removing toxic emailers

[Jeff Law]

On 4/15/2021 2:26 PM, Chris Punches via Gcc 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".
>
> 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?
>
> 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.

[ Again, speaking or myself, not my employer or for the steering 
committee. ]


So first, my employer (Tachyum) has had absolutely no clue what's going 
on with this discussion until yesterday afternoon when I mentioned it in 
passing.  We're much more focused on getting our bits where they need to 
be rather than policy, procedures and politics of the upstream 
projects.  However they have repeatedly, up to the CEO level emphasized 
that upstreaming our work and being good players in the various relevant 
communities is important and the various concerns I raised around that 
prior to joining were answered to my satisfaction.


Second, I was the technical lead for Red Hat's tools team until about a 
month ago.  I've also held management positions in Red Hat (and Cygnus 
prior to the acquisition) during my 25+ year career there.  Red Hat and 
Cygnus have consistently worked through the years to be good stewards 
for the GNU tools.  Management  has consistently had a hands-off 
approach to the upstream community, allowing engineers to exercise their 
own judgment on if when and how to engage in various discussions.  The 
only time management got involved in these kinds of discussions was to 
throw support behind EGCS -- including being supportive of bringing in 
outside advisors for what ultimately became the steering committee.


You may not buy it, but that's OK.   That's ultimately your decision to 
make.


I do buy it.  It's consistent with what I've seen over nearly three 
decades of dealing with GNU tools and what I've *directly observed* as 
part of the leadership and management teams.


Jeff