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Richard Stallman Demands Return Of Abortion Joke To libc Documentation (theregister.co.uk)
An anonymous reader quotes The Register:
Late last month, open-source contributor Raymond Nicholson proposed a change to the manual for glibc, the GNU implementation of the C programming language's standard library, to remove "the abortion joke," which accompanied the explanation of libc's abort() function... The joke, which has been around since the 1990s and is referred to as a censorship joke by those supporting its inclusion, reads as follows:
25.7.4 Aborting a Program... Future Change Warning: Proposed Federal censorship regulations may prohibit us from giving you information about the possibility of calling this function. We would be required to say that this is not an acceptable way of terminating a program.
On April 30, the proposed change was made, removing the passage from the documentation. That didn't sit well with a number of people involved in the glibc project, including the joke's author, none other than Free Software Foundation president and firebrand Richard Stallman, who argued that the removal of the joke qualified as censorship... Carlos O'Donnell, a senior software engineer at Red Hat, recommended avoiding jokes altogether, a position supported by many of those weighing in on the issue. Among those voicing opinions, a majority appears to favor removal.
But in a post to the project mailing list, Stallman wrote "Please do not remove it. GNU is not a purely technical project, so the fact that this is not strictly and grimly technical is not a reason to remove this." He added later that "I exercise my authority over glibc very rarely -- and when I have done so, I have talked with the official maintainers. So rarely that some of you thought that you are entirely autonomous. But that is not the case. On this particular question, I made a decision long ago and stated it where all of you could see it."
The Register reports that "On Monday, the joke was restored by project contributor Alexandre Oliva, having taken Stallman's demand as approval to do so."
25.7.4 Aborting a Program... Future Change Warning: Proposed Federal censorship regulations may prohibit us from giving you information about the possibility of calling this function. We would be required to say that this is not an acceptable way of terminating a program.
On April 30, the proposed change was made, removing the passage from the documentation. That didn't sit well with a number of people involved in the glibc project, including the joke's author, none other than Free Software Foundation president and firebrand Richard Stallman, who argued that the removal of the joke qualified as censorship... Carlos O'Donnell, a senior software engineer at Red Hat, recommended avoiding jokes altogether, a position supported by many of those weighing in on the issue. Among those voicing opinions, a majority appears to favor removal.
But in a post to the project mailing list, Stallman wrote "Please do not remove it. GNU is not a purely technical project, so the fact that this is not strictly and grimly technical is not a reason to remove this." He added later that "I exercise my authority over glibc very rarely -- and when I have done so, I have talked with the official maintainers. So rarely that some of you thought that you are entirely autonomous. But that is not the case. On this particular question, I made a decision long ago and stated it where all of you could see it."
The Register reports that "On Monday, the joke was restored by project contributor Alexandre Oliva, having taken Stallman's demand as approval to do so."
I mean not to put too fine a point on it but this kind of nattering over minutiae is almost quaint. A relic from a bygone age of outspoken egotists who Did Shit(tm)
I, personally, thought to the joke was funny enough, albeit off-color. Black humor is still humor, and I personally recommend its persistence if only as a defense against the professionally offended. That being said, I can sympathize a bit with folks who are legitimately offended by something like this (primarily because death as a whole is a subject that requires concern/consideration when talking about it in certain contexts), in contrast to those who are essentially allowing themselves to be offended on behalf of some other entity/group. As a final note, if someone has read this comment, and assumed that they are a target of my labeling as a professional offense taker, some soul-searching is recommended, as that was basically my intention.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
Can we put in a joke about how he eats his hair and nails into the documentation?
Will this be added only to versions .1,.2,.3 or will it be allowed all the way upto version .9 of the documentation?
**Life is too short to be serious**
glibc abort you!
or just glib?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Some people consider this a joke? I think I can see the real problem here - it's not even funny.
After all, OSS documentation itself is one big joke.
I would rather politics be discussed elsewhere and let's also remember that these docs are read all over the world, including users who may not understand the humour
He was a firebrand that brought a lot of good into the world via his open source push. But in the last decade, at least, he is simply a lunatic with a megaphone that makes the open source community look bad.
A manual for glibc is no place for a joke about abortion, whether you are for or against abortion.
Offensive or not, that deserves to be removed based on it being just plain lame.
Protect the unborn programs.
It's funny because he was right.
It didn't make me laugh, but I have to admit that I find it a clever way to comment on a political issue: not abortion itself, but rather the way anti-abortion proponents try to exert control on abortion clinics by forcing them to talk-down to their patients as if they were ignorant children.
mysql --i-am-a-dummy
Permit only those UPDATE and DELETE statements that specify which rows to modify by using key values. If you have set this option in
an option file, you can override it by using --safe-updates on the command line. See the section called “MYSQL TIPS”, for more
information about this option
One thing that pulls me through my day (and life for that matter) is humor. It belong everywhere, even at some funerals. It lightens life. As a programmer, I have many comments that would amount to jokes. Hell, for many of my stored procedures, the first parameter is called @fiscal_year and right at the top when I'm explaining the parameters, the comment for that one says "Duh!"
