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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...
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**
or just glib?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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
Offensive or not, that deserves to be removed based on it being just plain lame.
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?
Well I don't find the joke funny, mostly because it's a lame joke, censorship should always be fought.
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?
Sure you can. Just fork it and maintain your own project from now on and get everyone to switch to your fork. Seems a bit extreme over a joke in the documentation.
Get over yourself. You guys need to learn to "get over it" and learn that you have no right to NOT be offended. The "professional" thing is no to release software that is riddled with security holes. I'm still waiting for the "professional" software houses to start doing that.
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.
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
I for one prefer his idiocy over red hat (poettering et al.) idiocy. And yeah, that joke is there for a reason, whether you think the joke is funny or not. It doesn't even matter what your stance is on human abortion.
In other news, some of the reasoning for removing it was SJW-flavoured: "could possibly cause trigger-y thingies to happen to imaginary someones somewhere somewhen". Apparently red hat is going the way of google. Unix never was about coddling sensibilities, providing safe spaces, or whatnot. So DIAF to that. Tacnukes at bring your own dawn, etc.
It isn't censorship to remove superfulous information from documentation, joke or not.
What makes me funny, is that RMS is acting like a petty dictator over a "joke" that is no longer funny nor wanted any longer. Some jokes run their course, this was one. Calling it "censorship" is asinine.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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.
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
Freedom comes with responsibility to not ruin freedom for others.
Freedom comes with responsibility to tolerate the sensibilities of others.
>joke isn't funny
was that an echo
>It isn't censorship to remove information
bruh
I don't recommend using a (mediocre) argument Of Triviality, because it easily flips around.
Here, I'll show you: "Demanding the removal of superfluous information is asinine."
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)
This.
RMS saying that he, by himself, can oppose the change is the real joke here. Even if he created the GNU libc in the first place, it doesn't belong to him any more and he doesn't have any power to do that. Most of the work has been done by others ; it belongs to the community. If the community want to remove that joke they can. If he insists that he owns the place (which is quite at adds with the principles of GNU) then people will just move over to somewhere else. For good.
I just wonder what it is like to go through life getting offended by every little thing. It must be exhausting.
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.
Of all the people made "uncomfortable" by this joke I'd be chief among them and I'm advocating that we leave it alone. Where I may find reason to be offended, this does not give me the right to demand it be removed. Why? Because something I say or do may offend you and I expect to be afforded the same tolerance. Being offended doesn't actually hurt you, especially if the offending thing is in the comments...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Uh, obviously he does have the "power to do that". The "joke" is back.
If satirising religion in politics impacts your freedom, chances are you are living in Iran or China.
In most countries, satire is a Null operator.
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)
You must be kidding.
I find it funny.
Therefor your opinion has been nullified.
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)
This is a joke that makes multiple developers uncomfortable for various reasons, and rather than just saying, "get over it,"
Non thread safe C library functions using internal static variables and ellipsis make multiple developers uncomfortable for various reasons, and rather than just saying "get over it", the professional thing to do would be to excise these features immediately.
Stallman is hopelessly out of touch for championing this of all things.
Out of touch? Does that imply your in-touch? I don't want to be touched..... I'm scared and afraid now... I don't feel safe.
Who said GNU needs to be "professional"? It originated and is still maintained by hobbyists. Keep it weird.
I don't respond to AC's.
Your logic is trivially easy to turn on it's head. Really, it doesn't seem like you're even trying here. They put the joke there to shine a tiny spotlight on the government-sanctioned practice of only some of the US states of ruining freedom for others.
I prefer no idiocy at all. Reading this kind of jokes in the libc documentation could be confusing for many non-english speakers and really is out of place.
I'm not talking about people sensibility or SJW anything, just trying to have the documentation do what it's supposed to do in the most efficient way.
That was fun for some times and persons, I smiled reading it, but really it seems childish .. and even more from RMS to now oppose the removal.
