net/Articles/753661/ https://lwn.net/Articles/753661/
  - justonepost 8y ago
    He probably owns some root certs. Likely if he were to start exercising such authority without being an active developer, there would be a fork soon enough. Isn't that what happened to emacs?
    - pzone 8y ago
      A few times, but so far GNU has held on.
    - favorited 8y ago
      It happened with GCC. Today's GCC is actually a fork of the original, which became the "blessed" version once the forkers and RMS worked out resolved some issues that led to the fork. The unforked (for lack of a better term) GCC was set aside, and the fork became the official version.
      - chx 8y ago
        Just for the sake of completeness: the EGCS fork you are talking about was alive 1997-1999.
  - lsh123 8y ago
    Fork, take maintainers and contributors with you, convince others to use your fork.
geofft 8y ago
Nobody who removed the joke said they were offended by it, they just said that they didn't believe it was the sort of thing that belonged in technical documentation. If anyone is offended, it is RMS, in the sense that he seems personally affronted that he doesn't carry the line-item veto power he thinks he had over all of GNU and people did not ask him before removing something he added 25 years ago. Not everyone who disagrees with something is offended by the thing they disagree with. Shall I say that someone who prefers writing documentation in man pages instead of Markdown is offended by Markdown? Is Project Zero offended by buffer overflows?
- flukus 8y ago
  > they just said that they didn't believe it was the sort of thing that belonged in technical documentation I've been dreading the day OSS projects became as soulless and boring as corporate ones. If we can't have jokes in technical documentation then it seems that day has come. Next the FOSS HR department will be asking them to rename the abort function.
  - sitepodmatt 8y ago
    The day went and passed a few years ago. SJW asswipes campaigned to have the phrased blacklist removed from projects and changed to allow list, also 'slave database' too because it could offend some dead ancestor that was a slave? These little cry babies are ruining tech, another example MS just had a tech conference with a cuddle farm, they imported animals so people could feed and cuddle them in the event any of the talks accidentally included trigger words. Don't forget crockfordgate - the javascript legend (the good parts book) who described brackets as dogballs and was mercilyless hunted by SJWs including being removed from jsconf. Sad times.
  - geofft 8y ago
    There's certainly something lost here, I won't deny that. But glibc, and huge other parts of the FOSS ecosystem, has been a corporate project for years. Maintenance comes from stodgy companies like Red Hat who install glibc on the sort of extremely stodgy companies who are Red Hat customers. And for those of us whose day jobs involve using glibc and reading its documentation, we deserve the benefits of free software as much as everyone else. If it is an ethical imperative (as RMS says!) for all software to be free and for proprietary software to die, it follows that the primary battleground is the servers of soulless, boring corporations. Your hobbyist laptop is important, too, because everyone deserves free software. But if free software weren't around, you would have installed a pirated copy of Windows with a keygen with some hentai as its background image and enjoyed the non-HR-compliance of the process, and Microsoft would have been quite okay with it because you would be locked into their proprietary software. If free software is an ethical imperative - or even if it's not, but even if open source is simply a better way to develop software - then everyone who wants a job in software engineering and is qualified for it should be able to have a job in writing and maintaining FOSS. Human society has determined that if we want everyone to participate in an activity, things work better if everyone agrees to uphold a few norms. They don't have to be the same norms as boring corporations uphold (and you can quite easily argue that the norms of boring corporations aren't that good, actually, at making sure everyone is welcome to participate on equal terms). But the fact that we open our shared infrastructural work to accountability and public judgment is sort of how civilization works. Hobbyist projects are still as possible as ever. Twenty years ago, you wouldn't have been able to get inappropriate jokes in the technical documentation for Solaris libc, or into MSDN, or whatever, but you could work on some upstart free software project with your friends and do whatever you want. You can still do that. If you want to be the young, upstart libc with some off-color political jokes that's being an alternative to the boring corporate libc, more power to you. Not everyone will participate, but that's what you want. Meanwhile, the libc whose goal in life was to displace the corporate libcs has won - and needs to step into its role.
komali2 8y ago
I disagree with RMS because I don't think the joke adds to my ability to understand the usage of the function.
- rurban 8y ago
  Then you didn't read the fine line. He was making a subtle reference to power politics how to abort a process. Properly or abrupt. A certain fraction of the group wanted to forbid this abrupt termination and only go through signals, so that everyone involved can have their say and be informed. This particular function sidestepped it, and as such was politically loaded. Removing this reference would remove the questioning of proper usage and the politics behind. But since current glibc maintainers are more worried about their profile than good documentation RMS vetoed.
  - rurban 8y ago
    The proper term for the first variant is "kill all children", which is equally loaded. Next would be to change kill child to something worse, and go away with master slave.
  - komali2 8y ago
    The joke doesn't really make sense to non-Americans
smsm42 8y ago