Nobody's ever complained about humor peppered in the comments. Never in the output, but comments are fair game.
Is that a roll of dimes in your pocket or are you happy to see me?
people make choices every day. And being free to do so is what most free countries are based on.
stating stupid stuff like "what if you had been aborted" is just ignorant. what if you jaywalked and got hit by a car? what if, what if, what if. world is full of what if's. and probibly mozarts, einsteins and a few hitlers was already aborted with alot of other what ifs.
but that is not your choice to make.
Wait, isn't the documentation under GPL or whatever the version of GPL is for text instead of code? Which means that you have the freedom to change it, as long as you give the changes away.
Hypocrite.
Come on, when will this PC nonsense stop.
Please... Do I have to watch my coding to the
extent that it might offend somebody? Really??
How 'bout fixing bugs and making it better than
nitpicking about somebody's comment. Jeeze.
CAP === 'nibble'
The tiele of this response has censored in Iran and China on the grounds of forbidden Christianity.
Well I don't find the joke funny, mostly because it's a lame joke, censorship should always be fought.
The right answer was to not have put the joke in there to begin with. Freedom comes with responsibility to not ruin freedom for others. The workplace is for work, not for crude humor or for politics.
This is a joke that makes multiple developers uncomfortable for various reasons, and rather than just saying, "get over it," the professional thing to do would be to excise the joke immediately.
Stallman is hopelessly out of touch for championing this of all things.
Finding God in a Dog
particularly given that it might not be a joke
If you're gonna say dumb shit like this, at least have the decency to put your name on it. Notice I'm putting my name on this statement calling you a dumb shit. Yep - you and the thing you said are both dumb as shit. Change my mind.
I see my shadow changing, stretching up and over me...
How about: No jokes and no political commentary in the documentation and source code, period?
Does the OSS community work overtime to invent controversies that make them look like a bunch of kids working in their parents' basement?
Fork glibc, remove joke, have every Linux distro switch to the forked version. That way Stallman has no say in what goes into the docs.
This is a perfect example the classic Prisoner's Dilemma problem, except instead of two prisoners there's only one prisoner, and if the prisoner chooses to delete the offensive joke nothing happens to him, and if he chooses to restore the offensive joke he's being an ass because he doesn't like the kind of person who finds it offensive
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Even worse than Stallman's anti-democratic approach to anything GNU is the rabid, lynch-mob attitude taken by the usual (probably professionally) 'outraged' sorts.
...than comments in the code
....
I'd love to change your mind. You have been far too polite to that Godwinesque troll.
There are some people who are ideal test subjects for whether Mars can support life and anyone who equates abortion with eugenics richly deserved to become part of the Martian soil program.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
When I first got on the internet, webrings were still a thing. If you were interested in any particular topic, your main source of information would be personal sites of people passionate about the topic, and since search engines back then were crap, webrings and other inter-site links were a major way of discovering more material. I've since seen the start of projects like Wikipedia and seen what happens as they get more users. I've seen Linux grow from a personal hobby project to what it is today. And everywhere I look, I see everything becoming dryer and dryer and dryer. Call it professionalism or corporatism if you want. But when I just entered, the net had a kind of charm that it has mostly lost.
You must be kidding.
Real software developers, the only ones who matter, are aiming for eliminating bugs. If satire about excessive religion in politics is distracting you from your job, you're in the wrong job.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Time for normal people to take a stand against the nutty left wingers and their PC nonsense, just like we did against the right wingers and their racism and hatred.
Abortion, as exercised by places like the Chinese Government against its' own citizens, i.e., forced abortion, is far from a laughing matter, And in many families there it can be considered an affront to their personal sensibilities. Such as those who are Christian.
I have no doubt that in some context, as spoken by Mr. Stallman: "glibc is not strictly a technical project" is quite true. There most likely have, or are, Chinese citizens who feel they have been personally negatively impacted by horrendous abortion policies.
It appears Mr. Stallman may need to broaden his horizons to understand that not all people live in a free society. What is acceptable in some contexts is not acceptable in other contexts.
I would assert Mr. Stallman is effectively "reverse-censoring" his abortion joke.
You are certainly welcome to disagree with any, or all of the above, that I have noted. And personally I do not care either way, I am simply the messenger that not all jokes are appropriate worldwide.
Have a good day.
Caution: Contents under pressure
It's the dark side of over-liberalization, and the belief that you have the right to NOT be offended.
Someone is actually looking at the gdam documentation! Of a C library no less!!!
If like a snowball just rolled into hell and asked for a hot chocolate.
So, you do care, even if it's just a little.
There is very little that is universal. If you want to only cover topics that are universally appreciated you can certainly find your own way off this site. I'd recommend that option to anyone who is unwilling to understand and interact with cultures different from their own.
It's time to let go, Dick. You' ve been choking the chicken too long; now it's time to give someone else a chance.
There are other jokes/easter-eggs in Glibc's documentation. I get a kick out of them every time I run across one.
Should we also go through and strip all of those out? What if I decide that EIEIO is insulting to farmers? Who decides what's a trigger-warning and what isn't?