But it's a pretty good reason for deleting it from technical documentation.
You could also write the word "spam" at the bottom of every single function's documentation, and that wouldn't be funny either. It also wouldn't be censorship if someone removed it.
I usually agree with RMS but this is one of those "who the fuck cares?" things.
Then it gets worse:
OMG, we're having a contest to see who can be the most stupid. I'm almost back to joining RMS in "demanding" it be put back again. "Triggered?" really? Holy shit.
Fuck anyone and everyone who pretends they're unable to handle reading a certain word. The "joke" needs to be put back in, just to piss on the drama queens.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
That's the thing I find most interesting about this. When it was clearly just a joke for the past decades, nobody complained about there being a joke there. Now that we have a political climate that's quickly darkening into the type of one where this is a serious possibility they want to astro-turf over the warning?? Seems like highly suspicious timing to me.
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
Just because you can be an asshole doesn't mean you should be. I'm pro-abortion, but I'm against bringing politics and religion into software development. Making fun of people's stupid political and religious beliefs in software documentation can only lead to a cesspool of toxic arguments and the needless loss of developers and consequent reduction in quality of the project. Not to mention a needlessly miserable time for all involved in the ensuing flame war.
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He might get away with this once. Otherwise, wait for the fork ...
You ought to create a fork that fits your needs then. Until you do, enjoy the joke.
Your opinion doesn't nullify mine. THAT is CENSORSHIP!!
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I'm not offended. I was merely pointing out that "get over it" is offensive to a large part of the Politically Correct Crowd, as they use it as example of whatever "oppression" they are experiencing at the moment.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
And it's perfectly fine to make jokes between colleagues. Just that, when your colleagues become millions of people from all around the world, you might want to remove some private jokes from the doc as it's no longer funny.
If millions of people have read the man page for abort we're all doomed.
Only fools who don't know how to properly handle process lifecycle would ever dream of being stupid enough to call this function in the first place.
>"I'm pro-abortion, but I'm against bringing politics and religion into software development"
I don't think anyone is "pro-abortion". More likely you are "pro-choice" (pro-abortion-choice). There is difference. Like probably most people, I abhor abortion. But I also think it isn't the governments right to dictate what someone can't do with their own body. So while I think the government should, in no way fund, support, or promote abortion... and don't have any problem with requiring education and warnings, I don't think it should be made illegal.
Another example- I am not "pro-alcohol" but I am "pro-alcohol-choice."
Because being our only two choices is to tip toe around people offended by every little thing or not caring about anyone anywhere at anytime.
Binary worlds suck.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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
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.
I won't ; I read man pages, which do not have that joke.
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)
But are you for phylactics or not? Inquiring minds want to know....
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
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
Here's the problem, "get over it" is itself offensive, and some people use it as a further extension of whatever offense they have taken.
It's ableist because little people may not be able to "get over it", they will have to go under it. And what about people in wheelchairs?
/runlegs
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.)
I find the joke a bit dark but funny.
However, I hold the position if I find something like this I remove it. Have even put my own jokes into code and docs. Not sorry. Done it before will do it again. Have a good laugh with everyone then fix it up. There are soul less mindless drones out there. They will suck the room dry of any humor or good things. It is easier just not to trigger them. They will waste thousands of hours of your time. Pick your battles with them. Provoke them and they will make it their life mission to be a pain in the ass. They are 'professionals'. They use that term to abuse everyone around them.
With a project this big a bit of polish is not unwarranted. I would expect to also find little things like this everywhere. But cleaned up when the joke is discovered. Then you add in another one somewhere else. That is part of the 'game'.
RMS is being a bit of a dick here. He said 'lets have group votes' Apparently that is only true when it does not contradict him.
It's abort. Not abortion. The word does have other meanings than kill a child.
Do you start to get how prescient RMS has been all along? This "triggering", or censorship in any sane language, is exactly why he insisted on such jokes, no matter how bad they are.
Here comes the fun police.
