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John Sullivan resign as executive director of the Free Software Foundation

131 points by mthld 6y ago

oblio 6y ago
Is this related to Stallman going back to the FSF?
- sparkling 6y ago
  More likely related over the outrage of Stallman going back to the FSF
- fen4o 6y ago
  See https://rms-open-letter.github.io/ https://rms-open-letter.github.io/ and the counter-letter https://rms-support-letter.github.io/ https://rms-support-letter.github.io/
  - risky_opinions 6y ago
    I could see companies starting to screen applicants using these lists. Different companies would choose which list to use according to their own politics and culture. Totally hypothetical: Coinbase and Google will probably turn rms-open-letter into a denylist. Twitter will do the opposite. This is all conjecture, but I could see it happening. It's why I feel I shouldn't sign.
    - user-the-name 6y ago
      One list is full of people who have achieved big things, and are in positions of power. The other is full of throwaway and inactive github accounts.
      - beaconstudios 6y ago
        which isn't particularly surprising if people are worried about getting cancelled. (FWIW I haven't signed either, and don't know enough about RMS' actions to commit to a perspective).
    - twic 6y ago
      There's already a script to block people on GitHub based on signing one of the letters, written by an infosec furry (but i repeat myself): https://twitter.com/kyhwana/status/1375651591672324096 https://twitter.com/kyhwana/status/1375651591672324096
  - secondcoming 6y ago
    I know it's impossible but it would be very interesting to see how the participants in each list break down by $IDENTITY_GROUP. Edit: it seems some people are not interested in this data
  - bitwize 6y ago
    One is signed by the directors of major open-source projects and initiatives. The other is mainly signed by Russian bots.
    - yellowapple 6y ago
      That doesn't seem like a fair characterization. Yeah, a lot of the names do look Slavic, but what makes you believe they're bots?
    - e3b0c44298 6y ago
      The fact that the Twitter Khmer Rouge are currently making lists of people signing the Stallman support letter might help explain why only Russians, safe from American wokeness and cancel culture, are willing to sign that letter.
      - mhh__ 6y ago
        I understand the point but Khmer Rouge?
    - willeh 6y ago
      I hope that I'm wrong here and there is evidence of actual bots, but as far as I can tell you're making this judgement based on the fact the people signing the RMS support letter have Russian sounding names. First off, yes I don't doubt that the totalitarian oppressive and oppressive governments are using this type of technique, in fact they are probably using it a lot because it is highly effective. However, it seems exceedingly unlikely that they have any interest in a spat in an, on the whole, insignificant professional organization. I think it is worth reevaluating your opinion, as understanding the other side of an argument is useful and helps us understand the world better. Generalising, a bit in my experience Russians tend to be slightly technocratic valuing pragmatism over ideology, which seems natural considering that it was beaten out of them by a series of absolutist despots. Still their opinions are valid even if most people in Europe and the US, no matter their political beliefs, will consider RMS to have perjured himself as an ideological leader to the extent that trust can not be mended, and consequently must resign.
  - Glavnokoman 6y ago
    Thanks for the links! And I guess the rms-support is getting yet another "russian bot" signature.
    - mandmandam 6y ago
      2 hours and this still isn't grey? What the f*ck is your deal HN.
    - mpol 6y ago
      I'm not a Russian bot and yes, I did sign the support letter.
prvc 6y ago
A little bit more background would be useful.
- enriquto 6y ago
  The FSF has been under a lot of (undue, in my opinion) pressure lately, regarding the composition of its board. It is understandable that the ED, who is part of the hired staff and not a member of the board, has a limited patience. I hope all is well with him, his work as executive director has been great.
tester34 6y ago
vocal twitter minority reaching their goals again? current state of internet is pretty sad, I bet you'd just need 30 people/twitter(or reddit) accounts in order to create drama of significant size
- wiz21c 6y ago
  seems so. It'd be a better world if people would understand the difference between walking a thin line and actually crossing it.
- Jonnax 6y ago
  https://rms-open-letter.github.io/ https://rms-open-letter.github.io/ The organisations that I've heard of which called for the board at the FSF to resign: - X.org Foundation - Tor Project - Mozilla - The HardenedBSD Foundation / The HardenedBSD Project - SUSE - GNOME Foundation - The FreeDOS Project - Creative Commons - OBS Project Isn't this a bit more than a vocal twitter minority?
