Re: delete abortion joke

[Torvald Riegel <triegel at redhat dot com>]

On Mon, 2018-05-07 at 20:46 -0400, Don Barry wrote:
> The "threats", such as they are, to fork glibc are no different from
> various other projects which have emerged that are hostile to the FSF,
> and who see the body of work which emerged from its efforts of many
> years as fruits they would love to take, but which are saddled,
> unfortunately in their eyes, with such things as the GPL and its Golden
> Rule base.

You make several wide-ranging statements and accusations.  Let's be more
specific, and see whether your comments actually apply to the discussion
we're having in the glibc project right now.

AFAIR, I've been the person who suggested that we should fork iff
there's no acknowledgment that glibc is a community-driven,
consensus-based project.  You posted to this list, so the context of
your remarks is this list and this thread specifically.  Which means you
are saying that my statement about forking is a "threat", and that I'd
be hostile to the FSF, and dislike the GPL.  Do you actually have any
proof for that statement?

Let me explain what's going on here.

First of all, this isn't a "threat", because that would mean I'd care
whether glibc was under the GNU umbrella or not.  That's not the point.
My statement was directed at my fellow developers, because I think it's
a problem for the developer community if the there's an undermining of
the consensus-based process that we have established in recent years and
that is serving glibc very well.  Preventing this problem is what I care
about -- it just happened to come from RMS, but that's not essential.
Forking is an obvious way of working around the problem, but there are
others.  One that I explicitly called out is RMS (or the FSF)
acknowledging that glibc is indeed a community-driven, consensus-based
project.

Furthermore, you certainly know that forking wouldn't change the
license; so much about your claim that this is about avoiding the GPL.

Finally, regarding "efforts of many years as fruits they would love to
take": please understand who's doing the work to keep glibc going, and
who has argued in favor of removing the "joke".  You make it sounds as
this is some hostile takeover -- and accuse the very developers that
have done a large part of the work for many years.  That doesn't make
sense.