Time to remove all jokes from the internet.
What's next? The Teapot protocol? Avian carriers?
Is it bad that I found it funny you have to type "man abort" to read it, inferring only men can abort?
Someone should mandate all distros create an "alias woman=man"
This post, which includes the name "Carlos O'Donnell," has just triggered in me a traumatic memory of what a flaming asshole Carlos is. I demand that no one ever mention his name again, on this forum or any other; and if you agree with Carlos's proposal, I guess you'll have to agree with mine. It's only fair.
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.
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.
That's impossible. I am offended you don't give credit to God for granting us these freedoms. You heathen. In reality, getting offended is an American past time, and being outraged is the natural human state.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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
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.
Freedom comes with responsibility to not ruin freedom for others.
Freedom comes with responsibility to tolerate the sensibilities of others.
As well as not be overly sensitive and easily insulted...
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Perhaps it is childish (to you), to most sensible people it's a comment on the political climate in the US, but removing it when the author explicitly stated decades ago not to is censorship and for that reason alone, the quote should stand.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
and I said nothing...
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.
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!!!
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.
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.
Nothing RMS did could make you funny. Perhaps you meant "laugh"?
You are incurring the mental cost and inconvenience of me having to deal with your horribleness as a person. Should I have the right to choose to end your life because of that? No? Then there's some threshold where someone's life outweighs the temporary inconvenience of another.
By the way, there's a more humane way to avoid the legal and financial liability part. It's called adoption.
Knowledge Brings Fear
"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.
One is spam, the other is not.
Not only do you restore the joke, you add at least another one.
I suppose I think of censorship as a bit more dire than removing a decades old joke from versions of documentation. Is it censorship if I propose a change to add that "rather than using abort(), I have a modest proposal for an alternative.." and my change gets denied? Does everyone's submission to add commentary to the documentation have to be allowed, because to do otherwise is to censor that person's speech, even as they have tons of other venues as even their own code tracking system would keep it available for posterity, even if not currently in new downloads?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I think it's a valid point. I have seen jokes, puns, and colloquialisms derail a non-native English speaker from understanding what they are reading. What would *seems* to obviously be something in jest has caused me to have to spend a lot of time explaining that "no, don't worry about that bit in the documentation.. why not? because it's a joke... how is it a joke? well... you see in america...." which is all in all a sort of cultural exchange, but it's never entertaining to either party (anytime you have to explain a joke, it's not going to be funny by the time it is understood).
It's not a matter of unwilling to interact and learn cultures, it is it bogs down documentation and makes it harder to understand. It is rare that a person who didn't get it is ready to walk away without a full explanation about it so they are engaged, it's just that it's not the best forum for cultural exchange.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Most of your questions can be answered straightforwardly by using an analogy of a library. Does everyone's submission to add a book to a library need to be allowed? No, not really. Is requesting that a book be removed because you don't like what it says censorship? Yeah, it is.
As a general rule of thumb, "I am offended" is not a good reason to remove speech.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I would hate to see what the Fundies would do with creat().
The point is, who cares what you are "against'? That "joke" has been in there for decades, and no one noticed. Get over it.
Who is going to fork it and maintain it? You? Doubtful. Get over it.
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.
RMS is just not let himself go with the political nonsense herd mentality other projects are currently going.
It is called having a backbone, which is rare nowadays.
Sad that RMS is the only having the wisdom to do that.
As a non-native speaker, I can assure you learning all that nuances is what takes part of mastering a language.
What happened to your mate, had he a buffer or parser overflow over reading those parts of the documents, or was he able to skim them over, and resume reading?
Non-English speakers can skip text and resume reading when they do not understand things, they are not machines. As an EFL speaker, I do get the joke btw.
There is more to say about RH here than RMS.
Amen!
As a non-US guy, I can assure you we get it. No rats and RedHat SJWs were harmed in laboratory for us to understand the joke.
