Re: Remove RMS from the GCC Steering Committee
> I think I will leave this discussion up to those who have more > familiarity with the guy than I do. There's no doubt that some of the > stuff Stallman has written creeps me the hell out, and I think it was > more the tone of the OP I objected to. I mostly want to stay out of this and will leave much of this discussion to others (though I have met RMS personally on a number of occaisions), but I want to mostly say that I agree with Jeff that it's important that this discussion stay civil. I believe that to a large extent, the discussion here is reflective of a much larger discussion in society of to what extent, if at all, an entity associated with an person must or should take action based on things that that person does while not associated with that entity. I think all of us understand that, on the one extreme, there are some things so eggregious that entities must take action and on the other, we don't want companies taking actions against employees that express unpopular political positions or are members of marginalized minorities. There's the famous Supreme Court Justice who said "I can't define pornography, but I know it when I see it", but I think it's worse here: I suspect that many more of us would agree on whether a particular piece of media is pornography or not than would agree on whether a particular behavior does or doesn't cross the line in terms of the obligations of an entity associated with that person.
Re: Remove RMS from the GCC Steering Committee
> For a leadership position, which serves as an example for > the community and to some extent demonstrates the values shared by the > community, I think it is reasonable that there is a decreased > expectation of privacy. .. and libel and defamation laws in the US reflect that, for example.
Re: Remove RMS from the GCC Steering Committee
> I respect that you want stay out of the discussion, but I think that to > present this as some larger societal issue which is somewhat academic > is wrong. Sorry, I didn't mean to say or imply that. What I meant to say is that the very specific discussion we're having in this forum *mirrors* the similar discussion that society is having in that the same issues that are being discussed here are also being discussed there. > And I hate to point to others, because I know these people, who > worked closely with RMS, will get harassed to "proof" their > allegations or will be told that since they were not physically > attacked it doesn't count as harassment. This is exactly what I mean by the need to draw a line. At what point does somebody's behavior rise to the level where it's necessary to take action? In other words, I think the question is less in understanding what RMS's behavior has been (I suspect most people would agree on that), but what the appropriate consequences of that behavior should be.
Re: Remove RMS from the GCC Steering Committee
> 3. Most of claims about Stallman are not true (to be more precise - > they are deliberately misrepresent what Stallman said to make his > views to look immoral). I would like to suggest that this discussion will go better without making accusations that people are "deliberately" doing something. In my opinion, there are many different ways both of interpreting what somebody writes and in making value judgements on the appropriateness of saying something in a certain way. Just because you and somebody else interpret a statement in different ways or have different moral views of the propriety of saying something in a certain way doesn't mean that either of you are "deliberately misrepresting" anything.
Re: Having trouble getting my school to sign the copyright disclaimer
> They claim that university owns copyright to my code if I wrote it > for a school-related research project. That's potentially correct. And the purpose of them signing the disclaimer is to release that interest so that only you need to sign the assignment. The other way of doing it would be for them to sign the assignment and you sign the disclaimer, which would essentially acknowlege that they own the copright. But because of of you have a potential interest in the copyright, both of you need to sign something. > However, since I'm an undergraduate and thus do not have an advisor, > nobody in the campus knows me well enough to prove that it's not the case. The purpose of having both of you sign is so that there's no potential issue going forward where they might later assert that claim. That way, we don't ever need to decide who currently owns the copyright.
Re: Remove RMS from the GCC Steering Committee
> If RMS had ever done the same (pretty unlikely, Fortran isnt't his > thing), I would have done the same without thinking twice about it. I agree with that sentiment. The fact that somebody has a certain role doesn't necessarily mean that the question is asked with that hat on: it may be nothing more than curiousity.
