> Sent: Friday, April 09, 2021 at 11:48 PM
> From: "Pankaj Jangid" <pan...@codeisgreat.org>
> To: gcc@gcc.gnu.org
> Subject: Re: GCC association with the FSF
>
> Gabriel Ravier via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org> writes:
>
> > RMS is not indispensible because he does not contribute to GCC and
> > doesn't bring much to it, and otherwise takes more away from it. If
> > you were to remove all of Ian, Jonathan, Joseph and Nathan you would
> > be removing ~13% of active contribution to GCC (counting in
> > commits). If you also remove all the major contributors that are from
> > corporations (counting a major contributor as someone with 10 or more
> > commits), you're removing ~63% of active contribution. If you also
> > remove the major organizations contributing to GCC, like Adacore and
> > the GDC project, you're removing ~18% more of active contribution,
> > meaning you're left with 19% of active contribution. While I do not
> > doubt that all of the contributors that would remain are talented
> > individuals, GCC would undoubtedly, in the best case, heavily suffer
> > from the loss of 3 to 4 fifths of active contribution and become much
> > less appealing as a compiler, and in the worst case simply die
> > out. While each of the individuals forming any of those groups aren't
> > indispensable, as a group, they certainly are indispensible to GCC
> > unless you think GCC can really survive with 3/5 times less
> > contributions to it.
>
> What is this man? Are you trying to compute the probability of survival
> a project? You forgot to count me. I am one of the users of GCC. If
> there are no users then the project is dead; however heavyweight the
> maintainers are.
>
> And let me also tell you the truth. I have looked at the list of
> maintainers and the steering committee for the first time, when this
> thread was started. My reason for sticking to GCC is FSF and associated
> cause. Not the above list of people. Those who are not connected with
> the cause have already started migrating to the competing tools.
RMS made the GNU System without the cohort of active contributions listed.
This means that great things can be accomplished when people is focused
on what they do. I am sure help will come from other sources if the tools
are valuable enough.