After the current wikipedia, FreeBSD and StackOverflow "inclusive" and politically correct stances, do you still need to ASK?
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
> looking professional and easier to sell Is it just me, or does it sound like prostitution?
FACTS:
Everyone is entitled to an opinion, but some people's opinions are wrong (eg "I think the earth is flat").
Everyone is entitled to give their opinion, but not entitled to have their opinion listened to. (assuming US audience where there is freedom of speech)
And not listening or telling you that you are wrong is not censorship.
And if you posit your opinion as a fact (like you did as there was no "in my opinion" or "I think that" etc), it can be treated like any statement of fact, including outright rejection if incorrect.
SUMMARY
if you want to claim your opinion and not have it nullified say "I think that joke isn't funny" not "that joke isn't funny".
Personally I'm on the fence, (see what I did there) but it irks me when people claim their opinion in absolutes. Same reason I have a problem with most religions.
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.
What they should have done is remove it one word at a time so that no one notices.
It isn't censorship to remove superfulous information
Would you like to take a moment to reflect on what you've just said?
Are you really arguing that all I need do to avoid accusation of censorship is to declare something superfluous - literally 'unnecessary'?
RMS is acting like a petty dictator
You say that like it's a bad thing. The _point_ of free speech is that everyone gets to be 'a petty dictator' over what they say or write. You can argue that something is superfluous. You can ask that it be removed for various reasons. But if the author declines, then that is quite literally their right.
His words. He gets to say 'no' when you ask for them to be removed.
nor wanted any longer
Here you go, again. It doesn't matter whether you or anyone else wants this, they are his words. He gets to say what happens to them.
We are only tested on our dedication to the right to free speech when the speech is something we don't like or don't want to hear.
Calling it "censorship" is asinine.
Denying that it is is ignorant.
When your 'opinion' is stated as broadly as you have and used as though it were a fact or date to prop up your argument, then showing a counter-example 'nullifies' your 'opinion' within the context of your argument.
there are a lot of people who now don't exist
There are even more people who don't exist because of all the people who have failed to have children with me. Some of them I've never even met.
And if the pro-life advocates, like you, would stop insisting that the 'weight' that they attribute to the decision is the only valid one, then I'd probably be more amenable to their position.
The essence of the pro-choice movement is that it is the choice of the individual. That they should be allowed to make that choice based on their own evaluation of the 'weight' of that choice and that other people, like yourself, imposing what _you_ think is an appropriate 'weight' is an imposition on their right to self-determination.
Some people will treat it with every bit as much 'weight' as you ask. Others will treat it as you characterise all pro-choicer advocates.
Personally, I think more harm has been done by righteous do-gooders, certain of their morally superior position and unable to admit that their position might be an opinion and not a fact than just about any other single source in human history.
where someone's
I'm not sure you're even aware of the fact that you are assuming something as fact that others disagree with.
You equate killing the GP with the abortion of a fetus, that abortion is killing a person. That position may be one you consider incontrovertible. It is not.
the temporary inconvenience of another
I see. Are there any other dismissive phrases you'd like to use while virtue signalling how much more amenable you'd be if only 'they' would treat this with the proper 'weight'?
It's called adoption
Cool. How many children have you adopted?
I don't want to take away choice. I just want it to only be exercised in rare circumstances after the weight of the ethical question is fully considered.
It isn't just a question of "reproductive autonomy". It is taking a life and should be treated that way.
Knowledge Brings Fear
The problem is that "overly sensitive" is subjective. For the sake of freedom of speech it's better to make it other people's responsibility to just ignore stuff they find over sensitive.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
"“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” - George Bernard Shaw
People thought he was a lunatic back when he was starting to do the things that you describe as 'a lot of good'. I'm damned grateful that there's someone like him who doesn't compromise even if it makes other people 'look bad'. The man has proven to be prescient far too many times for me to dismiss what he has to say, even when I don't necessarily agree.