This is harmless - probably true, nobody would die or suffer harm from having irrelevant content in the manual. We could splice full seven books of Harry Potter into it, and provided it is clearly marked up, it won't cause any serious harm. But glibc technical manuals are not exactly the place for RMS - or anybody else - to wage political advocacy campaigns, criticize US federal government or joke on the topics unrelated to the technical content. It's not harmful (which is a very high bar), but it's also not appropriate. Do we want to see political debate and advocacy in glibc manuals, commit messages, code comments and other places? Probably not. There are ample venues for this - and especially for a person with the name recognition RMS deservedly enjoys - to advocate anything he likes. He doesn't need the venue of glibc manuals for that, and shouldn't use it.
- llukas 8y ago
  Try reading GPL license... is a political statement itself. Is joke in documentation useful? Probably not...
  - smsm42 8y ago
    True (which is one of the reasons I don't use GPL for my personal projects) but that doesn't mean GNU technical space should be a venue for every other political discussion in the world. There are far better venues out there.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Maybe, maybe not. I think the core issue is that RMS doesn't believe in that strong "technical" vs. "political" separation - to him, the whole GNU project is a political endeavour, including all the tech in it.
      - smsm42 8y ago
        > that RMS doesn't believe in that strong "technical" vs. "political" separation I do not believe that for a second. RMS is completely capable of seeing it, and he himself on his own site has this separation, and in there's no indication he is incapable of distinguishing between UNIX API and political advocacy. He just wants to use his considerable technical capital to promote his political agenda. In places, where such promotion is not appropriate.
ubernostrum 8y ago
I wish I could make RMS, and you, and everyone who agrees with you, live in a sort of reverse-Kantian world, where whatever you advocate for as acceptable behavior when you do it becomes a universal law of conduct for other people to use when interacting with you. No matter how much of a "thick skin" you may think you have, I'd lay money that in a world which truly worked this way, you'd last under an hour before abandoning your position and calling for stronger social norms against being an ass to people.
- ciupicri 8y ago
  I think RMS has been "attacked" quite a lot of times since he founded FSF and even before it, yet look at him, he's still advocating for what he believes in.
- bhhaskin 8y ago
  You should practice what you preach, because your statement doesn't make me feel very welcome or safe right now. You seem to make a lot of assumptions about me and the world I live in. I just said I agree with RMS on this, and you straight up attacked me personally.
  - ubernostrum 8y ago
    I just said I agree with RMS on this, and you straight up attacked me personally. The worst thing I would wish on you is for you to live a while in a world run according to your own espoused values. If you feel that's an attack, it's a problem with your values. (at least, that's how I think I'm supposed to respond here, since people aren't supposed to "feel attacked" or "get offended" by such things, apparently)
    - sandov 8y ago
      You're basically saying his values are wrong without any explanation of how you came to such a conclusion. You're also making wild statements about how he would react to some imaginary world. Probably not the right way to have a discussion.
jcranmer 8y ago
One thing that may not be well-appreciated: This is walking very close to the line of outright political advocacy. If you read the entire email thread, one of the examples [1] clearly crosses that threshold. Once that threshold is crossed, it is illegal for a government employee to contribute to glibc in an official capacity, or even a private employee contracted by the government. This includes things like people who need to modify glibc to get them to run on government supercomputers. [1] Someone suggests blocking out code with #ifdef REPUBLICANS.
- chris_wot 8y ago
  Actually, GNU is a 501(c)(3) organisation. They can’t really be politically active and maintain such a status.
  - im3w1l 8y ago
    501(c)(3) can support issues but not people in election for office.
- fulafel 8y ago
  Most worthwhile things are political. If there really is such a rule in some country, it should not condemn organisations to self censorship & apathy.
ajross 8y ago
Yeah, this is one of those spots where RMS is stubbornly and stupidly standing up for principle in a context where the rest of us just clearly see that it shouldn't matter and he's just being a jerk. But... damn if he's not right about this. The joke has meaning. It still means what he meant when he wrote it. The issue is an important one (to RMS, at least). And no one else has a real argument here other than "it's unprofessional and embarassing and we want it gone". Same old, same old. The crusty bearded guy is a jerk, but he's right.
- dralley 8y ago
  >The joke has meaning Only if you're American and also have the requisite background knowledge to understand it, which many don't. If you don't know the context, it's meaningless. Which is not a good thing to have in technical documentation.
  - ajross 8y ago
    > Only if [you...] have the requisite background knowledge to understand it, which many don't. It's literally the C library reference manual. That's true of the whole thing! The point is that it has meaning, however obscure, and reflects a particular principled intent of the author. And the request to remove it is cosmetic. And you resolve that by holding to the author's intent and not just polishing it to fit your sense of aesthetics. Your argument would be an excellent reason to reject a submitted joke that didn't reflect a consensus of the active maintainers; not so much to remove one decades after the fact.
    - dralley 8y ago
      >It's literally the C library reference manual. That's true of the whole thing! You have to know about the global gag rule prohibiting health providers that receive federal funds from discussing abortion with their patients to understand the entire C library reference manual? News to me.
      - ajross 8y ago
keiyakins 8y ago
I read it the other way around, with RMS being the one offended and trying to correct everyone: the people maintaining glibc agreed to change part of the documentation because it wasn't serving a useful purpose, either as technical material, core philosophical material, or as material reinforcing one of those two (which can include a carefully-crafted joke, don't get me wrong). RMS got offended and tried to force them to keep it.

