Ciao a tutti, Notizia freschissima quasi in diretta SMTP: Stallman è stato appena rimosso dalla Steering Committee di GCC a valle di una richiesta di Nathan Sidwell (di Facebook) che potete leggere qui: https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-March/235091.html Ho provato a far notare che migliaia di sviluppatori come me scelgono di usare e contribuire a GCC proprio perché si fidano della consistenza fornita da RMS ma senza successo (qui e successivi: https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-March/235183.html ) Tuttavia la nuova Steering Committee "Stallman-free" mi ha rivelato un inatteso ed enorme problema di apertura alla diversità, che non avevo mai notato prima (e che ho segnalato alla comunità di GCC): https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-March/235246.html Se vi interessa, ve lo allego per comodità. Chissà se accoglieranno la mia richiesta con la stessa solerzia di con cui hanno accolto quella di Nathan? :-D Giacomo Begin forwarded message: Date: Thu, 1 Apr 2021 01:11:33 +0200 From: Giacomo Tesio <giacomo@tesio.it> To: gcc@gcc.gnu.org Subject: RMS removed from the GCC Steering Committee (was: Remove RMS...) Hi David, thanks for sharing! On Wed, 31 Mar 2021 14:27:29 -0400 David Edelsohn via Gcc wrote:
In 2012 RMS was added to the GCC Steering Committee web page based on his role in the GNU Project [...] we are removing him from the page.
I have to admit that I had never carefully observed the list of members of the GCC steering committee. As I explained before in this thread, the presence of Stallman gave me enough reassurance that GCC would have honoured the values of Free Software. As I said, enough to chose to port GCC to Jehanne instead of another C compiler, in the hope to contribute back the port upstream, to GNU. But now that I'm comparing the old web page [1] and the new one [2], I realized something entirely new to me. 10 out of 13 members of the GCC steering committee work either for American corporations (8), their subsidiaries (1) or an American University (1) recently covered by the press in India [3]. Also, 4 of these work for the same corporation (IBM / Red Hat). The other 3 are from German GmbH (2) or from a Nederlands public agency. To me, and to billions of people, this shows a huge cultural bias. Even ignoring the huge, unfair and invisible influence that such American companies could have on the project development, even ignoring that so many members are subject to the same Law (a Law that includes the US Cloud Act, FISA, PPD 128, E.O. 12333, etc) decades after the Thompson's lecture on trust in compilers development [4], the sole fact that a single culture and economy can influence so heavily GCC development through its leaders decisions should be fixed. GCC is an international project. I didn't saw this before because I trusted RMS to defend Free Software values at any cost, but now I do not even need to recall my previous adventures with Google and Software Freedom Conservancy to see a huge risk not only to contribute to GCC development, but to rely on GCC. Just like the Galactic President in The Hitchhiker's Guide, our trust in RMS was distracting all of us from the very real and very dangerous geopolitical-diversity issue in GCC leadership. I'm afraid that if you wanted to attract more developers by cutting GCC's ties with Stallman, you just proved that he was not even enough. The GCC Steering Committee doesn't look more inclusive, without RMS. On the contrary, it reveals itself as very "exclusive" to the world. Please, fix it. Giacomo [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20210330171044/https://gcc.gnu.org/steering.html [2] http://web.archive.org/web/20210331192841/https://gcc.gnu.org/steering.html [3] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/twitter-faceoff-rutgers-univers... [4] https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thompson.pdf