But on this, he's absolutely right. They are his words, in his document for his project. He gets to say 'no' when people suggest that he remove them. No matter how reasonable or unreasonable other people might think that position is.
Abortion is intentionally ending a life that would continue without that intervention. Trying to deny that the foetus is alive or that it can't feel yet or that it isnt a "person" is just rationalizing.
And I might adopt. My wife and I are trying to have a child. If it turns out that we can't do so naturally, we will be looking into adoption.
Knowledge Brings Fear
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.
-
Abortion is intentionally ending a life
You are arguing about something 'in potentia'. The 'life' (as a singular noun) does not yet exist. This argument is/was used by the Catholic church against contraception. That a 'life' would otherwise exist except for the intervention of the condom, for example. It's a position that is well reasoned and argued. It's not proven and there are counter arguments just as well reasoned and argued. Those arguments may not persuade you, but they exist and the fact that other people find them just as compelling as the arguments you use to reach your conclusions is the thing you seem unable to understand accommodate or accept.
Trying to deny that the foetus is alive
A collection of cancerous cells in a tumour is alive. You're conflating alive with 'a life'. You attribute a value to the fact that this group of cells may go on to become a person, compared to this other group that is not. You argument relies on the value you ascribe to the potential of those cells. There are other values.
is just rationalizing
Patronising assertion and a straw man. Are you aware of the assumptions you are making in _this_ statement?
And I might adopt
I see. So abortion is ending a person based on the potential of those cells to become a person, and your virtue with respect to adoption lies in the potential likelihood of you adopting in the future.
I think I'm detecting a pattern. Some people lack your omniscience, and so come to different conclusions being, as they are, restricted to knowing only what is.
You seem to be confusing two arguments. I disagree with your position on abortion, but that's not what I'm arguing. There's no point. You refuse to admit that there could be a different position so arguing with you about that would be utterly fruitless. And the only reason I'm pointing that out is because of the hypocrisy of your position where you condescend to allow how you'd be better able to accept someone having a different point of view if only they'd value things the way you do.
Well of course you would. Then they'd be wrong.
Are you kidding? you are the one who is offended by the offence of offended people!
The correct course of action for this stupid debate is to shake your head sigh, and close the web browser. Literally both sides are wrong and i really don't care. But the comments here acting like its a free speech issue are clearly the most entitled of all.
-
First of all, I'm not a pro-life advocate. I oppose laws that that try to ban abortions. So I'd probably be more likely to side with you than them on most legislation.
The essence of the pro-choice movement is that it is the choice of the individual. That they should be allowed to make that choice based on their own evaluation of the 'weight' of that choice and that other people, like yourself, imposing what _you_ think is an appropriate 'weight' is an imposition on their right to self-determination
This "argument" could be applied to anything. Claiming that you're making a choice while pretending that no one else affected is just deluding yourself. Moral relativism has to have a limit. If ending a life isn't something that universally has some substantial ethical weight, then you're really just advocating for anarchy.
Knowledge Brings Fear
Claiming that you're making a choice while pretending that no one else affected
Well it's a good thing I didn't make that claim, then, isn't it. You exclaimed that you wished people would treat the choice with the appropriate weight. I pointed out that you were assuming that your judgement of the weight is your own and that you are assuming that this is universal and/or has an absolute right/wrong. I'm advocating for letting people evaluate that for themselves. Nowhere in that chain is there a statement about whether their decision does or does not affect others.
If ending a life
You keep doing it.
You consider it ending a life. That's a conclusion you've reached based on your values and reasoning. Other people evaluate that differently.
_That's_ my point. Then you condescend to allow that you'd see their point of view if only they'd value things the way you do.
That you cannot understand that is not a criticism of your conclusion. It's a criticism of your inability to consider that your axioms may differ from someone else's and that as a consequence the conclusions you draw may be different.