Should we remove HTTP error 418?
The UNIX/Linux hacker subculture of the 80s and 90s produced a ton of interesting technology, and arguably shaped the internet into what it is today.
I don't want my operating system to be a sterile, soulless entity. I like the in-jokes, the fact that 'fortune' exists, and the recursive acronyms. People have poured their vitality into making tools that are free for the world - the least we can do is let them express a sense of humor if they choose.
UNIX cultureLinux/UNIX is born from a really unique, amazing kind of culture, which
---- I'll take you in a Hunt deathmatch any day.
s/radical/principled/
sticking to your principles isn't that easy
RMS is one of the very few people that consistently does so
Free speech lives! (and yes that very much includes offensive speech)
you don't give up on a sensable culture with free speech in order to cater to one without
that's a recipe for loosing your free speech
remember folks rights are like muscles, they get weak if unused
Even here, there has to be at least one that goes off on one when their precious world view is even slightly challenged.
It's a joke about censorship, and it is rather ironic that someone decided to censor it.
It's not even offensive, unless you actually work at trying to be offended.
It's not about aborting a pregnancy, it's about aborting a program.
You people do know that words, especially verbs and adjectives (Or nouns based on such verbs and adjectives) are not exclusively used with one single thing in the universe don't you?
Besides, if independent, or at least non-commercial devs can't have a sense of humor, they should just put on a monkey suit and go work for IBM.
Or a bank.
Stop trying to take the humor out of life and stop trying to turn it into an Orwellian nightmare.
Realize that not everything is an insult.
Think of the uncompiled software, do you want to run them in this environment?
(Yes, that was a weak attempt at a programming joke.)
So, the women can abort, and the men can practice anal sex, error, analysis of gender.
Less Christian 5th columnists is a good thing.
It's abort. Not abortion. The word does have other meanings than kill a child.
Here comes the fun police.
Time to remove all jokes from the internet.
What's next? The Teapot protocol? Avian carriers?
liberal(3) -- Takes no arguments. Automatically enters endless loop which finds every possible thing offensive. No return value as function never returns.
See also: SJW(3) -- Takes no arguments. Generates random idiotic arguments with no basis in fact, consuming 100% of available CPU capacity.
Long story short: sometimes cute little jokes have unintended consequences.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
You're misusing the word child in a childish attempt at emotional manipulation. It doesn't work. A fetus is not a child, in just the same way that a child is not an adult. We already totally understand what potential the fetus has to further develop.
I think you misunderstand where opponents to your way of thinking stand on the matter. I'm sure that many of them would be happy for the fetus to continue its development outside of its host, were that possible. You're asserting a right you simply don't have over another persons body in requiring them to bring the fetus to term when they don't want to.
The question of bad parents is difficult.
Some people are sufficiently self-aware to recognize that they wouldn't be good parents. And, in some rare cases, with great commitment and effort, it might be possible for such people to learn the skills necessary to be good parents. But in most such cases, the key is to find ways for them to satisfy their needs, if any, to be in loving passionate relationships without getting pregnant - that is, making safe and easy birth control and sterilization widely available.
But what do you do with all the people who either can't recognize/accept that they wouldn't be good parents. Or, who perhaps suspect that they wouldn't be good parents but have been convinced that having children is a religious obligation?
I don't have an answer. But, to me, seeing children raised by bad parents is far more horrifying than abortion.
I exercise my authority over glibc very rarely [...]. So rarely that some of you thought that you are entirely autonomous. But that is not the case.
This line should be on a page of greatest quotes of all time.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
"Triggering" people to "relive trauma" over a joke? Get fucked!
"Men" like Carlos O'Donnell, a Senior Software Engineer at RedHat, are cucks and faggots who consume too much soy and should just go away.
In a truly free society,
There would be no 'Proposed ""Federal censorship"" regulations' in the first place.
May I suggest that they simply fork libc...
You're welcome to suggest it. I suggest anyone considering such a thing reject the proposal, or only continue using and developing on the un-forked version.
Contributors to open source projects (ESPECIALY the seminal projects and the pioneers like Stallman) are giving us their work. But it's not for free. They still expect to be paid - but in things far more valuable than money.
Removing this joke is stealing part of Stallman's pay for his work. And it's a piece of his pay that he values enough to raise a stink about it.
For thousands of years the prescription of essentially every moral code has been "pay the worker what you promised". Example: "... the labourer is worthy of his hire." (Luke 10:7, King James Version).
Let's not succumb to the censor's tactic of punishing people who don't totally conform to the current group-think prescription by stealing their stuff - starting with those things they value the most, and with those most connected to denying them free speech.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Not only that, but the word "abortion" does not refer to killing a child, and might be said to preclude an instance of this ever happening.
It's not about whether it's funny (it's not), or whether it's the right venue for a lame joke.
The issue here is that Stallman - as usual - still, after all this time, can't get his head around what censorship actually is. A group of people on a project removing a tone-deaf bit of nonsense from some documentation isn't censorship!. The government making them do so, that would be censorship. That Stallman can't wrap his head around the distinction is right in keeping with his many other absurdities.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
and I said nothing...