Re: RMS removed from the GCC Steering Committee
> I'm scared by the dangerous influence that dangeours US corporations > and a dangerous military nation with a long history of human rights > violations (see Snowden's and Assange's revelations and the ongoing > Assange's trial) HAVE over the GCC development. I agree that that's a concern, but the point being made is that the SC is not relevant to this because they, as a practial matter, have almost no influence on GCC development. GCC development is mostly influenced by those companies that pay people to work on GCC. It is a fact that most of these are US corporations. But the only way to change that is to encourage companies that are *not* in the US to contribute too. > Except that the President of FSF (and Chief GNUissance himself) was > receiving copy of all the communications of the Steering Committee. Do we know this as a fact? I don't know whether that's the case or not, but I've read this entire thread and have seen no evidence either way on that issue. In any event, I suspect that the "all communications" may be less than a few dozen emails a year, although that's only a guess on my part. > Thus, I'm not naive enough to ignore the thousands way your employee > can get huge advantages by having you in the GCC's Steering Committee. Thousands? Given how little the SC actually *does*, I find it hard to come up with any meaningful advantages at all, let alone "huge" ones. > As a small example among many many others, you are using a @google.com > mail address while serving in the Steering Committee. So? How many emails per year do SC members send on behalf of the SC? As far as I see, it averages maybe two per year, all of which are announcements of new or changed maintainers of components of GCC. > On the contrary, it explains WHY you are debating against an urgent > fix to the GCC Steering Committee on my request, while you had no > problem to promptly remove Stallman on Nathan's request. Again, the position taken was that RMS was never *on* the SC to begin with. > You said you involved him in SC discussions. > You said you treated him as a member of the Steering Committee. You're missing the point here. The role of the SC is to act as the official maintainer of GCC. The official maintainer of a GNU project coordinates things with the GNU project (a tautology). RMS is indeed involved in those communications (which I suspect are quite rare), but as a representative of the GNU project, *not* of the GCC SC.
Re: RMS removed from the GCC Steering Committee
> Yet enough to slow down certain developments such as Nathan's libcody > or the plugin framework. The SC had no role in that, as was discussed here. > You can also put trustworthy and credible observers to protect the > interests of the global Free Software movement. How is an "observer" going to influence which people are willing to spend their time developing software and how much time they're willing spend? As a practical matter, the direction of any Free Software project is dictated by those who actually work on it from day to day and who pays for their time, not by groups like the SC or the maintainers. > > > Except that the President of FSF (and Chief GNUissance himself) was > > > receiving copy of all the communications of the Steering Committee. > > > > Do we know this as a fact? > > Ian wrote so in his response to Nathan. > https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-April/235269.html That says he was "involved in SC discussions", which to me, means that he *didn't* get a copy of all their communications. If somebody says they're a member of the XYZ committee and "involved Bob in our discussions", to me, that means that Bob is *not* in the committee and doesn't get all committee communications, but that they chose to involve him in some of their discussions. > The removal of Stallman revealed a huge issue in GCC. > Maybe you can't see it. Maybe you don't want to see it. > But it's evident to any seasoned programmer outside the US. I just don't see it as a "removal". RMS is still in charge of the GNU project. That means that he, at some level, is involved in every GNU project, including GCC. As a practical matter, that involvement was very slight and still is. I don't see any change whatsoever in the day-to-day operations of GCC.
Re: GCC association with the FSF
> Having one guy at the top from whom all power flows. > > Power does not "flow" from RMS. Since you have used a political analogy: > I think it is more akin to a constitutional monarchy. I think it's like the Queen of England. As a British person I used to know said: "The Queen of England has the power to veto anything passed by the Parliament in any Commonwealth country until she actually does it; at that point she'll lose that power". I see it as the same here: if RMS tried to exert an inappropriate level of control over some GNU project, it would soon be made clear that that something he can't do.
Re: GCC association with the FSF
> Just for the record, I was not talking about developers but about > the leadership of the project, Ian. > > 8 out of 13 members of the Steering Committee are from US-corporations. I don't think I'd consider the Steering Committee "the leadership of the project". In what sense do they "lead" the project? To me, when you talk about "leading" a software project, you're talking about deciding what work gets done and when and by whom it gets done. The SC has *absolutely zero* influence on any of those things. All the "maintainers" they appoint (which is already indirect) do is approve changes, not make the changes or decide what changes to make. And their approval is supposed to be on technical or style grounds. The people who make the "leadership" decisions (what to work on and when) are the companies that employ the *developers*, not the SC or the companies the employ the members of the SC.
Re: GCC association with the FSF
> So, that's a solid 'no' on the likelihood of you contributing > anything of value to the discussion of GCC governance then? I really think that most of the people replying on this thread have a much more encompassing view of "GCC governance" than actually exists.
Re: GCC association with the FSF
> But it's quite obvious, after you removed RMS's oversight on SC's decisions. The SC is the "GNU maintainer" for GCC. The GNU project has oversight on the maintainers of every GNU project, including GCC. The change to the web page didn't affect that: RMS still has oversight on the SC's decisions to some extent, just like he does over all GNU projects.
Re: GCC association with the FSF
> > > So, that's a solid 'no' on the likelihood of you contributing > > > anything of value to the discussion of GCC governance then? > > > > I really think that most of the people replying on this thread have a > > much more encompassing view of "GCC governance" than actually exists. > > If the community makes it too hard by demanding too much (which > seems to me that it is bending towards the merely bureaucratic), > people would be discouraged to serve on it. I'm sorry, what is it that you think that the "community" (whatever that is) is demanding too much of?