Abort can be simply an initialism.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
The majority of Americans - and here in the UK too - are moderates. They support restrictions on abortion, but also believe that it should be legal under some circumstances. This moderation has little political representation though. The passionate ones, the people who actually drive the political debate and write the laws, are the extremists. The pro-lifers who want to see abortion banned entirely even if this means women dying needlessly, and the pro-choicers who believe abortion must be legal in every case as a matter of principle.
The US legal situation only worsens the situation due to the fear of incrimentalism.
I'd respect the pro-life side a lot more if almost every one of their pressure groups were not also opposed to sex education and access to contraception. The best tools we have to minimise the need for elective abortion, yet shunned by the organised pro-life movement for 'promoting sin' or some such nonsense.
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.
The question is not really over 'taking a life.' People kill all the time - for food, for medicine or for pest control. My whole household had to take antiparasitics last week because we adopted a rescue cat that was riddled with intestinal worms - does that count as murder? Not all life has equal ethical value, and some life has negligible value. A consistent framework for handling the issue of abortion needs to somehow evaluate this worth: What makes humans worth more than rats and worms, and does the fetus have it?
Unfortunately humans are superficial creatures, and easily swayed by simple physical features like a cute little baby face or a bizarre fixation on the heartbeat.
This is why I don't like the in potentia argument. Once you start granting rights to people who may hypothetically exist in future, you end up reaching some very strange conclusions which most people would find abhorent. By that logic any men here need to be getting out there right now and finding some women to impregnate - and if none are willing, just rape as many women as possible. Doing anything else means denying existence to future children, a crime on par with murder.
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?
It could be argued that GNU has outgrown the hobbyist era. GNU carries the weight of many billions of dollars each year of business activity and of safety-critical systems. There are hobbyists, but there are also professional programmers hired by businesses who need to improve the software they depend upon. The glory days of the hacker culture in which GNU originated have passed.
Wow did you just discover that list of mildly funny unix jokes from the 80s?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I just wonder what it is like to go through life getting offended by every little thing
You must have a very short memory then. You seem to be angry a lot and get hilarously offended about the use of the term "AI" for example!
SJW n. One who posts facts.
You write a library and put whatever you want in it... and we won't complain.
This is a funny joke, calm your tits.
Perhaps it is childish (to you), to most sensible people it's a comment on the political climate in the US, [...]
It isn't childish to me, but it is parochial. You (and by "you" I mean a generic "you") are welcome to comment on your own politics, but it puzzles me as to why you think the whole world needs to see it. What makes your political in-jokes so much more important than everyone else's?
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
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!
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
Not BE overly sensitive. Be. The person is supposed to
not overly sensitive.
ignore stuff they find over sensitive
Stuff ? Do you follow simple English ?
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
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.
But they treat it like the expectant mother is weighing the ethics of removing a benign mole
That's an easy comment to make from the peanut gallery and shows you fundamentally have no fucking idea what is going on in these cases.
I guess everyone's gotta have a hobby.
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 ]
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/
Comment removed based on user account deletion
No. That's not how things work. Your fragile feelings are your own problem. Guessing you don't know the difference between sticks, stones, and words? If so, I blame your parents.
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?
A baby right before delivery is as alive as right after delivery, and equally capable of surviving on its own. I am not arguing against abortion, just pointing out that the 'alive' argument can be taken to the ridiculous. If the baby is considered alive right after delivery, it's also alive right before delivery. And a day before, and 2 days before, etc.
At some point, you can argue that the foetus is not alive, I suppose, but obivously the question is more complex than argument that just because the bun is still in the oven it cannot possibly be alive. So in many cases, abortion can literally mean ending a life, whereas in other, much earlier stages, it doesn't mean ending a life.
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.
Isn't the point of FOSS that it doesn't really belong to anyone? It's a matter for the community, and not just one guy.
Look, I don't really have a problem with the so-called joke, if it can so be called. It's weak at best, but in its own way, it's a pro-choice joke. Fine. But does it *add* anything to the documentation? There's so much bad documentation out there right now in FOSS projects, and this is what they're fighting over? I run into obtusely documented functions in emacs/elisp all day every day, and it's 100% not getting better, but somehow there's time to worry about whether a bad joke deserves to be included so everyone can roll their eyes at it?
