I can't say it looks particularly good for someone at Google to be using their moderator powers on this unrelated-to-Google list to tell Felker not to include parts of his message which reflect badly on Google.
I see nothing wrong with this. The last thing you want in a technical discussion are petty personal attacks. The moderator sounds a lot like something you would see dang say on HN.
I don't think they're petty personal attacks. They are important concerns which I share.
Regardless, since this particular member of the project has clear incentives to be biased in favor of Google, they should have recused themselves, and asked another member of the project/moderator of the list to judge whether the message was appropriate.
Chandler is as related to the person responsible for putting musl in Fuchsia as are any two randomly selected software developers from anywhere in the industry. Having to disqualify someone from moderating a mailing list based on the union of all the conflicts of interest of tens of thousands of unrelated people is very silly.
Him moderating is a volunteer position, and he's been doing it forever.
(He's also an llvm foundation board member, etc).
Truthfully, I think the drive by commentary by HN on a community they appear to have about 10 minutes experience dealing with is a much worse look than what chandler did here.
It's funny to watch an entire group of people assume they understand the situations, motives, and community, based on a sample size of "1-2 emails".
If anyone actually bothered to look at the history of his moderation, you'd see he's incredibly consistent in his moderation. In fact, he's publicly called out me before for something similar, despite the fact that I was his boss's boss.
So I don't think it's reasonable to claim what should be happening here when the community itself has not asked for anything different - in fact, it's been quite happy with it.
If you want to become part of that community and then suggest change, by all means, you are more than welcome to join and contribute.
Felker's comment was that a big corporation might release botched code that contained hacks, but their influence would mean developers would be stuck coding against it.
If that's insulting at all, it's several levels less insulting than the sort of thing I see dang moderating.
The argument would be that he is dragging in incidents and companies, which could derail the discussion unnecessary. That’s reasonable but this is not:
> I don't
think this project poses any risk there,
much like Zach points out in his
reply. Google is specifically discussing [...]
Now he’s using his moderator rights to push his opinion which unsurprisingly defends his employer.
He should have sent two mails, one moderating and one participating in the discussion.
the whole point is "you cannot fork a fixed dependency".
if they put this libc into an environment where other applications need to work, then application developers will need to deal with the fact that there a multiple libc around and need to take their behaviour into consideration.
There's a clear conflict of interest: moderating comments critical of the organisation who employs you can easily be considered biased to a disinterested party. It doesn't matter if there is bias or not, the possibility that people will see it as biased is enough for people to recognise it and lost trust. This kind of moderation should be done by a disinterested party, and the Google employee should recuse themselves from addressing it (just refer it to another moderator).
Guess who just finished their Conflict of Interest yearly refresher!
I can't say it looks particularly good for someone at Google to be using their moderator powers on this unrelated-to-Google list to tell Felker not to include parts of his message which reflect badly on Google.