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Genuine question, what exactly do these maintainers want ? Stallman has already quit his leadership role/position, right ?! Is there something more that he or t

Genuine question, what exactly do these maintainers want ? Stallman has already quit his leadership role/position, right ?! Is there something more that he or the GNU project needs to do ?

jordigh 7y ago
He quit the FSF and MIT. GNU is not the same thing as the FSF, despite their close ties. He has ascertained he still maintains a leadership role in GNU, and he has quite a contingency of devoted followers who think this is all a witch hunt against him.
- bitwize 7y ago
  It's not just Stallman. This is an attempted systematic ouster of old-school hackers (and new-school hackers with old-school values) from positions of leadership. Stallman is just the latest target and also one of the softest. They have also called for the removal of: * Linus Torvalds (after he apologized and approved the adoption of their code of conduct) * Ted Ts'o * the entire FSF board The problem is that while the old-school hackers were mainly left-liberal or libertarian, more and more open source developers these days come from the San Francisco web dev community and were immersed in the ideals and principles of the social-justice left, for whom "scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds" is an unstated truism. More struggle sessions and purges are likely to follow, if this contingent is allowed to gain ground, and I fear for a GNU project led by, instead of Stallman or someone who espouses Stallman's liberal ideals, a commissar who strictly polices the use of gender pronouns and scrutinizes every code commit and mailing list post for hidden signs of bourgeois consciousness. These people do not even support free speech. What makes you think they will give a milligram of respect to free software?
  - badrequest 7y ago
    You've whipped up quite a strawman to get angry at, do you have any proof of this conspiracy?
    - dtornabene 7y ago
      of course they don't. because there isn't any. These people, some of whom, like Andy Wingo and Chris Webber, have been doing this for well over a decade. its asinine.
      - DuskStar 7y ago
        Why does "they've been doing this for a decade" mean "they aren't trying to oust major free software figures"?
        bitwize 7y ago
        To clarify I don't think the long-time hackers on that list are trying to oust major free software figures. What they are doing is a partial capitulation to those who are, most of whom are trying to effect a value shift in the free software community that undermines the bedrock principles of free software itself. I refer you to Coraline Ada Ehmke's views on the "pernicious cult of meritocracy" and her attempts to get licenses with legally sticky do-no-evil clauses approved as free/open source licenses.
        bitwize 7y ago
        I stand corrected. What this may be really about is that Ludovic Courtès wanted a Code of Conduct for the GNU Project and Stallman did not. Since having a Code of Conduct, an easy and fashionable tool for excommunicating those you find problematic due to their pesky different points of view, is obviously the Right Thing, and increasingly considered a requirement, that meant Stallman had to go. Sorry, pal. Maybe if you'd had the right perspective -- maybe if you'd sat at the feet of your moral betters and listened -- 35 years of work wouldn't be flushed down the shitter. This also stands as a warning to open source devs. If you have started an open source project and it becomes popular or otherwise important, you have two courses of action: * Adopt and enforce a Code of Conduct, preferably Contributor Covenant version 1.5 or later. Enforce it preemptively against Trump supporters, right-libertarians, Brexiters, people who think border laws are a thing which should be enforced, people who oppose Xi Jinping, or just white men in general. * Lose maintainership of your own project and have it taken over by your moral superiors, people who truly know how to lead. (If this sounds to you like venture-capitalist takeover of a startup, you're on to something. Keep going and see where it leads.)
  - bjourne 7y ago
    You're definitely painting with a broad brush. You can read Stallman's site and see for yourself that he is as left as they come (which is waaaay more left than "liberal"). Insinuating that there is some grand left-wing cabal conspiring to oust the "true hackers" is wrong. Some people apparently think Stallman is unfit to lead GNU, other people think he is. There is no need to throw accusations of malice around.
    - nwgt224 7y ago
      There's no such thing as "the left". Historically leftists have always been purging each other (most famous example Stalin/Trotsky). Stallman is the wrong kind of leftist these days, because he is still based in the left/libertarian wing of the 1960s 1970s student revolts. Now you need to be a limousine leftist with Google or Facebook stock options.
    - bitwize 7y ago
      When I say "left liberal", think Chomsky, not Hillary Clinton. Someone who thinks individual freedom is paramount, but who also thinks that corporations are just as bad as governments. The presently dominant current in the left prioritizes social justice over individual liberty, up to and including legal restrictions on freedom of speech under a constitution which expressly forbids such restriction (cf. the New York City ordinance forbidding the use of the term "illegal alien").
codesections 7y ago
> Genuine question, what exactly do these maintainers want ? Stallman has already quit his leadership role/position, right ? No. There was some confusion on this point because a note was posted to https://stallman.org/ https://stallman.org/ announcing that RMS stepped down from leadership of GNU, but this turned out to not have been posted by RMS (or with his authorization). (It was apparently posted by someone who added RMS as an entry to the "what's wrong with…" series, with a link to the Medium post that kicked all this off. Without commenting one way or the other on the underlying issue, that is a fairly funny bit of Internet vandalism)
miloignis 7y ago
jordigh beat me to the right answer, here's Stallman's email https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2019-09/msg00008.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2019-09/msg00008...

