removing toxic emailers

[David Malcolm]

On Thu, 2021-04-15 at 16:26 -0400, Chris Punches wrote:
> What I see here in sum is another high level tightly integrated Red
> Hat
> employee saying the gist of "I'm really not saying it out of my
> employer's interest and it has nothing to do with my personal
> feelings".

I'm not sure I'm "high level", but I guess I'll take that as a
compliment.

I stated that the opinions in my screed were my own, but I'm a former
FLOSS enthusiast in the fortunate position of being paid to work on
GCC.  I've tried to be open about my biases.

> 
> Every single proponent of this argument that I have seen so far is
> employed by one of the same 5 companies and "really isn't doing it on
> behalf of my company I swear".  
> 
> Why is it almost exclusively that specific crowd saying it here,
> then?

Because, sadly, there's only a small group of companies that employ GCC
developers.  These developers tend to have an emotional attachment to
the project (e.g. a broad agreement with the professed goals of the
FSF).  Part of the reason I work at Red Hat is that its own internal
culture aligns with mine, much of the time, anyway (and I know we're
not perfect).

Hence there's some correlation between those with strong opinions on
the project and those who are being paid to work on it.  I don't see
that as malicious or a conspiracy - just that we, reasonably, care
about the work we do and its context.  It's not necessarily just a job
for me.

> 
> I just don't buy it.  Please say anything that would not support the
> emerging theory that these companies are using integrated employees
> to
> try to emulate justification/pretext for a rift to attack the free
> software world.  Anything at all.

I hope I just did.

Dave