Re: removing toxic emailers
On Thu, Apr 15, 2021 at 6:30 PM David Malcolm via Gcc wrote: > 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. Then let me offer my perspective, again. I am not affiliated with RedHat, IBM, or what have you. I do not work for them, never have worked for them, and have contributed to the C, C++, and other Systems Programming communities entirely out-of-pocket or through scholarship and donation. I submitted my Copyright Revocation to the Free Software Foundation after giving the greenlight to merge the last of my already-submitted patches into GCC. Stallman is an exceptionally poor leader for Free Software. We routinely complain about LLVM here but Stallman had the chance to get on top of LLVM and guide it into the Free Software world; he missed the e-mail and "found" it 10 years later. Stallman was horrible to the people employed by the Free Software Foundation and apparently the board was barely able to keep him in check, resulting in his employees needing to have Shop Stewards with a Union in order to keep it workable for employees. Stallman is terrible at his job, and this group's inability to have a secondary or tertiary copyright assignment has cost them my contributions for the foreseeable future. Stallman's defenders are ableist, because Stallman himself - in the FSF book and more - have publicly stated that he is not autistic or neurodivergent. Stallman has also stated this publicly, but the fact that Bruce Perens, Eric S. Raymond, and more feel the need to show up and claim on behalf of all Neuroatypical people and Neurodivergent people that they are fighting for us while pushing a disgusting, ableist theory that "Neurodivergent == Definitely An Asshole And Needs To Be Deprived Of Agency For Their Actions" is disgusting. That people feel the need to stereotype neurodivergent people like me for the sake of Stallman's defense is horrible. That people would stand by and claim this is some kind of great advocacy for someone like me is a series of mental gymnastics I do not want to be apart of. This place is fetid, and contrary to Raymond's idea that toxicity has no cost, it most certainly did cost it myself and many other people like me. Sincerely, JeanHeyd
Re: Remove RMS from the GCC Steering Committee
Dear Alfred and Alexandre,
It seems that neither of you would like to offer any evidence
that counteracts what I have already been given by multiple
individuals. Furthermore,
Alexandre:
> A misguided person thought that reciprocating the doxxing against RMS
> was a good way to defend him. It's not
Alfred:
> The claims about doxxing, etc, are entierly untrue and unfounded.
Either this happened, or it didn't. Alexandre says that some doxxing,
possibly in retaliation to original doxxing, occurred. Alfred says
everything is unfounded and untrue, point blank, no details. I do not
know which of you to believe, which mix is true, and at this point I
don't think I want to know because it's incredibly clear nobody wants
to be publicly clear about it, even after my offer to have the details
sent to me so I can have an informed opinion and not a piecemeal
understanding.
Okay, fine.
I support Nathan's inquiry.
Best of luck,
JeanHeyd
On Wed, Mar 31, 2021 at 3:14 AM Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:
>
> I ("new moderator") won't recount what happened, it is neither here,
> or there, but Mark is presenting a very biased view of what occured,
> and also one of the reasons why he no longer is a moderator.
>
> The claims about doxxing, etc, are entierly untrue and unfounded.
Re: Remove RMS from the GCC Steering Committee
Dear Alexandre,
As stated here, shortly after I sent my message
(https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-March/235197.html):
> Apologies, a correction here. I should have more carefully read
> it, but this paragraph:
>
> > My problem is Dr. Richard M. Stallman stands credibly and
> > factually accused of Doxxing and GCC contributor/participant and
> > knowingly manipulating the project for his own personal reasons.
>
> This should be "RMS explicitly sanctioned, encouraged, and
> blessed the Doxxing of an individual". Apologies, he did not do the
> doxxing himself; this was a fat finger on my part. Please take that
> into account; the rest is accurate.
Taking the correction into account, no, the accusation is not
even close to false. What you've presented here is your word ("This
accusation is outright false, beyond any possible doubt."), with a
shortened version of what happened and no evidence, and that does not
match the quoted responses from Stallman and other people who were
present in both the public mailing list discussion and the internal
mailing list. I was given quoted evidence of, after people being told
they were NOT allowed to attack people like this and go this far and
being banned by moderation, RMS taking explicit actions to UNDO that
moderation and explicitly, in the internal mailing list, state
(paraphrased): 'I have put a new moderator in. Have at it.'
That the same individuals (who Stallman, again, explicitly and
knowingly) unshackled were then banned for continuing to do things
that were against the Community Guidelines and grossly inappropriate
(including the Doxxing). Stallman was not born yesterday, neither were
any of the moderators or contributors involved: Stallman deliberately
overturned moderator decisions and that decision went poorly after he
explicitly signaled to people that they should Go All Out.
If you (or anyone else) have evidence to the contrary, logs,
screenshots, etc. that counteract what I know and I have already
received, then I would LOVE to be proven wrong and have ABSOLUTELY no
problem walking back every word I said and giving Richard M. Stallman
an apology and respect as well as apologizing to the mailing list for
believing to be led astray. If you feel the exact words should not be
shared publicly, you can e-mail me or message me privately; I have
honored everyone's right to privacy, and I will continue to do so.
