On 17/04/2021 13:56, Giacomo Tesio wrote: > Hi Gerald,, > > On April 17, 2021 9:09:19 AM UTC, Gerald Pfeifer <ger...@pfeifer.com> wrote: >> On Fri, 16 Apr 2021, Frosku wrote: >>> In my view, if people employed by a small number of American >> companies >>> succeed in disassociating GCC from GNU/FSF, which is representative >>> of the free software grassroots community >> >> I find this insistant focus by some on "American companies" >> interesting - and quite pointless. And my passport is burgundy. > > > So much that in fact, we are talking about some of the most controversial > corporation in the whole world. > > And while we are talking about "toxic emailers", it's not lost to me > the irony that all this divisive debate about inclusive and righteous > behaviour started with an email of a Facebook employee that defines > working in Facebook "a joy". > https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-March/235091.html > > Yeah the same Facebook that still does what Cambridge Analytica used to. > >> It also is a completely unwarranted attack on the integrity of the >> maintainers, contributors, and other leaders of GCC. Regardless of >> the color of their passports. > > This is a strawman. > > People are just concerned about the undue influence that these > controversial corporations can have on GCC through the influence they > have on their employees. >
Do you have any justification for thinking that the number of such "concerned people" is significant? It is clearly at least one - you - and arguably a couple of the others who have posted here. But do you think it is many, and do you think they have any reason or justification for this concern? (Repeating it multiple times in these mailing list threads is not reasoning or justification - "proof by repeated assertion" arguments can be dismissed off-hand.) I am not a Facebook fan myself. I have an account that I use almost exclusively just for keeping up with a couple of sports clubs of which I am a member, and which use Facebook to publish information. I don't like the way it tracks so much information about me and other people, and I don't see how it benefits me. (Google tracks information too, but I see more benefit in it.) However, that is /my/ choice and /my/ opinion, and the way /I/ like to use (or avoid) social media. Other people have very different opinions, and find a lot to like about Facebook. That's /their/ choice. Big companies like Facebook and Google are powerful tools. They usually try to be "good" most of the time - after all, they are staffed by real people with real consciences who are, as most people are the world over, basically good people. They will make mistakes sometimes, and powerful tools get abused on occasion. But on the whole they are trying to provide a service people want and can make use of, while also making a living in the process. Anything else is paranoia - and like most conspiracy theories, it falls flat when you realise it would involve huge numbers of people keeping quite about doing evil. I do believe that Facebook, Google, IBM, etc., will have /some/ influence on gcc and all the other free and open source projects that they support. That is because they are big users of such software - it makes sense for them to support them and help and encourage them. And sometimes they will be contributing towards specific features that they want for their systems. (This does not seem to be common for gcc, as far as I understand it from the key developers here.) For example, Facebook want improvements to filesystems in Linux so they have employed people specifically to work on btrfs. IMHO, this is /fine/. There is nothing wrong with that. It is companies "scratching their own itches", just as individual developers often do. We all benefit. It may be /influence/, but it is minor and it is certainly not /undue/ influence. The way you go on about "controversial American companies" and "undue influence" suggests you think these companies are forcing their employees on the gcc steering committee to add backdoors to gcc to tell Facebook what projects you are compiling, or make gcc only work well on Red Hat. That would be utter nonsense. So what is it that you think these companies are doing wrong for gcc? How do you think they are influencing it? Who are all these "concerned people" ? If you have justification, evidence, or even a rational argument for your concerns, please share them. If not, please stop repeating baseless paranoia. You have made your point, such as it is - please move along now. (That is not censorship - it's just a polite request to stop wasting people's time.) David Brown
