Slashdot Mirror
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, 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...
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?
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?
The workplace is for work, not for crude humor or for politics.
Some of us are old enough to remember a time when Free Software wasn't just about work - when it was something that people did because it was fun.
Some people consider this a joke? I think I can see the real problem here - it's not even funny.
I'm solidly pro-life and I see the humor in it even though it's making fun of laws I would support. I'm not saying it's funny, but I see how some would find it amusing so it has merit and should stay for historical reasons.
I also don't consider personal offense valid criteria for censorship of any kind. Being offended to demand censoring something has become a cottage industry of late. Such foolishness needs to stop.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
stallman started Free Software not Open Source ... So he should, and so should we all
He started it because he wanted freedom
Not at all suprised to see him take a stance against political correctness
If the pro-choice advocates would treat the decision with the weight it deserves, I'd be more amenable to their position. But they treat it like the expectant mother is weighing the ethics of removing a benign mole rather than whether they should separate conjoined twins when one will die because of it.
Sure, there are some cases where sacrificing one life to save the other is the least terrible solution. So I do not want laws that proscribe the outcome without considering the circumstances. But those that promote abortion as simply a choice of whether a woman wants a baby or not deserve the "pro-baby-murder" label.
Knowledge Brings Fear
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
> 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.
I am socially pro-life and I consider this joke to be not only perfectly reasonable, but as a programmer who knows that calling abort() may kill a program without doing proper garbage collection and thus create memory leaks, the point of it being an unacceptable way to terminate a program is quite reasonable as well.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
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?