Everyone is Pro-Life, BTW. Nobody is out to kill babies.
It just depends on the parents whose life is more important at the time.
And the joke is a little funny.
I miss the tunefs joke more.
Extreme right, extreme left, liberal view, conservative view and all the colors of the rainbow in-between. When we turn our backs upon history, we forget just what it was that we were supposed to remember, we eventually build up to an atrocity and repeat it.
Since all documentation is available to be amended by the modern agendaists, I propose that we revise the preamble of the constitution to read "We, the white males, not slaves or women, in order to form a more perfect union..."
This would properly reflect what the founding fathers were all about and with our perfect, clearly superior view and understanding of those ignorant colonial backwoods peasants, "we" would better understand their position.
Good luck with that.
"Please do not remove it. GNU is not a purely technical project, so the fact that this is not strictly and grimly technical is not a reason to remove this." but RMS complains when someone congratulate another on the GNU list group for having a child. http://www.art.net/Studios/Hac...
Meh - Fuck 'em if that can't take a joke, and joke 'em if they can't take a fuck!
The Truth is a Virus!!!
Seems like a rather US centric joke that will be at best lost of most of the world, and at worst will cause confusion, especially with non native speakers.
You would scan through quickly, see the line "...this is not an acceptable way of terminating a program." And assume its a deprecated method kept only for compatibility. I could especially see some non native English speakers take to stackoverflow to ask for clarification. Even reading it the second time it wasn't that funny. Not because I'm easily offended but that they could do better. In the end though its not my project so they can document it in pig Latin if they so desired.
I disagree with Stallman, glibc should drop the joke.
On the other hand, it's not a joke about abortion, it's a joke about censorship, which is why Stallman wants to keep it. And if advocates for its removal would acknowledge what Stallman likes about it, they'd probably have an easier time with that conversation.
If they don't give a shit give 'em Dulcolax.
No wait lets abort!
Raymond you worthless, hypersensitive bitch. Thanks for letting the world know you are a useless, trifling piece of shit and a terrible programmer who is distracted by elements completely unrelated to the profession.
Instead of removing code, let's all take a moment and reflect on the countless program faults, uninitialized pointers, double frees and other careless mistakes are made by stupid, easily-distracted homosexuals like Raymond Nicholson.
You should learn to think. That link just lists a bunch of lawsuits against PP. None of the stuff on that page has been verified by any authority, as far as I can tell.
I don't respond to AC's.
It's a CENSORSHIP joke. The fact that something is mentioned in the setup to a joke does not make it the subject of the joke.
If it has been around since 1990s... why now? Was it not offensive then but it is now? Are we going backwards? What?
"Triggered" is the word people use derisively. The wording almost sounds like Carlos was encouraged to write something he didn't mean, and worded it in such a way to show derision for what he was being asked to say. Like the forced "confessions" that dictators film of hostages.
Either Carlos is ignorant enough that he self-flamed his own statement, or he felt compelled to engage in some virtue-signaling that he didn't actually believe.
> Have even put my own jokes into code and docs. Not sorry.
I've done that myself. One particular case stands out in my mind. As I recall it was in a comment, or perhaps within an "if false" statement, something that couldn't possibly affect how the program runs. However, the file ended up being used in a way that I didn't intend or predict, and the presence of the joke caused a significant outage.
I will never put jokes in production code again.
Not only do you restore the joke, you add at least another one.
I'm as far "left" as any of you thread jackers but the Mickey Maoists better stay away from my off color humor. I got yer safe space right $#@#ng here
I would hate to see what the Fundies would do with creat().
"I exercise my authority over glibc very rarely -- and when I have done so, I have talked with the official maintainers. So rarely that some of you thought that you are entirely autonomous. But that is not the case."
Is he aware that this project can very much continue without him? He know his Open Source license (and no I'm not saying Free Software) expressly allows people to tell Stallman GFYS while they fork glibc.
How is it "censorship" to merely remove a joke? No government forced them to do so.
It's been there since the 90s? Maybe it had just served its purpose, whatever that was?
Do not remove! libc is more than just code it is a philosophy.
Please. Lets add any garbage to the source code and claim it is an anti censorship stance.
to get to the other side.
At first, I was worried this would be what a dictator would do, as he said that he has "authority" to do things like this but had rarely done it.
After thinking about for a moment I realized that this is GNU's version of an Executive Order.
Kriston
Well, too busy whining to write PROPER code. Still one hell of an attack surface in glibc that can lead to arbitrary execution of code, yet he's too busy being offended at the removal of some little in-joke which came from out of the cruft of his fucking navel that he won't fix what's been pointed out to him for over 12 months.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Trying to subvert the Free Software movement.
A clear intelligence operation using white males soggy-knees and spinelessness when confronted by their all-holy master ("The white woman").
The white male is a moronic dog on a chain to his white cunt ruler. //dumber// than the white female, and is always outwitted by her.
Unlike most species: the white male is
This is not seen in Italians, Jews, Arabs, Japanese, Chinese, etc.
