Yeah, this is one of those spots where RMS is stubbornly and stupidly standing up for principle in a context where the rest of us just clearly see that it shouldn't matter and he's just being a jerk.
But... damn if he's not right about this. The joke has meaning. It still means what he meant when he wrote it. The issue is an important one (to RMS, at least). And no one else has a real argument here other than "it's unprofessional and embarassing and we want it gone".
Same old, same old. The crusty bearded guy is a jerk, but he's right.
> And no one else has a real argument here other than "it's unprofessional and embarassing and we want it gone".
No one needs any better argument. It's unprofessional, and it's embarrassing (both as poorly executed joke and as political advocacy bolted onto the technical manual). RMS has a perfectly good personal site and lots of speaking engagements where he is very welcome to advocate whatever he likes and people are happy to see him to do just that. And nobody has a problem with it - nobody ever, as far as I know, demanded to close his site or protested him speaking anywhere, let alone demanded him to be banned. His advocacy (the fact that he's doing what he's doing) is very accepted even among people who disagree with him. However, he insists on doing in in the place where people don't want it. That's just being annoying and stubborn for no other reason but "because I want it so".
> No one needs any better argument. It's unprofessional
I do. If you want professional, there are plenty of professional proprietary vendors out there. Or if you insist on Free Software, probably the BSDs are more professional.
GNU is a social project first, with quality and professionalism being secondary considerations.
The whole argument is about the removal of a statement against censorship (interpreted by some as an "abortion joke"). Of course a GNU project shouldn't remove such a thing for reasons of "being professional". I agree with rms here.
On the other side is the scope. Why is rms being so difficult here? Even though I think he's right, why not shrug it off? Why even bother?
I would disagree with rms here, were it not that in the past he's often been ridiculed for being quirky and irrational about minutiae, and yet here we are, with Facebook and Google controlling the internet, each one of us carrying a personal tracking device and loving it, and e-books being deleted remotely from devices we thought we owned.
So maybe this silly, trivial disagreement about some documentation is more important than I give it credit for at this moment.
rms is known for being difficult, not for being wrong.
> If you want professional, there are plenty of professional proprietary vendors out there
I do not see existence of other professional vendors a valid reason for behaving unprofessionaly. Nobody says RMS should behave professionally because otherwise there would be no professional vendors left. He should behave professionally because it's the right thing to do in this context, not because of availability concerns.
> GNU is a social project first
No, not really. Almost all effort is dedicated to code and surrounding matters (yes, GPL too), and very little is dedicated to societal change as such.
> with quality and professionalism being secondary considerations.
If it were true, GNU projects would die long ago. Nobody needs a compiler or a shell that is social project first and quality software second. Nobody would use it (ok, maybe a dozen or so of people would, but that's it). Fortunately, it is not the case at all.
> rms is known for being difficult, not for being wrong.
He's known for both. He has been wrong plenty. He also has been right plenty, including in many important things, but that doesn't make him infallible.
I am not American but get the joke. Also, I can think of only a handful countries w/o any significant amount of opposers to abortion, and even those probably have quite a bit of them.
'Clueless' is an offensively derogatory word in this context. An incredibly niche piece of legislation that applies to 5% of the World's population?
I had no idea it related to abortion . I have no knowledge of or interest in abortion laws. I assumed it was something related to US munitions export laws.
Laws seem to be the main export of the US these days, so you probably have the context. You definitely should have it if you work in computing, as almost everything in this industry is defined by how US of A sees things.
> Only if [you...] have the requisite background knowledge to understand it, which many don't.
It's literally the C library reference manual. That's true of the whole thing!
The point is that it has meaning, however obscure, and reflects a particular principled intent of the author. And the request to remove it is cosmetic. And you resolve that by holding to the author's intent and not just polishing it to fit your sense of aesthetics.
Your argument would be an excellent reason to reject a submitted joke that didn't reflect a consensus of the active maintainers; not so much to remove one decades after the fact.
I find your line of reasoning vague and...I don't know the word, it seems very one-sided.
what do you mean by the "C library reference manual"? The glibc man or something else? Cause to me glibc is just GNU's implementation of the C standard.
RMS can decide what goes in the GNU manual, sure. But you didn't even address the fact that the joke is not understandable unless you're from a very specific background (how many people are familiar with US imperialistic politics and the global gag rule?)
> (how many people are familiar with US imperialistic politics and the global gag rule?)
Many of us are, more or less. RMS's intention may be to inform more people about such rule(s), since US politics affects the whole world and it is good to be informed.
>It's literally the C library reference manual. That's true of the whole thing!
You have to know about the global gag rule prohibiting health providers that receive federal funds from discussing abortion with their patients to understand the entire C library reference manual? News to me.
No, the manual is a dry retelling of software capabilities without tutorial content, so its readers might reasonably be expected to be familiar with the idea of a section or two requiring some external context to interpret.
All you're telling me is that you'd prefer to be googling for strftime() examples on StackOverflow than reading an explainer on US abortion rights policy. Which is fine. But it's not like it would hurt you to learn a little extra stuff along the way, and RMS thinks it would be good for you. And he wrote the manual.
It's never helped anyone understand the technical material and it's caused at least one instance of confusion (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48445031/why-would-it-be...), that's reason enough. Jokes in documentation are good, but only if they serve the documentation.
But... damn if he's not right about this. The joke has meaning. It still means what he meant when he wrote it. The issue is an important one (to RMS, at least). And no one else has a real argument here other than "it's unprofessional and embarassing and we want it gone".
Same old, same old. The crusty bearded guy is a jerk, but he's right.