Re: Endorsing the GNU Social Contract

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi Nathan,

On Mon, 2020-02-17 at 17:33 +0100, Nathan Sidwell wrote:
> On 2/14/20 8:45 PM, Mark Wielaard wrote:
> 
> > Thanks for your support. GCC has an FSF appointed steering committee
> > <https://gcc.gnu.org/steering.html> which is what we would
> > traditionally call the official GNU maintainers for a GNU package.
> > But given that GCC is so big they delegate responsibility to
> > maintainers for larger subsystems/packages, of which you are one.
> > I have created a special section on
> > <https://wiki.gnu.tools/gnu:social-contract-endorsement> to list
> > GNU community members like yourself who have endorsed the GNU
> > Social Contract.
> 
> Further, RMS is a member of the GCC steering committee, and I believe has 
> veto 
> power (possibly only over non-technical decisions).  So the likelihood of 
> that 
> /committee/ endorsing the Social Contract is low.

You might want to ask the GCC steering committee about the current
situation. According to https://gcc.gnu.org/steering.html he is on the
GCC steering committee as representative of the FSF. He resigned as
president and from the board of the FSF, so maybe another FSF officer
took his place. But he might also still be on steering committee on
personal title. https://gcc.gnu.org/gccmission.html says various
(legal) responsibilities still remain with the FSF. It might simply be
one of these governance questions that hasn't been fully answered yet.

> I do not know if other GNU projects have a similar oversight structure.

GDB has an FSF appointed committee, but without an FSF representative: 
https://sourceware.org/gdb/committee/

glibc used to have a Steering Committee, but they dissolved themselves
a couple of years ago because the community was able to self-govern:
https://www.sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2012-03/msg01038.html
https://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/MAINTAINERS

Cheers,

Mark