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."

Comments

Opinion

[thegreatbob]

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.

We All Need Jokes

[lsllll]

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.

Re:No good guys to cheer for

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Huh?

[bobbied]

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.

No. (See Luke 10:7) More valuable than money.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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.