Re: GCC association with the FSF
> When it comes to deciding the direction of a project like GCC - technical > and otherwise - in my mind it primarily should be those actually involved > and contributing. I agree, but I'm not clear if you're claiming that that is or is not currently the case. I believe it is.
Re: GCC association with the FSF
> The principle by which high level decisions in all GNU projects have > always been made is how it best helps the GNU system as a whole. > Contributors are exactly that. They offer *contributions* - the > very meaning of the word implies there is no expectation of anything > in return. Obviously I hope all contributors *do* get some > satisfaction and maybe even some tangible benefit. But > contributions are not to be seen as a means to gain control of the > project at a high level. I agree with most of that, but all *actual* changes to a project are done by contributors. If somebody makes a "high level decision" to do a certain thing to GCC, but no contributor steps up to do that thing, it won't get done. Conversely, if some contributor decided to do some thing (e.g., add an optimization) that nobody made a "high level decision" to do, that thing *will* get done, since it's unusual to reject such contributions, assuming they're technically sound. So I think that the bulk of the "power", from a practical standpoint, is in the hands of the contributors, not some high-level group.
Re: GCC association with the FSF
> > When it comes to deciding the direction of a project like GCC - technical > > and otherwise - in my mind it primarily should be those actually involved > > and contributing. > > GNU follows the general principle of the Free Software movement, that > freedom for *users* is the priority. Assigning *higher* importance to > developers' preferences is *not* a position I share. I think there's a difference between philosophy and practicality here. Sure, the importance of work done by different developers, measured on the scale of advancing the goals of the Free Software movement, is different for each. But what actually advances a project (which can be viewed as "deciding [its] direction") is what work developers choose to do, not the importance of each piece of work on that metric. So I certainly agree with what you said above, but don't think that changes the reality that it's ultimately what developers choose to work on that most affects the direction of a project.
Re: GCC association with the FSF
> I feel like this should be even more evident when dealing with > something like a compiler toolchain. GCC's user is likely to be > another free software project's contributor (as is my case). I suspect that's not true. It certainly wasn't true when more major large companies used GCC to compile their products and I doubt it's even true now when many have switched to other compilers.
Re: GCC association with the FSF
> Then it would not longer be GCC. It would be something different. > The whole point of GCC is to provide a free software compiler for the > GNU system and systems based on GNU, and not to be pragmatic at the > cost of software freedom. Certainly that was its initial intent, but I'd argue that at this point, the main value of GCC to the Free Software movement is that its extensive use outside of the GNU system makes people aware of the movement and of the quality of its software. > Commercial interessts are often at odds with software freedom as > well. This is one of the many reasons why the GNU project is > entierly volunteer based. Although that's true, I strongly suspect that the majority of actual work done on GCC is commercially funded. > But I'd hope that we can avoid words like "fanaticism", "childish", > "cultish" simply because of disagreement in philosophies or continuing > to spread obvious misunderstandings of what someone wrote, it is not > constructive and only causes unnsesescary agitation. Agreed!
Re: GCC association with the FSF
> I guess my point is that the direction in which a project *does* go is not > always the direction in which it *should* go. I agree. And depending on people's "political" views, that can either be an advantage or disadvantage of the free software development model. > To give just one small practical example, I'm told (by people who are more > familiar with GCC internals than I) that it is not feasible with today's > GCC to port to backends which have a small number of registers. [Finally, a technical discussion in this thread!] It never really has been. Maybe it's not even possible now (I don't know), but if you tried it in the past the results would never have been very good. Almost all multi-backend systems operate by having very large numbers of expressions at all levels, which you gradually lower to actual registers. This works quite well if you have enough registers to hold the high-usage expressions in them, but when you have high register pressure, the model breaks down completely. Although the situation may well have gotten worse in recent versions that I'm not familiar with, I'd say that GCC was probably doing a *better* job with a small number of registers in more recent versions than in older ones: "reload" was particularly bad when there was high register pressure. When your main constraint is register pressure, in order to get high-quality results, I think you almost have to change the entire philosophy of compilation, to the point I think where you have an almost entirely different compilation chain for such machines.
Re: GCC association with the FSF
> For developers, I think the GPL matters very much. It introduces > fairness in the contribution process - companies and individuals > can contribute code knowing that it can't be taken away and locked > up, to be modified, sold and distributed as binary packages > (eg. Nvidia). Note that this discussion (part of which occurred off-list) didn't resolve the question of whether Nvidia did or didn't do that: nobody's been able to figure out what the Nvidia package in question does.