I must be explicitly clear here that the current body of evidence
gives me my current conviction. There is no planet, no galaxy, no
UNIVERSE, where someone who was already banned for going **way**
beyond acceptable behavior, and then brought back with their
punishment undone with the *explicit go-ahead to go forward* and a
*new moderator for that purpose*, would not take that as a signal to
be even nastier. If you are in a Leadership position and your thought
process here was "well, things will go better the second time" after
doing those actions, then you absolutely do not deserve to be in a
Leadership position, and you absolutely should not have stewardship
over me or my contributions. Especially if this is not your first time
on a mailing list and this is not your first time being a leader.
All my best,
JeanHeyd
Re: Remove RMS from the GCC Steering Committee
Dear Giacomo, Apologies, a correction here. I should have more carefully read it, but this paragraph: > My problem is Dr. Richard M. Stallman stands credibly and > factually accused of Doxxing and GCC contributor/participant and > knowingly manipulating the project for his own personal reasons. This should be "RMS explicitly sanctioned, encouraged, and blessed the Doxxing of an individual". Apologies, he did not do the doxxing himself; this was a fat finger on my part. Please take that into account; the rest is accurate. Sincerely, JeanHeyd
Re: Remove RMS from the GCC Steering Committee
Dear Giacomo,
I want to reply specifically to you because you, like me, are a
new contributor, and I have a few questions and a few points that I
think are salient in this discussion.
> As an Italian I'm having a hard time trying to follow your reasoning
> about Stallman being a problem to attract new talents.
>
> I could understand such statement if he had committed actual crimes,
> was legally persecuted, processed and condemned like Reiser.
>
> But while I try, I cannot really understand why you think that his name
> in the Steering Committee would drive away people from contributing GCC
The first is that I don't want to get into the conversation about
how the FSF handles Stallman. Other than them having my Copyright
assignment (something I also need to take a look at), the FSF does not
write the code. GCC's contributors, like you and me, do. My biggest
problem with Stallman right now is not about whether or not he likes
US-ians or if he's a good person:
My problem is Dr. Richard M. Stallman stands credibly and
factually accused of Doxxing and GCC contributor/participant and
knowingly manipulating the project for his own personal reasons.
When I say this, I want to be clear: when Mark sent his e-mail I
followed up with multiple GCC contributors to determine how factual
his claim actually was. Multiple people have independently
corroborated that Stallman did what Mark said, and worse, and their
quotes of Stallman's words line up word-for-word. In fact, what
Stallman did was worse than what Mark described, and has happened
multiple times before. Stallman is willing to attack and engage in
cancel culture of his own contributors. What his reasons are, I don't
know and I do not want to know: my bottom line here is that Stallman
is a danger to GCC contributors and is harmful to them.
I make no argument based on my ethnicity, skin color, which side
of the globe I come from. Dr. Stallman's demonstrated behavior is that
he can - and WILL, and HAS - shown up into places where he has very
little to offer technically and utterly derailed or otherwise harmed
individuals or peoples **and their code contributions**.
So, it boils down to this for me: either GCC is a place where all
contributions are welcome, or GCC is a place of hypocrisy, where
contributions are welcome except when Stallman (or someone else in a
position of power) lobbies a non-technical, non-factual argument
against you and jumps from their high tower to slam down on
rank-and-file contributors and participants. You cannot have it both
ways.
That is why I switched from "wait and see" to "absolutely not".
I am not going to wait for the day somebody high up enough on the GCC
ladder doesn't like me enough to decide that he's going to
shoulder-slam my contributions with non-technical claptrap, nor am I
going to recommend other people to this project if anyone can do that
to them. Which brings me to another important point...
> I do not really know if the removing Stallman from the Steering
> Committee would attract more US people in GCC development. Or if it
> would attract more US people that now prefer to work in LLVM only
> because of they feel somehow bad working with Stallman in the SC.
>
>
> But I can assure you that, as Pankaj Jangid said before me, many many
> people are attracted to GCC, as users and developers, BECAUSE of
> Stallman presence, because they know that something like this
> https://medium.com/@giacomo_59737/what-i-wish-i-knew-before-contributing-to-open-source-dd63acd20696
> will not happen to them.
>
>
> World wide, people do not LIKE Stallman, but we TRUST him on this.
> Just like the GPLv3, RMS is not perfect, but it does ONE THING well.