Just spineless moronic stupid white males.
Who are basically just a dangerous chained pitbull always waiting and ready to do it's master's bidding (mudering other cultures).
An intelligence operation has been successfully run against the Free Software movement.
Making Free Software professional and NOT fun and NOT welcome to hobbiest (ie: killing it's heirs) is the goal.
It has succeeded so far (because white males are simpering morons (unlike the Based Jew Stallman))
The joke got aborted.
the nit-wit at RedHat worried about people being "triggered" by a fucking joke or the quantity of people commenting in here who find the joke offensive.
if you find that joke offensive you need serious recalibration of your sense of humor.
also, please don't even run for any office. over.
Absolute statements are never true
Whatever. If the artist who makes a song can't dictate how i enjoy it, then the coder who codes something can't dicatate modifications made to their code by people down the line.
This whole cult of the founder/artist in programming, and their dictatorial whims over an OPEN SOURCE project is sickening. He was free to keep his code all to himself, but he can't control what people do with it after he decides to share it with the world.
I'm not a programmer, so i dont know how commonplace it is to put jokes in professional code. To the layman, jokes appear unprofessional. Like mechanics who draw cocks on your oil filter.
-
So you contributed nothing and would like to dictate how their work is produced? Go eat a big one.
He just isn't up on the latest SJW speak. It's hard to keep up with work and the family.
Not terribly surprising given SJWs cannot agree on the same language or how they should hate something. This tends to lead to them tip toeing around each other unless they get heated.
Crazies the lot of them. If you can't live in the world get some therapy or find a cabin deep in the woods.
Abort can be simply an initialism.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Removing this joke is stealing part of Stallman's pay for his work. And it's a piece of his pay that he values enough to raise a stink about it.
He's got into a spat with the other lead developers over this. They need paying too.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
There is a consensus. If you want the joke to remain then create your own branch with the stupid joke there.
Is it really an essential political statement that the project should be supporting? Does this mean that if IO support glibc, I'm also obliged to have specific opinions on abortion in a country I have visited twice? How about gun control? Nuclear power in Germany? Funding for colour blindness assistance glasses in the Polish health system?
There is no valid reason for removal. It's purpose is to remind of censorship. Personality in projects is necessary. Fuck red hat for their position. They are a top heavy org that is light years behind other distros. Yes i know they pay for Linux dev etc, I'm not saying they should go away; just saying they should stop being corporate politically correct shills.
Also to those offended. They are fucking words.
It's not stealing because nothing has been lost of the persons code whom which you will have partially copied. However that said I think this was the wrong move as subjecting every project to the censorship whim of leftys just results in a totalitarian society where people are not free to express themselves. I will support each individual or entity's to deny access to there property and censor there blogs/sites/etc- but I will personally choose not to partake on my blogs/site/property/etc. I will create the society I want by leading by example. Nobody should be afraid to express an opinion. We can counter bad opinions with rationality, countering points, facts, science, and logic fallacies. I was once threatened by a lefty indirectly who said he would never work with anyone who signed a statement of support for an individual accused of rape but for which there was no real evidence. I signed that statement with my real name: Jacob Applebom. We are still friends. We still work on stuff together. By being rational AND signing I lead a change of opinion not so much in making him think he was wrong- but making him realize that maybe he over-reacted. It also didn't hurt that the accusers even came out and defended Jacob in spite of finding him distasteful.
Very few, if any, jokes are appropriate worldwide. If that is so, then what is the importance of this message? Should we stop making any jokes?
Nothing is acceptable in all contexts. And most things are acceptable in some context. Letting the author of the fucking code decide is one of the better ways to decide. My code, my choice!
While I'm not particularly partial to the restrictive "punch up, not down" mentality a minority of over-represented nobodies seem to currently have towards comedy, I'd say this joke fits that criteria well. The joke is at the expense of the laws and politics of abortion, not abortion itself.
Thank you, Richard Stallman! ...
It saddens me to see that this would have gone south had "the man" not thrown in his veto. This means that the majority either ducks away or is made up predominantly by shit-bags (I doubt that).
I'm quite sure that those who complained are not really into programming. I haven't met a coder without a sense of humor and a desire for liberty, yet. There is currently a dreadful discussion about paragraph 218 ("termination of pregnancy", a.k.a. abortion) in GERMany. The background story is that a doctor was dragged to court for publicizing information to inform pregnant women of their options and their implications. This information was considered a crime by the new right. With dying churches and the political climate having been pushed towards the far right, they are now fastening onto what was thought "a human right" not so long ago.
We need more people like Stallman. Without them, we're back in our enclosures in no time
Abortion, as exercised by places like the Chinese Government against its' own citizens, i.e., forced abortion, is far from a laughing matter,
Most abortions are not forced abortions. Your saying that you can't make jokes about topics that have dark sides to them. Say goodbye to any joke about sex, religion, politics, children, prison, animals, labour, animals, food, alcohol, art or pretty much any other human activity. If humans do it, someone will have found a way to corrupt or abuse it.
It appears Mr. Stallman may need to broaden his horizons to understand that not all people live in a free society.
