Re: [PATCH] Improve adherance to the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines

[Joseph Myers <joseph at codesourcery dot com>]

On Mon, 22 Oct 2018, Carlos O'Donell wrote:

> I am immensely appreciative to Richard for working on and publishing
> the "GNU Kind Communications Guidelines" (the URL you quote), it is
> in my opinion a very good guideline for the GNU project. I expect the
> guideline to cover all forms of communication including the manual,
> website, and social media, and not just email.

If anything I'd say it's *more* important for the manual, as that's 
explicitly external communication rather than internal to the project.

> I am in support of the removal of the statement in the manual. As a
> GNU project maintainer for glibc, and project steward, I think it is
> useful to remove the statement because it has caused confusion in at
> least two recorded cases:
> 
> Post 9 months ago with +900 views:
> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48445031/why-would-it-be-illegal-to-inform-about-abort
> 
> The linked reddit thread from 7 years ago:
> https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/d4783/federal_censorship_regulations_may_restrict/

I concur that it should be removed, as something that is in fact confusing 
to readers, and, as I noted in 
<https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2018-05/msg00292.html>, extremely 
culturally-specific, relying on knowledge of a particular rule from one 
particular country.  I don't think such country-specific jokes are 
suitable for the GNU C Library manual.  As noted in the discussion 
referenced in the announcement of the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines, 
there are non-culturally-specific subjects of humour about topics that 
bring GNU users and developers together rather than dividing us (such as 
recursion, as in the name GNU itself), and those are much more suitable 
for the manual than anything specific to one country.

Furthermore, enough people have seen this as a joke about abortion rather 
than as one about censorship (lacking, perhaps, sufficiently detailed 
knowledge of the US rule in question) to demonstrate that it *does not 
work* as a joke about censorship for the audience the manual has today; 
the authorial intent for it to be about censorship is not particularly 
relevant when that's not how people read it.  Even if a 
non-country-specific censorship joke might be suitable for the manual, if 
it reads as being about abortion, that renders it unsuitable.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com