Genuine question, what exactly do these maintainers want ? Stallman has already quit his leadership role/position, right ?! Is there something more that he or the GNU project needs to do ?

jordigh 7y ago

He quit the FSF and MIT. GNU is not the same thing as the FSF, despite their close ties. He has ascertained he still maintains a leadership role in GNU, and he has quite a contingency of devoted followers who think this is all a witch hunt against him.

bitwize 7y ago
It's not just Stallman. This is an attempted systematic ouster of old-school hackers (and new-school hackers with old-school values) from positions of leadership. Stallman is just the latest target and also one of the softest. They have also called for the removal of: * Linus Torvalds (after he apologized and approved the adoption of their code of conduct) * Ted Ts'o * the entire FSF board The problem is that while the old-school hackers were mainly left-liberal or libertarian, more and more open source developers these days come from the San Francisco web dev community and were immersed in the ideals and principles of the social-justice left, for whom "scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds" is an unstated truism. More struggle sessions and purges are likely to follow, if this contingent is allowed to gain ground, and I fear for a GNU project led by, instead of Stallman or someone who espouses Stallman's liberal ideals, a commissar who strictly polices the use of gender pronouns and scrutinizes every code commit and mailing list post for hidden signs of bourgeois consciousness. These people do not even support free speech. What makes you think they will give a milligram of respect to free software?
- badrequest 7y ago
  You've whipped up quite a strawman to get angry at, do you have any proof of this conspiracy?
  - dtornabene 7y ago
    of course they don't. because there isn't any. These people, some of whom, like Andy Wingo and Chris Webber, have been doing this for well over a decade. its asinine.
    - DuskStar 7y ago
      Why does "they've been doing this for a decade" mean "they aren't trying to oust major free software figures"?
      - bitwize 7y ago
        To clarify I don't think the long-time hackers on that list are trying to oust major free software figures. What they are doing is a partial capitulation to those who are, most of whom are trying to effect a value shift in the free software community that undermines the bedrock principles of free software itself. I refer you to Coraline Ada Ehmke's views on the "pernicious cult of meritocracy" and her attempts to get licenses with legally sticky do-no-evil clauses approved as free/open source licenses.
        bitwize 7y ago
        I stand corrected. What this may be really about is that Ludovic Courtès wanted a Code of Conduct for the GNU Project and Stallman did not. Since having a Code of Conduct, an easy and fashionable tool for excommunicating those you find problematic due to their pesky different points of view, is obviously the Right Thing, and increasingly considered a requirement, that meant Stallman had to go. Sorry, pal. Maybe if you'd had the right perspective -- maybe if you'd sat at the feet of your moral betters and listened -- 35 years of work wouldn't be flushed down the shitter. This also stands as a warning to open source devs. If you have started an open source project and it becomes popular or otherwise important, you have two courses of action: * Adopt and enforce a Code of Conduct, preferably Contributor Covenant version 1.5 or later. Enforce it preemptively against Trump supporters, right-libertarians, Brexiters, people who think border laws are a thing which should be enforced, people who oppose Xi Jinping, or just white men in general. * Lose maintainership of your own project and have it taken over by your moral superiors, people who truly know how to lead. (If this sounds to you like venture-capitalist takeover of a startup, you're on to something. Keep going and see where it leads.)
- bjourne 7y ago
  You're definitely painting with a broad brush. You can read Stallman's site and see for yourself that he is as left as they come (which is waaaay more left than "liberal"). Insinuating that there is some grand left-wing cabal conspiring to oust the "true hackers" is wrong. Some people apparently think Stallman is unfit to lead GNU, other people think he is. There is no need to throw accusations of malice around.
  - nwgt224 7y ago
    There's no such thing as "the left". Historically leftists have always been purging each other (most famous example Stalin/Trotsky). Stallman is the wrong kind of leftist these days, because he is still based in the left/libertarian wing of the 1960s 1970s student revolts. Now you need to be a limousine leftist with Google or Facebook stock options.
  - bitwize 7y ago
    When I say "left liberal", think Chomsky, not Hillary Clinton. Someone who thinks individual freedom is paramount, but who also thinks that corporations are just as bad as governments. The presently dominant current in the left prioritizes social justice over individual liberty, up to and including legal restrictions on freedom of speech under a constitution which expressly forbids such restriction (cf. the New York City ordinance forbidding the use of the term "illegal alien").

codesections 7y ago

> Genuine question, what exactly do these maintainers want ? Stallman has already quit his leadership role/position, right ? No. There was some confusion on this point because a note was posted to https://stallman.org/ https://stallman.org/ announcing that RMS stepped down from leadership of GNU, but this turned out to not have been posted by RMS (or with his authorization). (It was apparently posted by someone who added RMS as an entry to the "what's wrong with…" series, with a link to the Medium post that kicked all this off. Without commenting one way or the other on the underlying issue, that is a fairly funny bit of Internet vandalism)

miloignis 7y ago

jordigh beat me to the right answer, here's Stallman's email https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2019-09/msg00008.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2019-09/msg00008...