  - sparkling 6y ago
    Did these organisations ask their respective members if they agree with signing this letter? On the support letter* there are a number of GNOME contributors, so clearly there is not one single opinion within these organisations. * https://rms-support-letter.github.io/ https://rms-support-letter.github.io/
    - Foxboron 6y ago
      There are two listed, both former. But there is a difference contributing to GNOME projects and being part of the GNOME foundation.
rich_sasha 6y ago
A whole different angle, I wonder how well the FSF folk get on with RMS. For all the defenses people mount of him, no one says he's a nice guy to be around. I'm still against the Twitter mob etc., I do wonder though if RMS nuked his own organisation by joining the helm again. Life's unfair.
- Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
  It does not matter if rms is a nice person or not. He didn't do anything criminal, his only offense is stoically and pedantically expressing his views, unyielding to public pressure. In other words, displaying those very qualities that helped him change software development forever. People should not be destroyed for not being nice enough to certain individuals prone to offenses, and conforming to someone else's views should not be a necessity to work in your chosen field.
  - SamoyedFurFluff 6y ago
    Not having a board position isn’t anything close to being destroyed. I’m totally against heavily exaggerating everything RMS did wrong but can we not swing the other way around and equivocate a highly privileged position with life and livelihood?
    - Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
      Pushing a person from his life's work and from the organization that exists only because of him is effectively destroying. This won't stop with him resigning again. What do you think, this mad cancel mob will tolerate rms to appear at some Libre Software conference? Hell, no! They'll harass organizers till they quit, threatening with boycott and pressuring all the sponsors and venue providers. We've seen this in action many times. This mob must be stopped.
  - iSnow 6y ago
    Then again, if you are of a divisive personality type, you maybe should not lead an organization as others might not want to work with you, companies might want to withdraw funding because they don't like to be associated with the controversy around you. And lastly, you might reduce the reach of your own ideas.
risky_opinions 6y ago
I'm creating a throwaway that I hope won't irk dang. If this breaks the rules, I'm sorry and I'll stop. Richard Stallman single-handedly created the free software movement, and he's the reason we all have jobs. Google and Facebook might not have been possible in a world where you couldn't spin up a server for free and compile code without paying a license. Richard Stallman has said some sexist and edgy things. He also has Asperger's, which poses challenges many of us do not face. He hasn't, as far as I know, committed any crimes. Do we destroy the pillar we've built our entire livelihoods upon to satisfy a mob? Have all of us been truly without blame? Who hasn't said something they shouldn't have? Or done something that marginalized someone at some point in time (even if it wasn't on the basis of sex, gender, race, etc.)? I don't want to live in a world without American freedom of speech - where we can't be blunt and speak our minds. I don't want to live in a world where we can't be forgiven. I was reading comments in another HN thread, and one poster suggested that this might arise from raising kids without bullying. Like the immune system, if we don't develop a central tolerance, perhaps we start attacking everything we find unpleasant? No basis in behavioral science, of course. And then there's the engagement-driven social media monster. Twitter, in particular. It's destroying careers. We're badgering the members of the FSF. We're denying Richard Stallman any chances. This isn't good. It's horrific. What do we do about this?
- enriquto 6y ago
  > What do we do about this? There's not much we can do about that; the world is a horrible, unfair place. If Socrates was born again, we would kill him again.
  - QuesnayJr 6y ago
    Your last sentence perfectly captures something I think all the time, but could never articulate pithily.
    - QuesnayJr 6y ago
      I know that you're not "supposed" to comment on voting here, but I feel the need to call out the fundamentally broken culture here around voting. I said something mildly nice about some else's writing, and I've gotten 3 downvotes? Really? I think the people running the site really needs to consider consequences for excessive downvoting. Having a discussion here is really unpleasant, because of the random drive-by voting. It's easier to have a discussion on Reddit, and Reddit is terrible.
aboringusername 6y ago
I apologize if this particular thread isn't the appropriate forum for this but this type of activity is inevitable at one point or another, and perhaps he just wants to retire of there are politics/shenanigans at play, no organization can be free of politics afterall. Yet, there are many examples of software projects with "BDFLs", the Linux Kernel being the most prominent one I can think of. I suspect there are people just waiting, biding their time until Linus retires - who takes over him? How does the governance structure change? Who takes over David M's net stack? Greg's stable trees? I find it fascinating to think about and I am very curious when known figures step down and to watch what happens next, how things change. Are they subtle? Are they more obvious? How does this play out in 5 years? To me it's one of the more interesting aspects of communities since one person can really make a huge difference (for example, Ballmer/Satya at MS).