RIMR 8y ago

I agree with RMS's pro-choice opinion, but I honestly see no reason a 20-something year old joke about abortion needed to remain in the documentation. The consensus was that it be removed. It was removed. Just because HMS is a FOSS legend doesn't make him God.

matthewbauer 8y ago
Yes I'm 100% with you on this. I mainly dislike how the LWN article is framed.
8_hours_ago 8y ago
> Just because RMS is a FOSS legend doesn't make him God. According to RMS he does have ultimate authority over all GNU packages, including Glibc: https://lwn.net/Articles/753661/ https://lwn.net/Articles/753661/
- justonepost 8y ago
  He probably owns some root certs. Likely if he were to start exercising such authority without being an active developer, there would be a fork soon enough. Isn't that what happened to emacs?
  - pzone 8y ago
    A few times, but so far GNU has held on.
  - favorited 8y ago
    It happened with GCC. Today's GCC is actually a fork of the original, which became the "blessed" version once the forkers and RMS worked out resolved some issues that led to the fork. The unforked (for lack of a better term) GCC was set aside, and the fork became the official version.
    - chx 8y ago
      Just for the sake of completeness: the EGCS fork you are talking about was alive 1997-1999.
- lsh123 8y ago
  Fork, take maintainers and contributors with you, convince others to use your fork.

geofft 8y ago

Nobody who removed the joke said they were offended by it, they just said that they didn't believe it was the sort of thing that belonged in technical documentation. If anyone is offended, it is RMS, in the sense that he seems personally affronted that he doesn't carry the line-item veto power he thinks he had over all of GNU and people did not ask him before removing something he added 25 years ago. Not everyone who disagrees with something is offended by the thing they disagree with. Shall I say that someone who prefers writing documentation in man pages instead of Markdown is offended by Markdown? Is Project Zero offended by buffer overflows?