I'm pretty sure he gets it, it's the entire point of the joke. It's not a joke about abortion, it's a joke about freedom of speech.
Resuscitation isn't going to help it anymore.
And this is what happens when socially unacceptable nerds start letting the plebs in. It was warned about decades ago. Yes, having more people can get you more bodies working on it, and yes some of those bodies will be just as skilled as the socially ackward nerds, but just as many will come in and corrupt it with social formalities. The kind of formalities that most people in the tech scene/movement had in fact congregated to it to avoid.
Also if we start concerning ourself with every in-joke and piece of nomenclature in the computer industry we're going to have to rewrite 40+ years worth of software, because everything from master/slave to abort killing a processor to daemon and superuser *cough* god *cough* is a trigger for somebody, and stripping them all out will eventually make a lot of these systems more oblique for others to understand. Some of these were already specific to english, or worse yet specific english subcultures, but taking away that common base will require rebuilding a new culture in its place. Something that while possible could go either very well or very badly depending on which cultural hacks get to be in charge (see reboots of various cultural icons, versus original works and how well/badly some of each went.)
in the past. Proprietary assholes forcing shit down our throats wouldn't be able to tie us into technology slavery.
Now which did you plan to order on Amazon, the Google Home, or your Amazon Echo? And would you like that your digital profile monitoring on an Intel or AMD management engine running only operating system for non-Apple PCs: Windows 10 Big Brother Edition!
Most people also haven't caught onto the fact that the GNU foundation is losing its influence even beyond what little they had in the past as more and more MIT licensed alternatives are created, until eventually we end up back in the 80s-90s full of proprietary forks of permissive open source/royalty free software all of which is subtly incompatible, and thanks to its permissive licensing unavailable in source code form to be hammered into cross-platform conformance without a costly contract and hopes and dreams to the exclusive company maintaining that version of the code.
To "abort" means to "stop". That's it.
In the context of abortion, it merely means "to stop the pregnancy". (Hence RMS' joke about proper ways to stopping a program and government allowing/forbidding the mention of it).
That you consider this a "child killing" is merely a reflection of the specific way "the point at which life begins" happens to be defined in the peculiar mythology you decided to believe in. Please keep in mind that not everyone took the same decision as you.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Why cant we just be free of political drivel in libc? Does everything have to be tainted? How about we include some other tasteless jokes since all is fair? Stallman is an idiot in this situation if he cant see where this will end.
It is white male privilege if he gets to keep it. Just anotber sign of patriarchal imbalance. Males making decisions. He is showing he is dominant male and that his decision is best.
In my country Brazil, this kind of censorship is done by leftists that have the culture of using "dirty ethics" as a convenient way marketing them as minorities protectors. Pure hypocrisy.
I could care less about it.
Why don't you?
he can't control what people do with it after he decides to share it with the world
I suspect he'd agree completely with you. One reason he shared it with the world is to allow them to do what they want with it (except hide it and prevent others from doing the same).
What he's preventing them from doing is changing his copy of his code.
i dont know how commonplace it is to put jokes in professional code
Very. Almost mandatory.
To the layman, jokes appear unprofessional.
The layman wont understand a large number of the jokes, or even that they are jokes. But that aside, programmers are people. People have a sense of humour. Why would they put that aside when being creative?
Hell, even the mathematically inclined professional actuaries have jokes: https://actuarialjokes.com/
So if a community decides to remove something according to its guidelines that's "censorship".
But removing this modernizing change from the code because you disagree with its politics is not "censorship".
Richard Stallman is a total and utter hypocrite? Say it's not true ...
Would it be unfair to characterise Stallmanâ(TM)s response as: keep my joke in or fork off?
Man.. The world is becoming too wimpy. Big deal it's a friggin joke. It reflects the personalityof thos who write and maintain the code.
If you don't like it.. too ba. go use wimpy os like winblows.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You want to leave Stallman's humorous line in? Fine. It's a historical footnote for OSS. But let's not open the floodgates for every budding programmer with a funny bone to insert their brand of humor into each man page or programmer's manual.
When I open a manual of some sort I want to find answers and not be distracted by irrelevant material. What's next? ASCII Porn? "Don't censor me, man!"
"Pandora's box" and "Unintended Consequences" comes to mind. Let's keep it brief, on topic, and as professional as possible, shall we?
As a joke it is simply not funny. As a political statement, it is a little bit funny. Do political statements belong here... Stallman would certainly think so as that's his standard mode of operation. If it were truly just a joke, then I doubt he'd give a shit.
"It's only business" is often an excuse for a deeply personal attack.
We all hear that label far too often from drones who just want to use it like a policy to enforce misery upon humanity. We are human we want to enjoy our lives a bit and we must deal with reality not being to our ideals all the time.
Free labor or simply even happy workers need some tiny low cost fringe benefits to boost morale (and thereby productivity, loyalty, etc.)
This BS is akin to preventing the laborers from singing while they work. "We don't pay you to sing."
If the majority is not horribly offended to the point of being miserable, people can suck it up and find their enjoyment elsewhere. Online tech has amplified all the bitchy political situations 100 fold.