I'd just as soon see it removed—if it doesn't help people figure out how to use the software, it's just one more thing I have to sigh at and scroll past as I look for something useful.
The whole argument comes down to a discussion about bodily autonomy. A woman has a right to her body—all people do. You can't harvest organs from a corpse to save the lives of 10 people if a person hasn't authorised you to do it before their death, and so forcing a woman to carry an unwanted baby to term is effectively bestowing more rights onto a dead person than a living woman, and endowing the fetus with *more* rights than any living person.
Beyond that, though, there's a misconception that abortion is taken lightly by women at doctors. Virtually nobody gets a 3rd trimester abortion that doesn't medically require it because the fetus has either died, will die, or will kill the mother. Here in Canada we literally have no laws at all governing abortion; it's just a medical decision that's made. We do not have meaningfully different abortion statistics.
Outlawing abortion doesn't make it any less prevalent, it just makes it more dangerous. Teach better sex ed, encourage children to understand sex, consent and contraception, and unintended pregnancy rates will drop, and with them, abortion rates. Unfortunately, it seems that most people (or at the very least, most lawmakers) that are anti-choice are also anti-sex-education, which ends up being a vicious cycle.
It doesn't have to be that way. The people making billions of dollars off of GNU should always be reminded who wrote that software. If they don't like silly comments, they can re-write their own code.
I don't respond to AC's.
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**
"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.
This is why I'm not pro-choice. I'm pro-abortion.
Population's too high anyway.
You consider it ending a life. That's a conclusion you've reached based on your values and reasoning. Other people evaluate that differently.
I don't "consider it" ending human life. It is ending human life. An embryo is alive and has a unique set of human DNA post-conception. Where is there room for interpretation? Do you deny that they have human DNA or that they are alive?
When does someone become human enough for their life to have value. If it isn't at the start, then when? Any other definition has seriously fucked up consequences like people losing their humanity because they have a disability or are temporarily unconscious.
That is why I say that considering abortion to be nothing more than "reproductive choice" is reprehensible.
You say that I'm just not open to alternative interpretations. That's true, but only because there aren't any others that can be held consistently without devaluing human life to the point where gross atrocities can be justified.
Knowledge Brings Fear
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
Before you criticize others for their lack of understanding of censorship you might want to wrap your own head around it. It does not have to come from the government to be censorship.
Bodily autonomy isn't as clear cut as it sounds. In the case of conjoined twins where one is reliant on the other. Does the bodily autonomy of the more independent twin override the right to life of the other one? Can one unilaterally decide to separate, even against the other's will and regardless of whether they are otherwise healthy?
Of course, this is a moral question, not a legal one. I don't propose making laws to bar everything that happens to be immoral. But the corollary is that not everything that is legal is morally correct.
Knowledge Brings Fear
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.
You consider it ending a life. That's a conclusion you've reached based on your values and reasoning. Other people evaluate that differently.
I don't "consider it" ending human life. It is ending human life. An embryo is alive and has a unique set of human DNA post-conception. Where is there room for interpretation? Do you deny that they have human DNA or that they are alive?
That is all true of sperm also. I hope you haven't jacked-off anytime in the past. Or had a wet dream. That would be millions of human DNA cells that you killed. Any one of them could have found it's other half of the DNA it needed and became a full human, but you shot them into a sock and killed them all!
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
When a group of people who run a project make a decision about what to publish in their own documents, it's called freedom of expression. The OPPOSITE of censorship. When someone else who, through some agreement or organizational structure, tells them they can't express themselves that way, that's also freedom of expression, if that's how things are set up. Or would you say that Stallman was censoring those other people's ideas about that communication? No? Exactly.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
As a general rule of thumb, "I am offended" is not a good reason to remove speech.