flukus 8y ago
> they just said that they didn't believe it was the sort of thing that belonged in technical documentation I've been dreading the day OSS projects became as soulless and boring as corporate ones. If we can't have jokes in technical documentation then it seems that day has come. Next the FOSS HR department will be asking them to rename the abort function.
- sitepodmatt 8y ago
  The day went and passed a few years ago. SJW asswipes campaigned to have the phrased blacklist removed from projects and changed to allow list, also 'slave database' too because it could offend some dead ancestor that was a slave? These little cry babies are ruining tech, another example MS just had a tech conference with a cuddle farm, they imported animals so people could feed and cuddle them in the event any of the talks accidentally included trigger words. Don't forget crockfordgate - the javascript legend (the good parts book) who described brackets as dogballs and was mercilyless hunted by SJWs including being removed from jsconf. Sad times.
- geofft 8y ago
  There's certainly something lost here, I won't deny that. But glibc, and huge other parts of the FOSS ecosystem, has been a corporate project for years. Maintenance comes from stodgy companies like Red Hat who install glibc on the sort of extremely stodgy companies who are Red Hat customers. And for those of us whose day jobs involve using glibc and reading its documentation, we deserve the benefits of free software as much as everyone else. If it is an ethical imperative (as RMS says!) for all software to be free and for proprietary software to die, it follows that the primary battleground is the servers of soulless, boring corporations. Your hobbyist laptop is important, too, because everyone deserves free software. But if free software weren't around, you would have installed a pirated copy of Windows with a keygen with some hentai as its background image and enjoyed the non-HR-compliance of the process, and Microsoft would have been quite okay with it because you would be locked into their proprietary software. If free software is an ethical imperative - or even if it's not, but even if open source is simply a better way to develop software - then everyone who wants a job in software engineering and is qualified for it should be able to have a job in writing and maintaining FOSS. Human society has determined that if we want everyone to participate in an activity, things work better if everyone agrees to uphold a few norms. They don't have to be the same norms as boring corporations uphold (and you can quite easily argue that the norms of boring corporations aren't that good, actually, at making sure everyone is welcome to participate on equal terms). But the fact that we open our shared infrastructural work to accountability and public judgment is sort of how civilization works. Hobbyist projects are still as possible as ever. Twenty years ago, you wouldn't have been able to get inappropriate jokes in the technical documentation for Solaris libc, or into MSDN, or whatever, but you could work on some upstart free software project with your friends and do whatever you want. You can still do that. If you want to be the young, upstart libc with some off-color political jokes that's being an alternative to the boring corporate libc, more power to you. Not everyone will participate, but that's what you want. Meanwhile, the libc whose goal in life was to displace the corporate libcs has won - and needs to step into its role.

komali2 8y ago

I disagree with RMS because I don't think the joke adds to my ability to understand the usage of the function.

rurban 8y ago
Then you didn't read the fine line. He was making a subtle reference to power politics how to abort a process. Properly or abrupt. A certain fraction of the group wanted to forbid this abrupt termination and only go through signals, so that everyone involved can have their say and be informed. This particular function sidestepped it, and as such was politically loaded. Removing this reference would remove the questioning of proper usage and the politics behind. But since current glibc maintainers are more worried about their profile than good documentation RMS vetoed.
- rurban 8y ago
  The proper term for the first variant is "kill all children", which is equally loaded. Next would be to change kill child to something worse, and go away with master slave.
- komali2 8y ago
  The joke doesn't really make sense to non-Americans

smsm42 8y ago

This is harmless - probably true, nobody would die or suffer harm from having irrelevant content in the manual. We could splice full seven books of Harry Potter into it, and provided it is clearly marked up, it won't cause any serious harm. But glibc technical manuals are not exactly the place for RMS - or anybody else - to wage political advocacy campaigns, criticize US federal government or joke on the topics unrelated to the technical content. It's not harmful (which is a very high bar), but it's also not appropriate. Do we want to see political debate and advocacy in glibc manuals, commit messages, code comments and other places? Probably not. There are ample venues for this - and especially for a person with the name recognition RMS deservedly enjoys - to advocate anything he likes. He doesn't need the venue of glibc manuals for that, and shouldn't use it.

llukas 8y ago
Try reading GPL license... is a political statement itself. Is joke in documentation useful? Probably not...
- smsm42 8y ago
  True (which is one of the reasons I don't use GPL for my personal projects) but that doesn't mean GNU technical space should be a venue for every other political discussion in the world. There are far better venues out there.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Maybe, maybe not. I think the core issue is that RMS doesn't believe in that strong "technical" vs. "political" separation - to him, the whole GNU project is a political endeavour, including all the tech in it.
    - smsm42 8y ago
      > that RMS doesn't believe in that strong "technical" vs. "political" separation I do not believe that for a second. RMS is completely capable of seeing it, and he himself on his own site has this separation, and in there's no indication he is incapable of distinguishing between UNIX API and political advocacy. He just wants to use his considerable technical capital to promote his political agenda. In places, where such promotion is not appropriate.

