> Sent: Thursday, April 01, 2021 at 1:28 AM > From: "Giacomo Tesio" <giac...@tesio.it> > To: "Mark Wielaard" <m...@klomp.org> > Cc: "GCC Development" <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>, "Nathan Sidwell" <nat...@acm.org> > Subject: Re: Remove RMS from the GCC Steering Committee > > Hi Mark, > > I'm a bit in a hurry and do not really want to focus on what happened > in Harvey: to my eyes that story just show you cannot trust people just > because they are nice and well known "open source" contributors, or > because they work for big multinational that "do no evil" or even > join the Good Guys (TM) of Software Freedom Conservancy. > > But let me clarify > > On Wed, 31 Mar 2021 13:34:17 +0200 Mark Wielaard wrote: > > > I looked a bit at that issue you filed and how they handled your > > request to remove your code from the project. And I must say I don't > > really understand what you believe they did wrong, they seemed to have > > acknowledged and corrected their mistake and then removed all the code > > you wanted to have removed. > > I asked them to `git revert` my changes referencing the issue, so that > the code I reused in my own fork of Plan 9 was safe that nobody could > claim copyright of my work after, say, a change in the version control > system adopted by the project. > > Instead they did a `git rebase` over which, I was pretty surprised > actually, they "accidentaly" squashed some of my own commits verbatim > (but without my name) in incredibly large commits. > And you know, they had to git push -f such rebase, breaking all the > existing github forks (while the `git revert` approach would not have > caused any issue to anybody) > > > There is some disagreement over whether a > > mass change of function declarations is copyrightable or not. > > And implementations. And kernel changes that took a couple of days to > get right (Harvey kernel was pretty unstable back then). And more I did > not remember but I noticed back then: > > > > But I happen to agree with them that if there is only one way to do > > it, then having someone else do the same transformation is a correct > > way to resolve this. > > Sure! > > But first, there were several different ways to do that (several > equivalent typedefs were already in place in u.h, without even > mentioning macros and so on), and more importantly if you actually > redo the same work in the same way because there is a single way > to do that, you do in a dedicated commit with an author that takes > the clear responsibility for change. > > Instead my work (or a totally, byte-for-byte equivalent, one) got > squashed into gigantic commits that include several very large commits > of several authors (all mentioned in the commit message... but me). > > > > To make this copyright issue somewhat relevant to GCC. GCC doesn't > > currently contain individual copyright statements and most of the code > > is currently assigned to the FSF. So the above mistake won't happen > > when contributing to GCC, but mostly because of the technicality that > > you sign away your copyright up front. > > Oh sorry, I wasn't clear enough about this. > > I'm SURE that this specific issue would not happen on GCC. > Nor on Linux. Nor in several other Free Software and Open Source > communities. > > But I think you are missing the valuable lesson that the Harvey team > (some of which actually signed the rms-open-letter) tauht me: I didn't > expected ANYTHING like this to happen. And I didn't expect SFC to not > expell a project doing something like this. > > I trusted them both. All of them. > > > So ultimately I do not expect this specific issue to occur in a > hypothetical GCC lead by a Stallman-less Steering Comittee. > > But I DO expect that, in the long run, a Stallman-less Steering > Comittee might do something not aligned with the long-term > interests of Free Software, abusing my trust again. > > Maybe not you. Maybe not the CURRENT Steering Committee. > > But people, groups and incentives changes. > Stallman does not.
It is likely that anothep person or group will evolve, which although not Stallman-Like, work within the free software idea. After Newton, there were other illustrious people. Does not mean everything stops forever after the demise of Richard. > Giacomo >