On Sun, Mar 22, 2009 at 1:00 AM, Joe Buck <joe.b...@synopsys.com> wrote: > On Sat, Mar 21, 2009 at 07:37:10PM -0700, Daniel Berlin wrote: >> "The steering committee was founded in 1998 with the intent of >> preventing any particular individual, group or organization from >> getting control over the project. Its primary purpose is to make major >> decisions in the best interests of the GCC project and to ensure that >> the project adheres to its fundamental principles found in the >> project's mission statement. [see the original announcement below]." > > The purpose of that statement (which dates from egcs days), was to address > concerns that egcs represented a Cygnus takeover of GCC. egcs started > before the Red Hat acquisition of Cygnus, and it started with the Cygnus > "devo tree" with a Cygnus employee as RM, and some Cygnus marketing people > at the time were actually telling customers that it *did* represent a > Cygnus takeover, so they had to have a Cygnus support contract if they > wanted any influence over egcs! Fortunately those people were quickly > slapped down. And after the Cygnus/Red Hat merger, the rest of the > community was worried about the 800 pound gorilla. All of this is a great statement of history if those are no longer the goals, you need to update the statement, so *the rest of us* know exactly what it is the steering committee sees itself doing these days. If the steering committee is no longer following this mission or abiding by these guidelines, you really should update the page. It also sounds a lot like you are saying the Steering Commitee does not care much if the FSF has control over the project, which I know to be false :)
> >> 1. The FSF, as an organization, clearly now has control over the project. >> You even liken them to the administration of which you are just a >> subordinate. >> You also believe you must act in accordance with their policy or >> resign from the group supposed to be making the major decisions in the >> best interests of the GCC project. > > Even in the egcs days, every contributor signed over their copyright to > their contributions to the FSF, so even then the FSF played a special > role. Many of the contributors worked (and still work) for organizations > that compete with each other: if there weren't some nonprofit with legal > ownership of the code one would have had to be invented. None of this is a refutation of the above, and in fact, seems to support it. Again, if it is no longer true that the Steering Commitee has a goal/purpose of keeping organizations from taking over GCC, change the page and tell us what the SC's current goals are. > > There are checks on FSF control in the sense that the project can be > forked and developers can leave. This is not a meaningful check on control. The same way that in the US "revolution" is not really a check on control of the government, it is a "method of replacement" when checks and controls are not respected. (This is why in the US we have a whole full constitution of checks and controls) Me, i'd rather see us have meaningful checks and controls. > But in this particular case, I'm hopeful > that this holdup is going to be resolved soon; there's new language and > meetings this weekend which I hope will resolve matters, and the new > language is designed to fix problems raised on this list by GCC > developers. Most of the time, the FSF hasn't interfered with GCC except > on a couple of matters that they care about; licensing is one such matter. I *heavily* disagree with this statement. Let's see, just in the somewhat recent past: Writing out the IL Plugins Changing over the bug system Hosting on sourceware.org Moving to subversion Claiming this as "a couple matters they care about" seems a bit much. All of these were certainly resolved, but *they never should have been issue that the FSF had any control over in the first place*.
