Giacomo wrote: >Stallman cannot betray Free Software AND get away with it. >So to me (and to many others) Stallman is a sort of a living warranty.
That's fine. He doesn't need to be in the GCC SC to do that. He can continue to provide guidance on the spirit of Free Software without having an SC position, or any official leadership position. The people in the GCC SC are very reasonable people; I have worked with some of them, and they will listen to reasonable arguments. RMS doesn't have veto powers anyway, and doesn't need them. The proposed removal from the SC doesn't prevent RMS from giving the aforementioned guidance in any way, nor does it even make it any more difficult. In fact, that removal shouldn't have any effect on his ability to give such guidance, nor does it actually have any effect on what the consequences of his guidance will be. The warranty you speak of does not boil down to a particular individual being there in the SC. That's by RMS's own design; the copyright and the license give you that warranty, not the SC presence of any single person. And a removal from an SC doesn't equal the removal from the set of people who can meaningfully contribute. That is certainly, I would think, not the intent of anyone who has spoken in favor of the removal. There is certainly a fair amount of heat in this discussion. Whether the proposed removal has the effects it seeks, I don't know. But I don't buy the surreptitious suggestions that the proposed removal somehow spells doom for the continued availability of GCC as Free Software, or for the spirit of Free Software in general. In my anecdotal case, it doesn't. I have fairly good reasons to think that it doesn't spell such doom for quite many other contributors to these projects, some far more frequently active than me. I am, Yours Most Sincerely, Ville Voutilainen an occasional libstdc++ contributor a less-frequently occasional g++ contributor
