> In 2012 RMS was added to the GCC Steering Committee web page
based on his role in the GNU Project, though his role as a member
of the Steering Committee has been ambiguous and he was not a member
of the Steering Committee when EGCS became GCC
In this context, the HN title above is somewhat misleading.
> Porting CLANG would have been easier (to some extent) BUT my choice was political and Stallman in the Steering Committee is a long term warranty that GCC development will not steer away from the Free Software conception that I know, betraying my trust.
When I read this thread a day ago, it consisted of SC and project contributors unanimously agreeing to remove Stallman, and 3-4 extremely angry outsiders calling the SC traitors.
Which steering committee member opposed Stallman's removal?
Is your objection to the whole idea of a "steering committee" that gets more of a say than TempleOS Developer CrunkLord420? Because you might need to take that up with 1999, and the EGCS/GCC detente.
There is no question that if Stallman had been hit by a bus then the project would be fine. He isn't a technical figure at this point.
But it is a bit worrying if the GCC team feels that a man who has dedicated his life to software freedom is at odds with their objectives to the point where he doesn't even deserve a thankyou as they boot him off their webpage.
Mailing lists are famous for their drama, but Stallman is one of the most reliable public figures there is on the subject of software freedom. It is worrying if the people who control these projects think they have priorities above freedom, because it'll probably turn out those priorities are corporate interests. Not such a problem in GCC, but if this is a trend it is of concern. The GPL is not a license written to be friendly and agreeable, disagreeable but competent people should be responsible for maintaining it.
There is a lengthy discussion among top contributors and steering committee members on the GCC mailing list and none of it favored retaining Stallman. Not one GCC participant on the "remove Stallman" thread spoke of him as an asset, and many described him as the opposite. From my reading, every single proponent of Stallman on that list was an outsider.
If one did, they would most likely keep it quiet as to not be the next target or seen as a stallman supporter. Anyone that speaks up for RMS under their real name will be blasted all over twitter.
Yeah, this is a worthy consideration. Anyone on the steering committee expressing support for him would probably be next to be voted out (or, more likely, privately encouraged to step down or harassed until they decide to themselves).
It'd be interesting to see the results of a totally anonymous vote among them. The majority would probably still vote him out, but not sure how close it'd be.
A totally anonymous vote is not possible, because at some point they must reveal the aggregate result, and this will allow the voters to reason about the way others must have voted. The minimum number of voters who must have taken a position is known. If the total pool of voters is small, they can talk among themselves, and this will reveal either impassioned people being publicly outspoken about their position, or people being deferential about their position. Irrespective of whether anyone is lying about how they voted, the deferential people will be under suspicion of having voted the way they're less likely to admit in public. This incentivizes people to seem more publicly impassioned about the position that's least likely to result in their condemnation.
This is true, but if they're convincing enough when acting publicly impassioned, it might be hard to identify all of the dissenters, at least. Voting would still be a major risk, but slightly less so than a non-anonymous vote.
Ok, but, respectfully, "non-falsifiable argument is non-falsifiable".
At any rate, I'm mostly just here to say that contra the nerd-popular argument that Stallman's "cancellation" is perpetrated by people "outside" of free software, here it's pretty clearly the reverse: the people most vigorously advocating for Stallman's removal from the project have unimpeachable GCC credentials.
People with unimpeachable credentials are still human beings with flaws like all of us.
This is about the removal of a listing, i.e. it is all about considerations regarding the public image and does not have anything to do with the project's current day-to-day work. Is this true or not?
It also coincides with a campaign against Richard Stallman which is built around an open letter. It turns out that that letter contains several blatant lies and there is no way around the fact. Every single person or organization that signed that letter is (unintentionally or not) supporting these lies because, well, they put their signature on them. I am finding this really hard to swallow.
Sane discussion within the community to get some things straight is probably too time-consuming and fussy, so it was probably easier to just remove a listing and throw some generic reassuring copypasta at the end.
Frankly, if it couldn't, that would be a serious problem.
Speaking for myself, I've got a lot of opinions, many - admittedly not all - of which overlap with the ones outlined in the GNU manifesto. One that may differ is that I'm simply unable to trust a cult of personality. GNU is already dangerously close to that, and I've sometimes wondered if there's cause for splintering off a group that is more firmly centered on Free Software instead of on Richard Stallman.
The announcement reads as if his identification as a Steering Committee member was never anything other than symbolic (emphasis, added):
---quote---
In 2012 RMS was added to the GCC Steering Committee web page based on his role in the GNU Project, though his role as a member of the Steering Committee has been ambiguous and he was not a member of the Steering Committee when EGCS became GCC. We no longer feel that this listing serves the best interests of the GCC developer and user community. Therefore, we are removing him from the page.