- keenreed 6y ago
  Linux is mature enough to handle less centralization. Each distro already maintains its flavor of patches, there is Android fork, several embedded forks... It will be more similar to FreeBSD development.
bitwize 6y ago
I've given a lot of thought to this issue and though I've wanted to give Richard Stallman the benefit of the doubt, I've come to an inescapable conclusion: The FSF board of directors really stepped in it bringing Stallman back, especially in the clandestine manner that they did. They have squandered the goodwill of the community by promoting a controversial figure known for his toxic opinions and decades of bad behavior to a leadership position. The FSF is at grave risk of losing its funding and its reputation, both of which it needs to carry out its mission. As such, it is appropriate for Stallman and the entire FSF board to resign. John Sullivan has made the right decision. He will doubtless be followed by others -- and hopefully, if Stallman refuses to resign, he will be ousted by the new board. All of the leadership in open source does not want Stallman in a leadership role because of the toxic effect he has on the community, in particular driving women -- and more recently, those repulsed by pedophilia -- away. There are times to fight social pressure; this is not one of them.
- Number157 6y ago
  This community is toxic and drives good but flawed people away.
  - bitwize 6y ago
    A talented asshole is a net liability. An untalented, nontoxic person can become a valuable contributor with the right training and mentoring.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - ionwake 6y ago
      Surely this is not the case if the talented asshole has already contributed in a massively vast way to the team / society.
    - orra 6y ago
      Additionally, an asshole can drive away multiple people. Even if an asshole is three times as productive as your typical contributor, they can easily drive away ten people. Not to mention the morality of pedestalling creeps.
Number157 6y ago
Never apologize to the mob. It emboldens them.
davty 6y ago
It was briefly discussed in this episode of floss weekly https://twit.tv/shows/floss-weekly/episodes/622?autostart=false https://twit.tv/shows/floss-weekly/episodes/622?autostart=fa... and I think the guest made an interesting observation in that quite a big issue in FSF is that the board is entirely self-selected, the community is not really involved. Thus, the future of the GPL is entirely in the hand of a few people who picked themselves so to say.
- boomboomsubban 6y ago
  >Thus, the future of the GPL is entirely in the hand of a few people who picked themselves so to say. What does this even mean? As Linux staying on v2 shows, the FSF doesn't have any real control over GPL licenses. And I'm fairly sure the only limitation on modifying the GPL myself is I couldn't use the word "GNU."
  - p_l 6y ago
    As Wikipedia shows, FSF has/had a lot of power (Wikipedia was originally GFDL licensed)
    - boomboomsubban 6y ago
      It still is licensed under the GFDL, I'm not seeing how this is an example of them having power, and this is the GFDL is not the GPL.
      - p_l 6y ago
        Significant portion of the text on Wikipedia is now dual licensed Creative Commons and GFDL (specifically unversioned), something that was made possible by change introduced in later version of GFDL (1.3, afaik) that didn't exist in earlier one. The licensing move was done in 2009.
  - Denvercoder9 6y ago
    The FSF can issue new versions of the GPL, which will automatically apply to software licensed under the GPLv2 or GPLv3 with the "or any later version" clause (which is present in the standard boilerplate). A completely non-representative grep through copyright information indicates that about two-thirds of the GPL-licensed packages on my Debian system have the "or any later version" clause.
iseanstevens 6y ago
Re: RMS, without passing judgement: - I think people can have great ideas but not be great long term leaders. FSF has high ideals, and fundamentally needs buy in from people on a lot of levels for them to succeed. It needs community. They could be really thankful to RMS’s getting things going but I don’t really understand why, now, they would add him back to the board. Is he saying new things that aren’t linear from the creation of FSF where his continued high level involvement is more helpful to the end goals than the community upset I would hope the board was aware of as a possibility?
