GNU Grep and Sed Maintainer Quits: RMS and FSF Harming GNU Project

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.

Stallman is the original neckbeard of computing

[Anonymous Coward]

Enough said.

Gnu/Anonymous FSF/Coward.

Re:Distaste of C++

[Anonymous Coward]

My distaste of C++ cannot be expressed as a fraction.

Re:I often disagree with RMS, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Except C++ isn't crap.

Pshaw. Well, I guess we can't really blame the Inferiors. Until you mature, I suppose you won't have a lush, fully-grown neckbeard whispering in your ears the dark secrets of why any programming language invented past 1972 is inherently worse. Trust me, everything will make so much more sense once you've heard the beard. Then you'll understand why we ONLY decided to grudgingly tolerate C after we made it more baroque than necessary to ensure our own job security. This entire "easier to write code" fad will certainly pass.

Re:grep -p

[jedidiah]

> lol AIX who uses that shit

Employers.

Re:Why does C++ matter?

[dalias]

The GNU coding standard for C++ should be that you use only the subset of C++ that's also valid as C... :-)

Re:Define horrible

[betterunixthanunix]

If C++ were a car, the accelerator would be a pedal located under the passenger seat, a dial on the radio, and a lever in the trunk. Most users would just shift into neutral, which would be a 14 step process, and push their car around the block; they would then point to this as a major accomplish, and would note that once the car is in neutral it is powerful -- after all, you can always shift into drive if you really need to!

Re:Distaste of C++

[celle]

" the string handling alone is worth its weight in, well, gstrings..."

      If they're empty gstrings that's not saying much.

      capcha: adorable

The takeaway for me is...

[mccrew]

I guess the big news here to me was that GNU grep and sed were being maintained. :)

Re:grep -p

[toastyman]

I worked with a Russian programmer of very few words, who willingly ran AIX as his desktop OS. When asked why, he said "I enjoy the strict confines of AIX."

I had absolutely no idea how to respond to that.

Re:grep -p

[sourcerror]

Why he didn't just use BSD(M)?