Keeping something out of misguided principle (or perhaps spite) is not a good reason either.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
What misguided principle do you see here?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Premature anti-PC. Even the slightest whiff of an argument for political correctness can lead critics of PC down some reactionary path. When sometimes they are reacting to their own strawman they initially set up. For example RMS's comment(joke?) was intentionally (I assume) hyperbolic, a criticism of over-corrective political correctness culture and its suppressive nature.
The tone of his joke was of a parody. Now that RMS doesn't realize his own parody years later means he's at worse set up a strawman as distraction politics and at best he's an old man tilting at windmills.
Full disclosure, I do believe that we should be critical or even actively subvert attempts of a self-designed authority to unilaterally establish new cultural norms. Especially when it is clear that we do not universally share those new standards, or if we do in principle we may not all agree with the force or application.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
You misunderstood his joke. He was criticizing people who want to silence abortion councillors.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
You misunderstood the thread. This thread is about the motives that RMS has for refuses to remove the joke. I am well aware of the nature of the joke, which is why I described it as a parody.
I've already gone over what I believe to be his motivations. Now can you explain, in your own words, why RMS refuses to remove it?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Sure. It's his project, he thinks it's funny, and he sees no reason to remove it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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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
Is it his project? I saw some responses where the community at large thought they owned it collectively and that decisions should be more democratic.
It's Linus not RMS that claims to be a "benevolent dictator".
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
It's in the summary. For GNU projects every contributor assigns the copyright of their code to the fsf.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
At the risk of stating the obvious, historical books which contain contemporary references were written with the audience in mind.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
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.
mangina alert
You seem to be an English speaking guy. Ask someone who's non native English speaking.
You and I are 100% in agreement on legality not being equal to morality, and vice versa. But the question of conjoined twins is not the same as the question of a woman and her right to an abortion as a medical procedure. I think we can lean heavily on the bodily autonomy argument, and leave the rest up to a woman and her doctor. Again, demanding that a woman be forced to carry a pregnancy to term gives that woman less autonomy than any non-pregnant person, and it gives more rights to a fetus than any born person—even a newly born baby would have less right to demand the organs and living body of another person than a 2nd trimester fetus, in that case. It makes no sense.
Conjoined twins, well, that's two people that entered the world sharing the same body, and so bodily autonomy now goes out the window because there was never a time where there was any actual autonomy for any one individual. It's a sad and interesting philosophical problem.
Again, demanding that a woman be forced to carry a pregnancy to term gives that woman less autonomy than any non-pregnant person, and it gives more rights to a fetus than any born personâ"even a newly born baby would have less right to demand the organs and living body of another person than a 2nd trimester fetus, in that case. It makes no sense.
I agree that no one should be compelled to give up their body for the benefit of another. Although, that isn't the situation we are considering. It's the question of whether they can withdraw support of another, once provided, when the other's life depends on it. I think that depends pretty strongly on whether that support was given willingly or taken forcibly.
It seems to me that the bodily autonomy argument is at odds with itself in these scenarios. It doesn't apply for twins who had no choice to be conjoined, yet it does apply for a pregnant woman regardless of whether she made the choice to get pregnant or not? Help me understand how those fit together.
Even if we just limit the discussion to abortion, does bodily autonomy still apply if the woman willing became pregnant? If so, why can she withdraw her support for the child at will after already committing that support? It wouldn't be morally acceptable for a kidney donor to demand their organ back.
Knowledge Brings Fear
I can pretty much assure you I am *non native*, and do not live anywhere near an English speaking country.
Nonetheless, a guy that does not understand English, well, he wont have a problem either. He pretty much wont understand it as the rest of the text.
What next, do you want to obliterate Shakespeare works, because a non native won't understand them?
I'm well aware of the FSF policy for copyright, we've known that for years. But that doesn't make it the personal property of RMS.
My earlier point still stands. That most people in GNU believe it to be a democratic process.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire