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.

Re:Opinion

[JaredOfEuropa]

Meh. They are both right and both wrong. May I suggest that they simply fork libc...

Re:Opinion

[pots]

Most of the people here aren't seeing the positive angle here. This is complicated by the fact that this particular joke has a political aspect, but setting that aside most of the criticism boils down to: "It isn't professional."

Okay. That is true, but that's also its virtue. Little bits of humanity like this in an otherwise incredibly dry and boring technical manual are a reminder that GNU isn't professional. That has value. It's not easily quantified, but GNU is a passion project that really needs people to care about it in order for it to go on. And professionalism is all about squashing passions.

... Come to think of it, does "professionalism" have any other meaning?

Re: Opinion

[ArmoredDragon]

I think he's trying to say I am, but in truth I'm not. In fact, I think the term right and left are kind of dumb because they imply that you sit in one of two camps. I don't sit in any camp, to be honest. For example, it's often said that if you are against gun control, then you're right wing, but if you favor legalization of cannabis, then you're left wing. I sit in both camps, so where does that put me? I'm not libertarian because I like net neutrality, and I'm not centrist or moderate because I have strong opinions on many things.

Perhaps the best word to describe me is independent. As for this topic, I'm against professional victims, mainly because they think they're systematically oppressed, but really it's all in their head. They are in fact narcissists, and they love the attention they get when others believe them, and the media eats it up. Narcissists are fucking assholes, and people should stop feeding them the attention they want, because it just feeds their addiction, which in the end just makes them even bigger assholes.

Makes sense...

[Anonymous Coward]

After all, OSS documentation itself is one big joke.

it's not that funny

[perlstar]

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.

Re:Clueless

[110010001000]

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.

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?

[Cajun Hell]

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:

Carlos O'Donnell, a senior software engineer at Red Hat, suggested that trying to wring humor out of abortion "could be a trigger for certain individuals causing them to relive a traumatic memory. I cannot condone that we add triggers like these to a technical manual, particularly when individuals would not expect such jokes in the manual."

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.

Other jokes

[SkOink]

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