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Richard Matthew Stallman (RMS), founder of the Free Software Foundation, originator of the GNU Project (GPL), and author of GCC, Emacs, and GliBC, has stirred controversy by opposing the removal of a joke he wrote by the GliBC community.
25.7.4 Aborting a Program
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Future Change Warning: Proposed Federal censorship regulations may prohibit us from giving you information about the possibility of calling this function. We would be required to say that this is not an acceptable way of terminating a program.
RMS made this abortion-related joke (which proponents call a censored joke) in the gliBC handbook in the 1990s in the abort function (). On April 28, Raymond Nicholson decided that the joke was completely useless to readers and that deleting it would have no impact on glibc use, so he submitted a patch to remove it from the document. Zack Weinberg and Carlos O’Donell took the patch and applied it to the GliBC repository. RMS objected, saying on his mailing list on The evening of April 30 that the joke was important to him and was deleted for no good reason.
The point of this joke is even more important now than it was when I first wrote it. Please do not remove it. GNU is not a purely technical project, so the fact that this is not strictly and grimly technical is not a reason to remove this.
On May 1, Raymond Nicholson, Zack Weinberg, William Pitcock and other project maintainers responded to the mailing list with comments that the user manual is not a personal space and is not suitable for such jokes. RMS reiterated its position that this was just a joke, and it was very short. It was deleted without our consent and we hope it can be restored.
A serious discussion of an unrelated political issue would be a strange digression. The joke is appropriate precisely because it is a joke, and very short.
Since you understand it wasn’t right to delete this without my approval, would you please undo that mistake?
Carlos O’Donell, a senior software engineer at Red Hat who has worked hard to resolve the issue with some degree of consensus, said the joke was inappropriate for the manual and could hurt people who have had unpleasant experiences related to abortion, suggesting possible options such as discussing the issues on another forum. RMS insists that the manual is not meant to be a “safe zone”, but is designed to solve a problem, and that jokes made no difference.
A GNU manual, like a course in history, is not meant to be a “safe space”. It is meant to address a subject. It must cover the function “abort”, just as a course in Renaissance history must cover witch trials and the inquisition.
However, there is no reason not to include the trigger warning if that is of service to people.
Whether the joke is included has no effect on this issue.
A flood of objecting emails later led the RMS to invoke its supreme powers. On May 4, RMS said on its mailing list that he was the project leader, responsible for what was published in the manual and determining the standards the community followed.
As the head of the GNU Project, I am in charge of what we publish in GNU manuals. I decide the criteria to decide by, too.
RMS’s insistence has also raised the ire of many maintainers and developers who see the project as a consensus-based, community-driven development model, and since most people think the joke is inappropriate in the project manual, RMS should respect that consensus, not use rights.
On May 6, RMS added: “The decision to keep the joke was made a long time ago and posted where all community users could see it.” The current views of the community did not persuade him to change his decision. On May 7, jokes resumed.
As of press time, the GliBC Project mailing list was still abuzz with controversy.