Remove RMS from the GCC Steering Committee

Maksim Fomin maxim@fomin.one
Tue Mar 30 15:24:50 GMT 2021


‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Friday, 26 March 2021 г., 23:02, Nathan Sidwell <nathan@acm.org> wrote:

> I would rather not have to write this email. Like many developers, I just want
> to write code. Right now we’re working towards the GCC 11 release. I thought
> about deferring this email. But there’s never a good time, and bad behaviour
> needs to be addressed in the moment. I have left this for too long already.
>
> I used to think of GCC development as egalitarian, and therefore fair, and, by
> assumption, welcoming. That is not true. I’m a white dude with a British accent.
> /Of course/ I have white male privilege. I used to joke that I fell into every
> job I’ve had (including my doctorate) – that, right there, is white male
> privilege.
>
> Perhaps you discount the benefits of white male privilege. You’re wrong.
>
> You cannot have missed the sparsity of women and people of color in compiler
> engineering (kaporcenter black tech workforce). Maybe you fallaciously put that
> down to imbalances in education (leakytechpipeline) How can we, the GCC
> community, be expected to address that? Representation matters, we’re the problem.

[Left most relevant parts of the letter]

The logic of this letter (and sjw in general) is obviously false.

1. There are no examples where Stallman (or people with similar views) censored project contribution from non-white non-male people.
In recent decades there is inflow of people from different counties and 2020 is definitely more diverse in programming than 2000 or 1980.
This observation (absense of discrimiation) is the first important note which blows the login behind the letter.

2. Because the p1 is hard to refute, the discussion moves from objective things (for example, rejecting some pull request from people of color) toward subjective
things like 'remove Stallman because I am not comfortable with his views/claims'. However, once this arguement is naked from the rest of discussion it becomes obviously weak.
Why the project should remove Stallman because 'some' people are not comfortable? Why sjw consider themselves in the position to judge? What to do with the group of people who supports him?
Finally, 'white priviledge' is only one (although  big) subject of dedates. What happens if other areas of social, political or economical debates are brought to the project? There are plenty of issues which divide people and there is no way to make the project to move of on if for each issue one group of people will demand removing members of comittee because of their views.

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).

4. Regarding morality. This letter (like many other sjw creatures) says many words about morality, diversity, but at the end of the day it boils down to removing Stallman from position. As a citizen of post-soviet country I can vividly see that this letter is enterely about politics and looks very similar to communist agenda which likes to hide authoritarian policies behind morality. It is very surprising for people from former Soviet block countries to see western world falling into 'very familiar' but notorious propaganda.

Best regards,
Maxim Fomin




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