You state it here and many others say it throughout the thread
that Stallman is the only reason they contribute to GCC, or similar
Free Software projects. This deeply concerns me, because the
underlying implication is if that Stallman were to disappear, right
this second, all of you would be gone. Yet, on the other hand, we say
that this is the "Free Software MOVEMENT". A movement cannot be
destroyed because one person disappears; if that is the case, it is
not a movement, but a ring of personality around an individual. Either
this is a Free Software Movement, or this is Stallman's Free Software
Shindig. I contribute to GCC because I expect that when Stallman is
gone and I am Stallman's age, there will still be a Free Software
Movement. Stewarded by the FSF or the CNCF or the {insert gathering of
like-minded OSS contributors and enthusiasts and hard workers here}.
Is this not the case for you and others?
If Stallman is the only thing holding this movement together, I
would like to know this now so I can invest my time in an actual
movement elsewhere, independently of whether or not he remains on the
Steering Committee. (I still believe he has no place to have a
position of power on the Steering Committee, and instead should just
be a
Re: Remove RMS from the GCC Steering Committee
Dear GCC Community,
Hi. My name is JeanHeyd Meneide, my online moniker is "ThePhD"
(not an actual Doctor. Yet!). I spend a lot of my time hacking on C
and C++. Some of the things I've done include:
- Contributing (mostly) a Implementation [1]
- Doing a GSoC for GCC and writing up about fixes for vector and
other data structures that can be helpful [2] (a lot of these
optimizations were rolled into libstdc++'s normal vector by
François Dumont, thank you!!)
- Implementing part of my own proposal's [[nodiscard("should have a
reason")]] [3]
- Macros for identifying literal and wide literal encoding, to aid in
code portability and pre-emptively solving a user concern while
preparing for a new C++ proposal that allows identifying the execution
and wide execution character sets deployed by the compiler [4]
I'm also helping to solve the intmax_t problems in C and C++ so
we can have wider integer types beyond "long long" blessed by
numeric_limits.[5]
I am also, recently, the ISO/IEC JTC1 SC22 WG14 - Programming
Languages, C: Project Editor. I do not speak for ISO/IEC, the C
Committee, or my National Body here; this e-mail is sent in a person
capacity, but my affiliations should be known (not that they are
hidden with a cursory search, either).
Asides from many other things, last and most importantly I am a
GCC advocate, a libstdc++ contributor, and an individual who spent an
exorbitant and extraordinary amount of my free time contributing to
these projects and the wider ecosystems in the hope that C, C++, Rust,
and related Systems Programming languages would continue to flourish
under the leadership done by the people here. By the time I was going
to finish my education, the goal was to ramp up these contributions
10-fold. There is much room for improvements in fundamental C and C++
architecture and library, leading me on a long, long journey, to where
I am today.
I am exactly one of the "future contributors" referenced in the
e-mails by Wakely, Rodgers, Wielaard, Poyarekar, and others here, even
if they were not explicitly thinking of me. Or, I would be:
On Sun, Mar 28, 2021 Mark Wielaard wrote:
>
> ...
>
> I witnessed something similar recently when we had setup the
> mailinglist to discuss improving governance of the GNU project. When a
> female GNU (GCC) volunteer spoke up she got attacked and harassed. We
> told the harassers that was totally unacceptable and blocked them from
> sending more emails to the list. RMS arranged for those people to get
> unblocked to continue their hate campaign on the public GNU list so
> they could "defend him and the GNU project". That was followed by a
> torrent of hate to the list making any discussion impossible and
> making women feel like they were specifically targeted. He still
> hasn't learned that his words and actions are dog whistles for
> misogynists, transphobics and racists. This really has to stop.
>
> ...
This is unacceptable. The only reason I was told - as early as
yesterday, by Free Software advocates, to my socially distanced face -
that Stallman was still here is because he was powerless and had no
effect on the project. That it was run by the caring,
community-oriented stewardship of the "real volunteers" doing the
"actual work".
That is not what this e-mail reveals.
Further digging into Stallman's own words and behavior also
reveals that he continues to flex this influence throughout the
project (and in other places), showing up (generally unsolicited) into
places to do this kind of gross and extreme harassment and engaging in
canceling our own hardworking contributors that actually write code
and do work. This is not a person who is just here for "historical
reasons" and who has "no power"; this is an active, perpetual threat
to hardworking and contributing members of the Free Software movement.
I refuse to spend my free time supporting a single bigot and an
entire globe's worth of toxic enthusiasts who actively support his
behavior while letting people like him create horrible ecosystems for
other developers. At the start of this conversation, I was much like
Nathan; I wanted an explanation. Having reviewed the facts of the
situation, I can now unequivocally say that an explanation is not even
close to enough.
I will never, ever contribute another line of code, another
proposal implementation[6], another optimization, or another
new/better library implementation to GCC and all of its affiliated
projects, including the compilers, glibc, libstdc++, the potential
upcoming Rust implementation, and more until this problem is not
"address", but *fixed*. If you never fix it, I will never return.
Wish you and your community all the best in sorting this out,
JeanHeyd Meneide
[#]: References -
https://gist.github.com/ThePhD/bcfad83f01e6a641c3fda5cfc013a72d