That's easy. Just 'be fruitful and multiply'. So, then forking and having children, of course. So long as the parent and children are being fruitful, all is well.
Doing nothing but forking and having children is completely prohibited (no fork bombs allowed here).
You are anti-choice. There is no such recognized group as Pro-Life that is legitimate. Pro-Life is defined as anti-choice and has NOTHING to do with the death penalty or war or any other LIFE issue.
It's clever propaganda (PR) spin by self-labeling in order to straw-man the opposition with severe slander. The implication is that that opposition is pro-death.
I've argued a pro-abortion, pro-death position with idiots in the past thinking perhaps it would illustrate the straw-man fallacy they fall for (and use against others.) It always was a waste of time as their brains were switched off... (likely most the time.) I no longer mop the floor with anti-choice arguers it's pointless and no fun anymore. Your personal position is fine but imposing your religion is the problem.
While most of the open source movement has long passed him by.
Humor is largely based upon sorrow. Mark Twain had some better phrased explanation of it; but anyhow TRY THINKING about where most humor comes from. It's almost always unpleasant to somebody. Even slapstick has somebody getting physically abused or suffering an injury.
You can't make everything 100% politically correct to everybody on earth. People who are so touchy as to be traumatized by every reference to something NEED THERAPY.
As always is the case, bullys' deal with their issues by making other people bend because they are too weak to do so. What we have today is empowerment by weak people to get others who lack meaning in their lives to join a shallow righteous cause at no real cost for the smug feeling it gives them to click a few buttons.
Better than that bitch's abortion joke at the WHCD...
It really does not matter what you think about the joke. There is no good reason to remove it and removing it validates a horribly wrong stance that some people fantasize would make the world better. (Even the Nazis though they were making the world better. Good intentions are not at all ensuring good deeds.) Hence it is quite refreshing that a high-profile person does not bow to this nonsense and just states "you have no say in this".
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
#1) this is NOT a paid product where you are a customer demanding you are right and deserve your way 100% for whatever you are paying.
This is a VOLUNTEER project; a GIFT where you are being a total bitch when it's you who should be doing them favors instead of freeloading and then demanding something from them. If you volunteer too-- then the situation only changes slightly as your being an ass to your team and taking away a bit of the joy that motivates others. It ultimately comes down to the majority deciding to fuck with a member of the group at their own expense. If something petty goes thru the group is DOOMED in the long term to remain viable.
What if I decide that EIEIO is insulting to farmers?
#include
The first line of source code found in John Deere tractors.
Buddy, we're just at the beginning of the censorship era. All humanity will be clubbed out of us through social shaming (which is soon to be codified globally as something like a global credit score). This is just a drop in the bucket. Most techies have very little respect for Stallman. It doesn't matter that he is much more talented than they are. It's no longer about talent and results and efficiency. Now that we have a way to have an abundance of food, efficiency isn't really that valuable to the human race anymore. We are entering the age of reputation, and your actual contributions, logic or foresight does not matter. Group harmony conforming to the Marxist vision is all that matters. I guarantee you this joke is gone within 3-5 years, and very few will defend Stallman.
For someone who quotes Ron Paul in his sig line you show a remarkable lack of respect for private property and contract. ...
If the artist who makes a song can't dictate how i enjoy it,
But to a large extent the artist who makes a song, if he retains copyright to it, CAN dictate the conditions under which it is performed - by terms of the license to perform it.
(I recall, for instance, attending a concert that included on orchestrial piece, composed back in the Vietnam confilct era, where the composer had written a political rant, and required it be read to the audience before the piece was performed. The rant, though dated, was duly read.)
This whole cult of the founder/artist in programming, and their dictatorial whims over an OPEN SOURCE project is sickening. He was free to keep his code all to himself, but he can't c.ntrol what people do with it after he decides to share it with the world
But he CAN. By licensing it open source he IS. The license is based on retaining ownership and control - then easing PART of the control. Use it in a way that is forbidden by the license and you lose the license to use it AT ALL>
Yes, he licensed it in a way that lets others hack the joke out of the comments and republish. But he's also an authority in the organization that maintains the current mainline distribution. So he gets, in this case, to dictate how THAT distribution deals with the joke.
And that will stick: To get a fork to take over from the current mainline you'll have to contribute more and/or better maintenance of the whole library than the current organization.
Are you, and your friends, willing to spend that much of YOUR time, resouces, and talents to the project? HE is. His friends are.
They're giving us this stuff we like - in return for other things from us that they value. That includes not locking up fixed/augmented versions of it, contributing other software that THEY like, recognition of their contributions, and respect for their wishes.
So if he values having a joke - relevant to the political situations around open source publication - in the comments (where it doesn't affect the function of the software), I say let him have it, even if the open source contract doesn't require it, even if I don't agree with it. For him it's more valuable than money, and having his way encourages him to make more good software for us. For us it's LESS valuable than money. So in this free market it's a fantastic bargain.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
"I'm not a programmer" and yet you feel you are qualified to comment on an open source coding issue.
