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Comment by RIMR | Hacker News Reader

Or, if you're going to be subtly political (as GNU often is), at least be current.

That joke was 20-something years old. It ran its course.

Also, as far as calling LGBT rainbows "political", I would have to disagree. You either view LBGT people as equal, or you can be a hateful person. There's no good reason to pander to the latter, but plenty of reasons to stand up in unity with the former.

There are some concepts that need to be aggressively viewed as truths rather than opinions. The civil rights movement was won by people standing up and putting their own enrichment aside to say "You are wrong and we stand up in unity with the people you view as subhuman". No reason to shame anyone from doing that again today.

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> There's no good reason to pander to the latter

"Pander", no. Avoid offending when "offending" would require active effort and "not offending" would just require doing nothing, yes.

Let me talk about professionalism for a moment. The whole concept of "professionalism" is that it's a set of artificial etiquette that allows people who absolutely detest one-another to get along for long enough to complete a joint venture.

I think we forget what professionalism is; a relatively-isolationist country like the US (in terms of where its citizens go on holiday, not in terms of its foreign policy) has little need of it. For most countries through most of history, though, professionalism is the thing that you're expected to show when your country decides to ally with that country you were just at war with, and you have to work with people who had just been shooting friends of yours.

We expect—and depend on—our tooling enabling professionalism in this sense. That means obvious things like not having insults toward the French in ARM ISA references; but it also means not using religious iconography in a country with multiple religions; not including the Battle Hymn of the Republic as a default ringtone on phones; etc. We want to ensure that we don't accidentally, through coincidences of technology, destroy a negotiation or cause a diplomatic crisis.

I don't understand your logic. You say that putting LGTB rainbows in a tool is not a political act and then go on to compare it with the civil rights movement, one of the major political storms of its time. Is it political or is it not?

As to political activism in computer tools... there is a time and place for everything (almost?) and I personally disagree that a computer tool is a place for some random political activism.

LGBT* is most definitely political - I think you just proved that.

I was raised in a country with very hateful views against LGBT. While I, personally, developed a tolerance against LGBT, a lot of people around me did not and those people often work as developers. Showing them any sign of LGBT propaganda is a great offence to them. I'm not lawyer, but I suspect that LGBT propaganda might even be against a law.

I guess, the same could be said about abortion jokes. Some people might take them too personal.

Fuck 'em. I'm not going to bend over backwards to coddle people who hate me for daring to exist. As for laws, I think the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said it best: "I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws."

It's kinda evergreen, as the global gag rule is, to notable controversy, retracted or reinstated with each change in Presidential party since Reagan, most recently reinstated last year by the Trump Administration.

Of course, it's still inappropriate for glibc docs.

What's the global gag rule you are referring to?

The US government does not fund overseas organizations that provide or promote abortion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico_City_policy

(The fact that this reference is so unclear is probably a reason that, everything else aside, the joke is not very good. The glibc maintainers have offered to replace it with some clear text about censorship in the US.)

Thank you for the explanation. This indeed is pretty obscure, and if that it what it is aimed at, the joke is also not well constructed - US govt does not ban anybody from promoting abortion with this rule (I assume we accept the joke's premise that talking about this function is "promoting abortion") - it just withdraws US governmental financing. But that would imply that otherwise GNU project is financed by US federal government? Not sure this is the impression RMS would want to make... OTOH, given RMS's politics (as I understand it), maybe he wouldn't mind it at all if that were true.

Nope

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