Re: [rain1 at airmail dot cc] Delete abortion joke

[Torvald Riegel <triegel at redhat dot com>]

On Sun, 2018-05-06 at 22:00 -0400, Richard Stallman wrote:
> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
> 
>   > The GNU C Library project is mostly a consensus-based community-driven 
>   > project.
> 
> I think that's literally true, due to the word "mostly", but people
> could get the wrong idea from it.  GNU Libc is not an independent
> project.
> 
> The GNU C Library is a GNU package -- part of the GNU Project.  That
> means I appoint official maintainers who are in charge of the work.
> They are responsible to the GNU Project and specifically to me as
> Chief GNUisance.  I appointed the GNU Libc maintainers in that way.

To me personally, that statement is a reason for a fork; specifically,
your insistence that your personal opinion is more important than strong
consensus in the community of developers (which we had in favor of
removal of the "joke", and again against reverting the removal).

All the back-and-forth about the "joke" could be considered just a
nuisance, but escalating this to a point where you dismiss (developer)
community consensus crosses a red line for me.  glibc has been
successful in the recent past because we have been a consensus-based,
community-driven project.  I don't want to risk this just because of a
person calling himself "Chief GNUisance".

A fork has costs, but making a point that we are indeed a
consensus-based, community-driven project can have *lots* of value too.
This can send a strong message to our community and users that we
actually mean it.  We have enough resources and experience with open
source projects to quickly bring up the forked community, and never look
back.  The developers that spoke out against the "joke" do a large part
of the work overall, and much much more than the developer(s) that
wanted to keep it.

Of course, it doesn't have to come to a fork.  All it needs is an
acknowledgement that glibc is nowadays a consensus-based,
community-driven project.  That can't be that hard to agree to, can it?