A member of the steering committee described their job with respect to Stallman as "saying no to Stallman", so I imagine they'll continue better without him.
Technically yes, but in his case there is a level of genius and dedication that is beyond expert level. There is also a good chance that potential replacements aren’t available to take on the responsibilities.
What are his managerial contributions? The ones that come to mind are AST export, accepting LLVM, and the lead-up to the EGCS split, none of which were positive.
The first email in the thread [0] has 10 reasons why Stallman should be cancelled. They repeat Stallman's earlier opinions about pedophilia from before he changed his opinion on that, so they shouldn't be valid.
About point 5 about "defending sexual assault", I think it's important to note that it was "sexual assault" only because that is the statutory charge used in Texas for violating the age of consent law [1]. If the incident [2] had happened a few miles away in Oklahoma where the age of consent is 16, there would not be a "sexual assault" charge. I complete agree with Stallman's other point (made elsewhere) that more precise language needs be used to describe what actually happened.
I'm not defending Stallman about everything - the other points, which can be summed up as "he's a creep towards women and alienates them", are problematic, and if he won't change his behaviour that might be a valid reason to cancel him.
This is why "tolerance" basically doesn't exist. Nobody's truly tolerant, they're just tolerant or intolerant towards some particular combination of things.
please explain to us where it stops. For instance lets say I find it toxic to use comma in sentences. how many people do I need to find that agree with me on this before I can ban you from hacker news for toxicity?
It stops when folks stop focusing on a singular angle to create arguments in bad faith. There’s a thousand examples of behavior that shouldn’t be tolerated that at some point in the last 200 years, society tolerated. Likewise, there’s a thousand examples of behavior that wasn’t tolerated by society that we by and large think should be tolerated.
But instead of talking about the merits of the behavior, folks want to throw out the “tolerance” card.
> But instead of talking about the merits of the behavior, folks want to throw out the “tolerance” card.
I don't think it works this way. When Selam Gano wrote her original hate piece, she concluded that people like Stallman need to be removed, and if necessary, MIT should be burned to the ground. What people? "Jeffrey Epstein. Marvin Minsky. Richard Stallman." The sentence has been passed.
She didn't demand an apology or a change of behavior. She wanted punishment. By putting Minsky next to Epstein, and Stallman next to Minsky, she wanted to create the impression that somehow the terrible monster, the AI pioneer and the founder of the GNU project are same kind of terrible scum that needs to be completely removed to make the world better.
this is a very obvious strawman... if you’ve been treating people poorly for decades you too may discover that publicly playing devils advocate for a convicted rapist may be the final straw.
Popper would not have approved anything that happened in that cancel discussion.
Popper knew things like forgiveness, not taking single statements out of context, not reading too much into statements, not misquoting people and much more.
Please do not associate Popper with mob justice. He would have despised the mob.
> 4. Regarding morality. This letter (like many other sjw creatures) says many words about morality, diversity, but at the end of the day it boils down to removing Stallman from position. As a citizen of post-soviet country I can vividly see that this letter is enterely about politics and looks very similar to communist agenda which likes to hide authoritarian policies behind morality. It is very surprising for people from former Soviet block countries to see western world falling into 'very familiar' but notorious propaganda.
I believe it's not something specific to communism but to human nature. People in power tend to have low tolerance towards opposing views and perceive them as a threat. Hence the 'you are either with us or against us' attitude, both from the left and right. In the end, people with more balanced views, or with no particular opinion on a give issue, seem to be in minority and as a consequence are afraid to speak up. This strengthens the position of those who have an axe to grind - it's a vicious circle.
The stated reason for removing Stallman is the belief that he is "toxic". You may disagree with that but it has nothing to do with Stallman's political views.
> The stated reason for removing Stallman is the belief that he is "toxic".
A very similar pursuit of ideological purity (in name only; it was a power game) was a characteristic of daily life in the Soviet Union.
Even until the very end, things like the fact that your grandfather used to own more than 10 cows before the revolution (a wealthy oppressor!) or that your family celebrates Christmas (unloyal to the party!) were used to morally judge you and deny things like an apartment allocation (there was no real estate market) or a permit to buy a car. The government had massive databases of personal histories of people (several generations deep, going back many decades) to assess their "morals", supplemented with characterizations people had to write about each other. Almost every hiring, foreign trip, university application etc was checked against these databases. Every organization of had a committee for this. All companies too (because they were all state-owned).