Re: removing toxic emailers
> The choice to have a policy for ejecting jerks has serious costs. > One of those costs is the kind of rancorous dispute that has been > burning like a brushfire on this list the last few weeks. I agree. Look at the huge ongoing debate about Section 230 in the US that's been going on for at least months. This is something that seems like it ought to have a simple solution, but it doesn't.
Re: removing toxic emailers
> The choice to /not/ have a policy for ejecting jerks has serious costs. > One of those costs is the kind of rancorous dispute that has been > burning like a brushfire on this list the last few weeks. Although I agree with the sentiment, there's a real risk that if we were heading in that direction, we'd be replacing part of that rancorous dispute with another rancorous dispute, this time about whether to eject people.
Re: A suggestion for going forward from the RMS/FSF debate
> The authority of the FSF, GNU and RMS over GCC is and has been a > fiction for decades, For the most part, I agree. > It would be usefull to clarify with the FSF and GNU what the > actual relations are, Why? What would that gain? I go back to my analogy of the British Queen. What would be gained by "clarifying" that if she actually intervenes non-trivially in the government of any Commonwealth nation, she'd lose that power?
Re: A suggestion for going forward from the RMS/FSF debate
> >> It would be usefull to clarify with the FSF and GNU what the > >> actual relations are, > > Why? What would that gain? I go back to my analogy of the British Queen. > > What would be gained by "clarifying" that if she actually intervenes > > non-trivially in the government of any Commonwealth nation, she'd lose > > that power? > > There are differences between the queen and RMS, even if the image > has some merit. I was refering more to the FSF and GNU project here than to RMS.
Re: A suggestion for going forward from the RMS/FSF debate
> You will not get funding grants in the US if you mention free software, > because the US Department of Commerce does not allow it. This is not correct and I suspect is a misunderstanding of what "government data rights" means.
Re: A suggestion for going forward from the RMS/FSF debate
> Depends on the use cases. Not in military surveillance. And certainly not > at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. At Boeing could be the same, but > I'm not sure. Before 2011, rather than building things from scratch, > washington bureaucrats simply picked from among existing technology. But > things had really been going berserk around 2008. From 2017 onwards, > I'm somewhat in the dark. They could have started allowing some ownership > rights, but ownership rights under government contracts are very different > than ownership rights under commercial contracts. I can't understand your point with this version either. Sorry.
Re: identifying toxic emailers (was: removing toxic emailers)
> So I think it's quite reasonable to expect that their employers could > read the SC's secret exchanges (since they technically CAN read them). I'm a bit lost here. What do you think is the content of "the SC's secret exchanges"?
Re: A suggestion for going forward from the RMS/FSF debate
> It is an argument against the idea that LLVM is the default way that > people choose. I don't think that anybody made the argument that LLVM is the "default" in any sense. What's being given here are reasons why some people prefer LLVM over GCC. > In those places, they don't trust Microsoft or anybody that provides > software products that are difficult or impossible to review. Free > software is not prohibited, since the government has access to the > source code. Any tool that comes compiled is not acceptable there. For a compiler, of course, you need a compiled version of it to start with. If you use that same compiler to build itself, having the source code does *not* protect you from malware, as Ken Thompson showed back in 1984. Even if you take the stance that you'll compile GCC with LLVM and vice versa, you still have the risk that both of the binaries have been compromised in this way.
Re: On US corporate influence over Free Software and the GCC Steering Committee
> You are an IBM employee 100% of the time. For those who aren't aware of it, this has been IBM's position for many decades. It's not a new position. But they are unique in the extremeness of their position on this, so generalizing this would be a mistake.
Re: On US corporate influence over Free Software and the GCC Steering Committee
> Troubling indeed, but this might just be an overzealous manager. > IBM, like other corporations, has made significant technical > contributions to GCC over the years, for example the scheduler and > the vectorizer, and thus has assigned the copyright of these > contributions to the FSF. Yes, as long as the employee is doing it as part of their work for IBM, which was the case in your examples. What's never been OK for IBM are their employees doing software development "on their own time" because they've taken the position that such doesn't exist.
Re: removing toxic emailers
> Just for the record, Google has no problem with the GPLv3. Google stopped
> working on GCC because they made a company decision to use clang instead.
> That decision was made for technical reasons, not licensing reasons.
But note that some cellphone manufacturers (e.g, Samsung) have taken
steps to prevent non-signed binaries from being loaded in their phones.
This would have been problematic ("Tivoisation") if GPLv3 code was
included in Android.
Re: removing toxic emailers
> That would surely only be relevant if people wanted to use their > telephones to compile code? That's not completely clear. It would certainly be true if the compiler were included on the phone, whether or not the compiler was actually used. But I was more addressing the general comment that Google doesn't care about GPLv3 than the specific issue of GCC. If the kernel were GPLv3, for example, there would be an issue with what Samsung is doing.
