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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."
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
Richard Stallman is a tool! I am sorry to say it but his radical advocacy turns a lot of people off. I can say that it turned me away from any interest in Linux whatsoever. I learned Unix on OpenBSD and had some curiosity about Linux but no more. I am happy to be strictly a BSD guy. If it isn't Free- or OpenBSD then I could care less about it.
Judging about how many "conservatives" panties got in a wad about Michelle Wolf's roast (including, grab 'em jokes, "pull out" jokes, and lying eye-shadow jokes), at the 2018 Washington Press's Correspondents' Dinner, I'd say that there's no more concentrated a form of whiny entitled professional victim than the white wing racist set.
Snivelling about how horrible it is that other people are describing you with words that are damaging to your fragile ego, is not the way to convince the rest of us that it's everyone else who is the snowflake. Man up, and realize that rap albums aren't meant to be sing-alongs. Not for you, anyway. You'll just have to suffer through life knowing that.
https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/trump-considering-pulling-us-out-of-constitution
Or how about renaming it "standyourground()" with a neat joke that "this function lets you kill anything at any time for any reason whatsoever, even if anyone else would think it's unreasonable, because you're a manly brogrammer".