Instead of "toxic", they used the phrase "ideologically unsound", and once you had been deemed as such, many doors in life remained closed for you.
Kinda strange to see the free world slowly re-inventing this.
Current cancel culture activism is indistinguishable from 1950s McCarthyism which they like to condemn. It would seem that they have no sense of decency.
yeah. you will see the first time you get fired from a job. they will surely give you a valid reason that make sense without any hidden agenda. Or maybe they will ask your colleagues and investigate to find anything they can use against you to remove you, call you toxic and make it a day
I don't know him (only ever saw him speak once at a Wordpress conference 10 years ago or so, where he was a caricature of himself), and I can easily believe he is hard to work with. That said, I believe he was diagnosed as having Asperger's syndrome, which could explain his many personality quirks, and that makes the mention of "neurodiversity" as one of the many aspects of diversity they claim to protect rather disingenuous.
"The GCC Steering Committee is committed to providing a friendly, safe
and welcoming environment for all, regardless of gender identity and
expression, sexual orientation, disabilities, neurodiversity, physical
appearance, body size, ethnicity, nationality, race, age, religion, or
similar personal characteristics."
Stallman has not been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome and he doesn't believe that he has it. Also, please don't put an equivalence between "difficult to work with" and Asperger's. Propagating the false belief that people with Asperger's are inherently "difficult to work with" increases the amount of prejudice and discrimination people with Asperger's have to face.
Swipes like that will get you banned on HN, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here.
I took a quick look at your account history (standard moderation practice) and was pleased to see that most of your comments are excellent, so fortunately this shouldn't be difficult to fix.
That's correct; what I mean is that in cases like these you are not allowed to sit on the fence. Orgs like FSF, Red Hat/IBM, GCC SC are under enormous pressure. They are being told that if they do nothing then it basically means they are supporting Stallman ("the defender of Epstein!" "pedophile apologist!"). So in a way they have no choice, they have to give in.
Frankly, I've seen in my life several "coups" like this. There is a great rage, people feel fed up and overthrow the leader. There is a moment of excitement, then the dust settles and what remains is a bland void. The enthusiasm disappears, it turns out that charisma is not easy to replace, and the whole projects slowly withers into total insignificance.
This is preposterous. Removing a serially abusive person from a position of power is in no way soviet style authoritarianism, and has absolutely nothing to do with communism or capitalism.
This is a private organization removing someone for poor behavior according to their own bylaws. It is not somehow a symbol for the fall of liberal capitalism in the US. Please. People are removed from boards and committees for poor behavior all the time. The sky does not fall.
The accusations that Stallman is a 'serial abuser' are strictly innuendo at this point. The flow of his detractors is one of wilful misinterpretation and unreasonableness.
Removing Stallman isn't an economic decision, true enough. But it is the same hubris of believing that someone's political trappings and status should determine their influence on technical matters. The Free Software community can survive without Stallman. But it is extremely worrying if the Free Software community feels Stallman is so at odds with their mission that they want to cast him out.
Stallman has flaws, but his commitment to that cause is really beyond question. It is appropriate to give him a voice in deciding how these projects are run. He is a reliable lighthouse for working out what is and isn't free about software.
Have you actually talked with anyone at MIT CS, particularly women? It's in no way innuendo to claim Stallman is a serial harasser towards women and behaves in an angry and abusive manner towards anyone he deems inferior, which is most people.
Stallman and Free Software have been explicitly political from the start. Stallman hasn't made any technical contribution in decades, and honestly, hasn't been relevant coding wise since the late 90s. He was put on the GCC committee as a political symbol, not a technical leader. That symbol is now toxic to GCC's mission due to Stallman's volitional behavior.
> and behaves in an angry and abusive manner towards anyone he deems inferior, which is most people.
This statements is simply not true. I had several exchanges and communications with Stallman, private and official. It was clear to him that I am less knowledgeable than him and less competent in the areas we discussed. But he never showed any of the traits you mention, the opposite was true. He was very patient and explained things to me without patronizing. I also observed his behavior towards others, it was similar (even though I found his hygiene habits highly objectionable).
That he treated you nicely, does not mean he does this universally. For him the contempt is less about intelligence or competence and more about his extremely rigid world view. When he's surrounded by his admirers of course he doesn't do it. But when someone turns down his lascivious advances or offends one of his random moral positions he behaves entirely differently.
But I mean, you can just go read the guys blog for content that would clearly bar him from ever holding a position of influence within most corporate businesses. No one wants an evangelist/spokesperson that is blogging about how "voluntary" pedophilia should not be a crime.