Re: Update to GCC copyright assignment policy
> > What about the parts of GCC with FSF copyrights that are not covered by > > the GPL, but the GPL with exceptions? How is it possible to move code > > between the parts if a contributor previously used DCO and thus gave > > only permission to license under the open source license "indicated in > > the file"? > > Depends on which DCO you uses. Various project use the following DCO, > which makes clear you assign permissions under all applicable licenses > (this helps if the project uses more than one, possibly incompatible, > license and/or is dual licensed): See above. The issue is if the project wants to change the status of a file from GPL to GPL plus exception. It can't do that if there was a change to the file made by somebody who did't assign the copyright. What's said in the DCO you cite doesn't help.
Re: Inquiry: Country of Origin for gfortran
> Should this question be posed to the Linux distribution that NASA is using? Yes, most likely. But exactly how Free Software fits into the Buy America Act (what she's talking about) is less than clear.
Re: rust non-free-compatible trademark
> just as with the Java Trademark, you as developers can say "gust is > compatible with the rust language" but you *cannot* say "gust is > compatible with rust". Note that trademarks are adjectives, not nouns (and only apply to specific nouns, so I'm not sure what you mean here.
Re: rust non-free-compatible trademark
> I think you are misinterpreting when you need a trademark license for > usage a word mark in an implementation of a compiler for a programming > language. Note that gcc used to come with a full implementation of the > Java programming language, compiler, runtime and core library > implementation (for which I was the GNU maintainer). None of that > required a trademark license because the usage of the word java was > just for compatibility with the java programming language. Was "Java" a trademark for both the language and compiler or just the language? What about "rust"? That would seem to make a difference. If the trademark is just for the language, then when you say you have a "compiler for the XYZ language", you're refering to the trademarked entity (the language) and you can always use a trademark to refer to the trademark owner's product. But if the trademark is also for the compiler and you have a different compiler (even if it differs just by patches), you need the permission of the trademark owner to call you compiler by the trademarked name.
Re: Inquiry: Country of Origin for gfortran
> If these bureaucratic parasites (but I repeat myself) don't want to > use GCC, or Clang, then they can write their own compiler suite from > scratch. Doubt that's going to happen, so this "investigation" is > simply yet another frivilous waste of taxpayer dollars. I won't blame this on bureaucrats. Congress is who passed the law (in 1933). These folks are just checking the boxes.
Re: rust non-free-compatible trademark
> Normal use of a word isn't something that Trademarks prevent. In general, no, but what it prevents is using the word in a way that would produce confusion with an "official" use of that mark. If the word that constitutes the mark is too general, then the trademark shouldn't have been granted. But let's assume that somebody has trademarked a common adjective, which we'll call "adjective", when applied to noun "noun". If I write "I have an adjective noun", that's supposed to refer to the trademarked it. If it instead refers to some other item (e.g., in our case a compiler with patches), that's a trademark violatio.
Re: rust non-free-compatible trademark
> In order to be a validated Ada compiler, a compiler must pass > an extensive suite of programs called the Ada Compiler Validation > Capability (ACVC). FYI: the current name for this is ACATS: Ada Conformity Assessment Test Suite. >"to be able to use the word rust in a distributed compiler your > modifications must 100% pass the test suite without modifying > the test suite" What does "in" mean here? Is "rust" modifying "language" or "compiler" in this case? As was stated, that's a significant difference. > a thorough investigation of how it was done for ADA should reveal > how it can be properly done for gccrs and rustc. It's a very different situation. Ada was a standardized language via a very formal process. And it was a very different time.
Re: rust non-free-compatible trademark
> A Certification Mark is the proper way to formally and legally enforce such > requirements. BTW, nobody is or was at all confident that the Ada mark was legally enforcable. I'm in the camp that it isn't. > telling people they cannot patch the source code without permission Nobody is telling people that. What they're saying is the same thing as the GPL does: it you distribute modified code, you need to be clear that what you're distributing is a modification.
Re: "file name" vs "filename"
> A "file name" is the file's name. It is a property of a file, like the > inode or size. The name exists (or not) regardless of whether we know > what it is. > > A "filename" is a syntactic element, the thing itself, a string of > characters. It is supplied as input or rendered as output. For what it's worth, I agree.
Re: Network Services Alert#489707
> Maybe if you spent less time worried about inconsequential things > like people's "offensive" language, and more time worried about how > your country (you live in the Western world, correct?) We are all responsible for our choice of words. We aren't responsible for the actions or policies of the country we happen to live in.
