>However, the FSF does NOT control nor own the GNU project. That appears to be a very common misperception.
>The FSF offers various pro-bono services to the GNU project, among them guarding some GNU assets for the GNU project, but the GNU project is an independent (unincorporated) organization, with its own separate and independent governance structure. >The conversation has supposedly moved on from being centered on the (very indirect) relationship with RMS to being centered around the (even more indirect) relationship with the FSF. >The trigger for the present movements seems to be RMS's reappointment to the board of directors of the FSF. >That makes no sense to me. Really? Well, it makes some amounts of sense to me. See below. >RMS's closest roles regarding GCC have been of initial developer, leader of the project that GCC belongs in, and occasional participant in discussions among the GCC SC, and none of this has changed recently. >What is the relevance of his reappointment to the board of a separate organization he's founded, long participated in, and presided for most of its history, and that has supported both the GNU project at large and the GNU toolchain specifically, in ways that haven't changed at all, not when he resigned from the board, not when he was reappointed?!? >Can anyone come up with any rational motivation for this move right now? This is fairly straightforward. FSF is not as separate an organization as you wish to depict it. It owns the copyright to GCC, and people associated with it have decided to act as the PR department of GCC developers. Multiple maintainers would rather not have that PR department, as they consider it a PR disaster. They'd rather improve the PR department, but if that can't be accomplished, another solution is to disassociate their work from FSF and the PR department. I don't love Jonathan Wakely's idea of forking libstdc++. I would much rather not have that fork happen. But I will follow that fork. I know him well enough that trying to talk him out of doing the fork is unlikely to succeed, we're far beyond the stage where such talking-out is on the table. This, of course, allows us to actually _see_ whether the predictions of doom and gloom will materialize if FSF and RMS are no longer associated with the work of various GCC developers. It also allows us to see how viable the origin of the fork is, when there sure are people suggesting that it can be lead by non-developers, but fair amounts of developers will just go elsewhere. If you wish to hear my wild guesses on those, they are a) that the doom and gloom will not materialize b) the origin of the fork will not remain viable. Bring on the forks. We have ruminated on this long enough, and that seems like a waste of bandwidth. The messages the various developers are conveying are not getting through, or are sinking into an abyss of neverending discussions about something completely different from what the developers are saying.
