GNU Grep and Sed Maintainer Quits: RMS and FSF Harming GNU Project 476
In a scathing rant posted to a GNU project mailing list, the maintainer of grep and sed announced that he was quitting the GNU project over technical and administrative disagreements. Chief among them: He believes RMS is detrimental to the project by slowing down technical innovation (the example used was RMS's distaste for C++, not exactly a strong point against RMS). Additionally, he noted that the FSF is not doing enough to help GNU "Projects such as gnash are bound to have constant funding problems despite being (and having been for years) in the FSF's list of high priority projects.". Finally: "Attaching the GNU label to one's program has absolutely no
attractiveness anymore. People expect GNU to be as slow as an elephant,
rather than as slick as a gazelle, and perhaps they are right. Projects
such as LLVM achieve a great momentum by building on the slowness of
GNU's decision processes, and companies such as Apple get praise even
if they are only embracing these projects to avoid problems with GPLv3."
The author is quick to note that he has no philosophical disagreements with GNU or the FSF.
Re:Why does C++ matter? (Score:5, Informative)
From TFA (I know, I know, cardinal sin, but I read the article yesterday on LWN):
However, all Stallman had to offer on the topic was "We
still prefer C to C++, because C++ is so ugly" (sic). As a result of
this, the GNU coding standards have not seen any update in years and
are entirely obsolete.
So, RMS wasn't involved in the C/C++ switch, but his refusal to acknowledge it has lead to a lack of "C++ is a real thing, we should have a coding standard" across GNU.
I saw another comment somewhere (that I can't find now) about how, prior to LLVM, RMS *was* opposing many things (I believe, but can't be sure without the source, that the switch to C++ was one of these things), and since LLVM came out as a competitor, RMS has been compelled to be more amicable to change he doesn't personally like.
"Pointed criticism", but hardly "scathing rant". (Score:5, Informative)
I advise people to read the actual message; this summary is exaggerated.
Holy slanted summary, Batman! (Score:5, Informative)
The posting is NOT a "scathing rant", it's a pretty clear, calm and well-reasoned explanation as to issues that the author sees with GNU and GNU software development. There's no flamebait, no ranting, no name-calling.
Re:Why does C++ matter? (Score:4, Informative)
So RMS doesn't like C++ -- this doesn't stop people who can use it properly from writing their projects in it, does it?
Yeah, after they enforce a company-wide ban on multiple inheritance, exceptions, and 95% of the publicly available libraries [google.com].
Re:Holy slanted summary, Batman! (Score:4, Informative)
Absolutely.
Also, one of the interesting points about the primary reasoning behind the creation of the CLANG compiler was not because of the GPL license.
it was because the developers wanted to make GCC more powerful, so that it could be used as a library.
Stallman refused to allow the features to be added even though they were not asking for the GPL licensing to be changed.
So the developers started CLANG. In c++. as a library.
Watch this for some very interesting history and features:
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/GoingNative/GoingNative-2012/Clang-Defending-C-from-Murphy-s-Million-Monkeys [msdn.com]
Re:Distaste of C++ (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why does C++ matter? (Score:3, Informative)
So RMS doesn't like C++ -- this doesn't stop people who can use it properly from writing their projects in it, does it?
Yeah, after they enforce a company-wide ban on multiple inheritance, exceptions, and 95% of the publicly available libraries [google.com].
The Google style only applies to code written by Google employees. Those publicly available libraries are not banned (except for Boost, and then only certain parts of it).
Re:Why does C++ matter? (Score:5, Informative)
Leffler moved on to FreeBSD afaik, and even was FreeBSD Foundation president for a while
Re:Distaste of C++ (Score:5, Informative)
Reading Linux Torvalds on C++ might be instructive:
http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/linus [cat-v.org]
Re:Holy slanted summary, Batman! (Score:4, Informative)
HIs refusal to make GCC into a library is his strategy for making sure commits keep coming into GCC. And in OSS, he who receives the commits has the power.
The problem with that strategy is that it keeps you as king of a shrinking castle; many potential community members decide they don't want to put up with the attitude and go elsewhere. Sure, there are faster ways to become irrelevant, such as taking everything private and selling out to Ora... err... EvilSoft, inc., but the trend is still down if you don't try to properly maintain the community.
I've seen it said that the internet sees censorship as damage and tries to route around it. It's true for other types of over-strict control too. It doesn't matter whether the control freak has good reasons for doing it either; the internet doesn't care for the moral strength of the reasons, it just sees the outcome. RMS's opposition to the things that some wanted to do with GCC has prompted the creation of an open competitor that is sapping much of the potential strength they might've otherwise had. This long-term threat to GCC is largely of their own making.
Oh well, I'll probably use GCC for a few years more at least; old habits die hard (and I never wanted to write a C compiler in the first place, so the internal complexity was an issue far off my radar).
Re:Why does C++ matter? (Score:5, Informative)
So RMS doesn't like C++ -- this doesn't stop people who can use it properly from writing their projects in it, does it?
Yeah, after they enforce a company-wide ban on multiple inheritance, exceptions, and 95% of the publicly available libraries [google.com].
Google doesn't ban multiple inheritance, though in most cases multiple inheritance of anything but pure interfaces is discouraged, and there's rarely any need for Google engineers to use all of the BOOST libraries, given Google's extensive internal libraries.
I do wish that exceptions were allowed, but I understand the rationale for avoiding them (it's spelled out in the style guide), and can't disagree with the decision.
(I write C++ code for Google.)
Summary is missing the link to the scathing rant.. (Score:4, Informative)
Where is this scathing rant? All I can find is a extremely polite, well written [gmane.org] airing of grievance and resignation.