ubernostrum 8y ago

I wish I could make RMS, and you, and everyone who agrees with you, live in a sort of reverse-Kantian world, where whatever you advocate for as acceptable behavior when you do it becomes a universal law of conduct for other people to use when interacting with you. No matter how much of a "thick skin" you may think you have, I'd lay money that in a world which truly worked this way, you'd last under an hour before abandoning your position and calling for stronger social norms against being an ass to people.

ciupicri 8y ago
I think RMS has been "attacked" quite a lot of times since he founded FSF and even before it, yet look at him, he's still advocating for what he believes in.
bhhaskin 8y ago
You should practice what you preach, because your statement doesn't make me feel very welcome or safe right now. You seem to make a lot of assumptions about me and the world I live in. I just said I agree with RMS on this, and you straight up attacked me personally.
- ubernostrum 8y ago
  I just said I agree with RMS on this, and you straight up attacked me personally. The worst thing I would wish on you is for you to live a while in a world run according to your own espoused values. If you feel that's an attack, it's a problem with your values. (at least, that's how I think I'm supposed to respond here, since people aren't supposed to "feel attacked" or "get offended" by such things, apparently)
  - sandov 8y ago
    You're basically saying his values are wrong without any explanation of how you came to such a conclusion. You're also making wild statements about how he would react to some imaginary world. Probably not the right way to have a discussion.

jcranmer 8y ago

One thing that may not be well-appreciated: This is walking very close to the line of outright political advocacy. If you read the entire email thread, one of the examples [1] clearly crosses that threshold. Once that threshold is crossed, it is illegal for a government employee to contribute to glibc in an official capacity, or even a private employee contracted by the government. This includes things like people who need to modify glibc to get them to run on government supercomputers. [1] Someone suggests blocking out code with #ifdef REPUBLICANS.

chris_wot 8y ago
Actually, GNU is a 501(c)(3) organisation. They can’t really be politically active and maintain such a status.
- im3w1l 8y ago
  501(c)(3) can support issues but not people in election for office.
fulafel 8y ago
Most worthwhile things are political. If there really is such a rule in some country, it should not condemn organisations to self censorship & apathy.

ajross 8y ago

Yeah, this is one of those spots where RMS is stubbornly and stupidly standing up for principle in a context where the rest of us just clearly see that it shouldn't matter and he's just being a jerk. But... damn if he's not right about this. The joke has meaning. It still means what he meant when he wrote it. The issue is an important one (to RMS, at least). And no one else has a real argument here other than "it's unprofessional and embarassing and we want it gone". Same old, same old. The crusty bearded guy is a jerk, but he's right.

dralley 8y ago
>The joke has meaning Only if you're American and also have the requisite background knowledge to understand it, which many don't. If you don't know the context, it's meaningless. Which is not a good thing to have in technical documentation.
- ajross 8y ago
  > Only if [you...] have the requisite background knowledge to understand it, which many don't. It's literally the C library reference manual. That's true of the whole thing! The point is that it has meaning, however obscure, and reflects a particular principled intent of the author. And the request to remove it is cosmetic. And you resolve that by holding to the author's intent and not just polishing it to fit your sense of aesthetics. Your argument would be an excellent reason to reject a submitted joke that didn't reflect a consensus of the active maintainers; not so much to remove one decades after the fact.
  - dralley 8y ago
    >It's literally the C library reference manual. That's true of the whole thing! You have to know about the global gag rule prohibiting health providers that receive federal funds from discussing abortion with their patients to understand the entire C library reference manual? News to me.
    - ajross 8y ago

keiyakins 8y ago

I read it the other way around, with RMS being the one offended and trying to correct everyone: the people maintaining glibc agreed to change part of the documentation because it wasn't serving a useful purpose, either as technical material, core philosophical material, or as material reinforcing one of those two (which can include a carefully-crafted joke, don't get me wrong). RMS got offended and tried to force them to keep it.