No one is canceling Stallman unfairly. What's getting canceled is a free pass he never should have been granted in the first place about this behavior.
> That he treated you nicely, does not mean he does this universally.
Of course not. It would make no sense to negate the experiences of other people, I was just objecting to the sentence "...behaves in an angry and abusive manner towards anyone he deems inferior" as it uses an absolute quantifier.
CIA plot to destroy open source software. Fake accusations will continue to be made by agents who are being paid to do so. Eventually when all the old guard has been removed everything will be corporatized and the GPL will be rescinded on all open source projects converting them to closed source capitalist piggy oink oink projects.
These foundations have always been a thorn in the sides of corporate interests. Kicking their teeth in under the guise of tolerance is an efficient way of doing it. Weird how the movement is as tolerant as the nazis to whoever doesn't subscribe to their buzzwords and blatant exploitation of minorities' problems for faux outrage.
I for one think Mark Zuckerberg should not be on the GCC Steering Committee. But I'm not on the GCC Steering Committee and have made no contributions to GCC of any sort, so my opinion on this matter doesn't count. I hope they don't add Mark Zuckerberg. One more thing to worry about now.
The solution to the Stallman problem at the FSF is probably as simple as removing his name from everything, posting some announcement on a “non-free” website.
He’ll never notice to cause trouble about it, he lives in a bubble.
Soon the problem will just solve itself, given his age and various obvious physical issues he’ll be dead in the next few years anyway.
>The GCC Steering Committee is committed to providing a friendly, safe
and welcoming environment for all, regardless of gender identity and
expression, sexual orientation, disabilities, neurodiversity, physical
appearance, body size, ethnicity, nationality, race, age, religion, or
similar personal characteristics.
I think it’s interesting to see this list get longer year by year. It’s good to have an ideal of welcoming, but curious to me what particular characteristics are “list worthy.”
It reminds me when those people raise their hand in a talk and say “what about security” and aren’t happy until you add the word “security.” Comically, even if nothing in the content is changed. Just adding the word makes them happy and I found it interesting that they didn’t actually assess whether the project was secure and obviously nothing changed except for a label so it was unusual to me that they would be happy since the security posture didn’t change at all.
In some ways, it doesn't get longer. I've never seen a list that was well-aligned with US employment anti-discrimination law. There's always a handful of categories that are missing.
Realized it might be worth providing a concrete example. So here that is --
The GNU Manifesto has a whole section, "Why GNU will be compatible with Unix", that briefly explains why RMS chose Unix. In it, he fairly explicitly states that Unix is not his ideal software system, but it's a good choice for advancing GNU's political goals. In other words, the politics are considered at least as important as, and perhaps more important than, developing quality software.
In a couple of decades we will be back to public domain and shareware software models, while a couple of people will get some money selling books and conference talks about the golden age of FOSS.
It is bound to happen to any movement that outgrowns its grassroots, while those that achieve their positions thanks to the movement betray it.
It is becoming more and more dispiriting to see how FOSS is used to build massive empires of surveillance which gather oceans of private data with almost no oversight. And the strategy that has become well-established now is to build a 'product' using FOSS and then lock them up behind a bootloader or a key. Rampant proliferation of binary modules built on top of the Linux kernel are simply not addressed because of fear that it might drive away companies. But how is it fair to all the people that play by the rules and contribute code because Linux uses GPL ? The situation in routers is pretty much the same regarding binary modules, and locked down devices are becoming the norm now.
you don't seen to realize the irony that under the appearance of "being welcoming", those committees are only welcoming to whoever complies with their political agenda.
That is just another form of the tolerance paradox. And the conclusion of that would say, yes, only welcome people that are socially open minded people.
It is like code of conducts, prior people on both sides could work together. By picking a side on an issue that has nothing to do with a given project you alienate half of your potential developers. Nothing about developing an open-source compiler implies anything but developing an open-source compiler.
It already has gone down the path. One of the more notable advancements in the past decade or so is the increase in language tooling that isn't strictly related to compilation: improved static analysis tools, language servers, formatters, etc. These require high-quality ASTs to get correct, and for C/C++ especially, you need to have the AST backed by a codegen somewhere to know you got it correct. Yet GCC has resisted adding support for this, because of fears that it would make it easier to subvert the GPL, à la Dragonegg.
> In 2012 RMS was added to the GCC Steering Committee web page based on his role in the GNU Project, though his role as a member of the Steering Committee has been ambiguous and he was not a member of the Steering Committee when EGCS became GCC
In this context, the HN title above is somewhat misleading.