Mr President , I thought you got all your news from FOX. Welcome to Slashdot.
**Life is too short to be serious**
Go easy on us. We're just not smart enough to write content that rises to your level of sophistication.
"Carlos O'Donnell, a senior software engineer at Red Hat, recommended avoiding jokes altogether"
If only he'd said that when Red Hat came up with systemd ...
The far right, because abortion is an affront to god, and all aspects of it must be eliminated.
The far left, because abort is another of the patriarchy's stomping on the rights of women, comparing the termination of a process with the right of a woman to have total control over her own body. No wonder we can't gert women in STEM!
Have I pissed everyone off?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
It's actually a FREE SOFTWARE project, not an OPEN SOURCE project, as he would tell you if he read your comment. ;) But
Contributions made to upstream glibc have their copyright attributed to the FSF once they are turned over to the FSF via a copyright assignment form. See: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/w...
Since Stallman is the President of the FSF, he basically has direct authority to modify the version of glibc on the FSF's servers, because he is the highest authority of the non-profit organization that owns that copyright.
What Stallman *can't* do, due to the license that he wrote and gave to glibc, is stop you or anyone else from modifying any aspect of that code once you download it. And he isn't trying to do that here. So indeed, a fork of glibc (which has happened before and was successful; see eglibc, whose changes were eventually merged upstream) would be the only way to have a publicly-recognized copy with this modification. But it wouldn't be *the* *upstream* glibc anymore, even if you called your repo "glibc".
Stallman also technically has the authority to change the copyright license on FSF's version of glibc to any other license, which he did when they made it LGPL v2.1+. Effectively, instead of glibc just being only available under the "Library General Public License v2" (an older version of the license), it can now be released under LGPLv2.1 *or* LGPLv3 by downstream distributors. But that license change only occurred because Stallman assented to it. He could change it to plain old GPLv3 if he wanted, or he could declare the FSF's copy to be proprietary software if he wanted - he's allowed to do that under copyright law. But that still wouldn't modify the license of any copies that were previously distributed.
The GNU project and the GPL licenses are due to Richard Stallman. He is the reason that the GPL licences exist, allowing Linus to do Linux. Take away the joke, and you whittle away at the GNU project.
The joke and other documentation is Richard Stallman's self deliverables in his life, and a life that he has every right to be proud of.
If you remove the joke, you remove a bit or Richard Stallman, a person for whom I have a great deal of respect. We need a little humor in our life, and that joke's not in bad taste.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
The power of the Internet and people can't be bothered to look up slang and colloquialisms? LAZY AF
Sadly the current reality is that American politics are World politics.
Regardless of the data supplied by either side, the fact is that abortion is a genuinely serious topic. It is an invasive medical procedure that can cause physical and emotional trauma to the parties involved. Inserting some simple puns, or making fun of some obvious irony is fine to lighten otherwise dull documentation, but decorum should prevail. Should we be equally indifferent if the IDE drive spec included some joke about a master and his slave?
I don't understand the cries of "censorship! censorship!" in this comment thread. The FSF's projects like glibc are collective endeavours following meritocratic / semi-democratic ideals, right? If the group has a discussion to decide what is appropriate content for its documentation, that's just the normal execution of a democratic process, not some imposed censorship. There's only one set of docs, the community needs to agree on what goes into them, even if that means some have to compromise or not get their way.
As far as I can see, the only autocratic decision here was RMS's assertion of control over glibc, and that the joke should be restored.
would be sick enough to demand the removal of jokes from documentation?
These will fit right in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_baby_jokes
One hand we need jokes here and there. It makes something more personable and sometimes easier to deal with when we lighten the mood up a bit.
On the other hand, I can see to a point the desire to avoid anything political since regardless of what side your on and whether or not you're offended it can be a distraction when you're trying to figure something out and get something done.
However, this is such a light joke on the subject and this is the Internet and there are far worse things being said out there and joked about out there that if someone gets offended by this, they need to grow a thicker skin and get over it. If we listened to all the SJW and snowflake nonsense out there, then we literally shouldn't bother talking and communicating at all since once one person has a different opinion on anything, at least one person will get offended and then all hell breaks loose against the person who dared to think different.
Good on Stallman for stopping the nonsense in its tracks before it grows larger.
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Just rename the function "coatHanger()".
Professional programmers shouldn't be putting jokes in their code although frequently they do. It doesn't matter how good the programmer thought the joke was, someday, when somebody else is debugging the same piece of code, it won't seen nearly as funny.
Furthermore, jokes that could be deemed political should be right off limits. "If I was in charge of the glibc code base, this one would be gone, even though I think vey views on abortion probably align with those of rms.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
This definitely reminds me of when they pulled ddate from the the util-linux package. Some dude was offended. It was one of the things that, for me, made linux fun and unique. I can still install it and use it, and I do most days, but it was so cool that it was just there.
what's a while while?
#HumorlessTurd
Planned Parenthood has repeatedly aborted the babies of abused children [liveaction.org] and then handed they underage girls right back to their abusers,
Which is somehow worse than NOT aborting the babies of abused children and sending them back to the abusers?