Not quoting anyone here. As a long time user of GCC, I am just worried about the project. Hence my few comments and reasons for being part of this movement called free-software.
RMS paid a visit to our premise in year 2000 or may be 2001. The institute where I started working as a Visiting Software Engineer in the year 2000. After a few years he came to IIT Bombay. I travelled a long distance just to listen him again. I knew. The speech would be same, the cause would be same but still I went. [I am not sure if I am allowed to write here or not. Though I have contributed to Emacs, but I have never contributed source code to GCC. And some people have repeatedly made me feel that this long thread is exclusively for those who have committed source code lines in GCC.] I don’t even know what is the qualification of the existing Steering Committee (SC). I use GCC, because there is a cause associated with it. Since, last five years I have been reading articles about superiority of a competing compiler technology - LLVM. But the original concerns of RMS are clearly visible. Apple keeps the important optimizations to itself. And many other software giants are also doing it. Fair enough. They stick to their ideology. They release the code only when it is longer a threat to their competitive advantage. I have seriously started looking into Rust when I read about resumption of work on ‘gccrs’. Such is the effect of this movement on me. Coming to diversity. I have never seen people travelling 12000 miles to convince people to join a cause. I am not talking about the sponsored/luxurious conferences. I am talking about sleeping in a sleeping-bag for weeks and sharing home-cooked meals with fellow free-software activists in the remotest part of the world. Don’t get me wrong. I would certainly like someone who has done more than this for diversity. I am speaking this from experience. And I don’t have the said privileges. My only request to the remaining members of the SC is that - do take a wise decision. And there is no need to overwhelmed yourself. Organization, cause, and here the project, is bigger than the people. People may come and go, people may saying anything. The project should continue to be lazer focused, and serve the society. -- Regards, Pankaj Jangid
