RMS removed from the GCC Steering Committee

[Ian Lance Taylor]

On Sat, Apr 3, 2021 at 10:31 AM Giacomo Tesio <giacomo@tesio.it> wrote:
>
> I'm still just one Italian hacker: all the huge imbalances that the
> removal of the only FSF and GNU member of the Steering Committee
> uncovered, are still there!

As far as I can tell, the imbalances you refer to are the fact that
the GCC steering committee has mostly Americans and some Europeans.
And that is fair.

But you have singled out removing RMS (who as David noted was never
really a member of the committee anyhow) as a particular problem.
Let's not forget that RMS is an American.  So the imbalance you
mention was there already.


> > I personally do not believe that the membership of the steering
> > committee is a significant cause of that problem.
>
> I would be surprised if you did!

Fair point.

> I mean, you are a member of such committee since 2 decades.
> And you are from the US. And you work for the biggest threat to
> global democracies and to all people's autonomy and freedom!

Actually I joined the GCC steering committee in 2014.

And you are confusing my employer with my free software work.  In the
time I've been working on GCC I've worked for six different companies.
I don't get a job and then get told to work on free software.  I am a
free software programmer who only takes jobs where I will be working
on free software.


> But that's the fact with priviledge: if you have it, you can't see it.

I'm sure that's largely true.  And I'm well aware that I have enormous
amounts of privilege.

But you write that statement as though it contradicts something that I
said.  It doesn't.


> > But I could be mistaken.  So prove me wrong.
>
> Ok, let's try! ;-)
>
>
> > This is free software.  If you want to make it better, then make it
> > better. [...] So prove me wrong.  Do the work.
>
> This is plain old open source rhetoric.
> https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html

No, it really isn't.

The point of free software is to provide freedom.  In order to do
that, it has to work.  Free software is not just a group of people who
get together to discuss the benefits of free software.  It's a group
of people who build working software that gives freedom to other
people.  That is what we have been doing, in a small way, with GCC.  I
personally have been working on GCC for 30 years now, on and off.

If nobody worked on GCC, nobody would care about it.  People care
about GCC because it is free and because it works.  Both aspects are
critical.


> But you can see how flawed this argument is by comparing it with your
> own words: https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-April/235269.html
>
> RMS was actively contributing to the Steering Committee without
> contributing a single line of code since years.
>
> So you proved that you (and open source rhetoric) are wrong.

I'm sorry, but that doesn't make any sense to me.  I think I was
pretty clear in that e-mail message that RMS was not actively
contributing to the steering committee.

And, even if he was, so what?  I agree that lots of work on GCC and
other free software projects has nothing to do with actual
programming.  When I spoke of doing the work, I didn't mean just
programming.  I meant the work of making GCC successful, which
includes much much more than just writing code.


> > If I knew how to fix that problem, I would work to fix it.
>
> Really?
>
> Well, let me do my job as a new member of the Steering Committee (:-D)
> and solve this problem for you and everybody else.
>
> In my original request[3], I proposed to solve it according to the
> recent precedent you established with the removal of Richard Stallman of
> Free Software Foundation [4][5], by simply removing enough employees of
> corporations ruled under the same legislation, until the global
> interests of the different economical regions and populations of the
> world are at least more balanced, if not more represented.
>
> But apparently you cannot decide which US-corporation should be thrown.
> (indeed US-corporations hold the vast majoirity of SC heads, right now).

I don't understand this argument.  If we remove everybody from the
committee, then it will be more balanced in some sense, but there
won't be anybody on it.  If you want a more balanced committee, then
at some point you have to talk about adding people.

And I do think it would make sense to add more people to the
committee.  Any suggestions?  They should of course be people
reasonably familiar with GCC and with free software, and with
compilers and software development tools.  (And for reasons discussed
elsewhere, RMS is not a good suggestion.)

Ian