- remirk 6y ago
  Stallman is only one person on the board. It's quite a proven strategy to have people with vastly different skillsets on the board of an organisation. In FSF's case, Stallman might be a good fit to contribute his software freedom ideas. As long as there are other people who can focus on PR.
simion314 6y ago
We almost Linus Torwalds because of the cancel culture, would be a big loss to lose RMS because he is no longer good PR to have him, bonus points if some big business like Google or Red Hat could grab the leadership of FSF and GNU. There was a few days back a post for people to support RMS and I admit I did not put my name on the list because i am afraid this could affect my future, cancel culture could get worse and my actions could be misinterpreted as the worse things possible(like I must support pedos if I support RMS).
- mhh__ 6y ago
  Well the difference is that Torvalds remains competent? Easy example: Stallman's idealism is why LLVM is now the academics favoured compiler to work on (i.e. no plugins for GCC) More human example: Someone I know who works in the GNU ecosystem on a reasonably major project mentioned that rms was cordial until he found out that this maintainer had children. And this was in response to someone handing already GPL code over to the FSF
  - hutzlibu 6y ago
    "Stallman's ideology is why LLVM is now the academics favoured compiler to work on" FTFY
  - simion314 6y ago
    Any proof that LLVM is chosen now on most universities? Because I also have anecdotes where I was offered a job to work on GCC for a specific hardware architecture and bring improvements. Though I would be more interested on what compiler or license brings the most real value to the society and not which ones brings more money to a small group of mega rich guys. Why not credit GPL or RMS for the Linux success over BSD ? There are many projects using BSD but still a giant number of companies and projects still use the "evil, cancerous" GPL project when they could use BSD and be selfish. Maybe open source will win over free software but that this will not prove the free software movement wrong, will prove that money and greed will win as always.
    - 6y ago
haunter 6y ago
Says a lot about the HN community that a lot of people need to post under throwaways because there are legit others would otherwise go after them or their employers Say whatever you want about reddit but at least it's more anonym than this site
- vmception 6y ago
  imagine not having sockpuppet accounts on HN [or reddit] imagine posting under your real name and having all that in your bio imagine thinking hackernews is different than a subreddit
  - haunter 6y ago
    imagine this is 4chan
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- mhh__ 6y ago
  Is there evidence that this is really the case (the "going after" rather than the throwaways)? e.g. I think Stallman is driving free software into the ground regardless of how right he is about it's value, but I'm not going to chase anyone up - beyond thinking they're stupid
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - gjulianm 6y ago
    Given how much the term "cancel culture" is being thrown around, I think that if someone got fired because of something they posted in HN (specially if it's a normal and reasoned opinion like almost all of the ones I'm seen in this thread) we would have seen it go round the presses five times over. I think a lot of it is echo: someone creates an anonymous account to say something because they think they're at risk, people see it and think that they're at risk too and repeat that and in the end you have a lot of people worrying about something that practically does not happen.
secondcoming 6y ago
Some guy wants him removed from the GCC steering committee too [0] [0] https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-March/235091.html https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-March/235091.html
- p_l 6y ago
  I thought that was done back with EGCS, kinda surprised.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  The list from the email: 1. 'skeptical that voluntarily pedophilia harms children.’ stallman's own archives 2006-mar-jun I note that children are incapable of consenting. That’s what the age of consent means. 2. 'end censorship of “child pornography”’. Stallman's archives 2012-jul-oct.html Notice use of “quotes” to down play what is actually being requested. 3. 'gentle expressions of attraction’ Stallman's archives 2012-jul-oct.html Condoning a variant of the wolf-whistle. Unless one’s talking to one’s lover, ‘gentle invitations for sex’ by a stranger is grooming (be it child or of-age). 4. Defends someone charged with ‘"sexual assault" on a "child" after a session with a sex worker of age 16.’ stallman's archives 2018-jul-oct Notice the quoting here, implying the child is not a child. ‘The article refers to the sex worker as a "child", but that is not so. Elsewhere it has been published that she is 16 years old. That is late adolescence, not childhood.’ No, they are a child, that’s what the ages of majority and consent mean. 5. The ‘St Ignatius’ ‘EMACS virgins’ non-joke. ‘The commenter writes about seeing the routine when she was only 15, and how RMS singled her out several times during that performance: He actually pointed to me in the back and proclaimed, into the mic, "A GIRL!" causing the audience to turn and look. Mortifying. Then he proceeded to gesture toward me every time he referred to "EMACS Virgins." (I cannot believe that he is still doing the same talk 10+ years later.)’ No wonder women want nothing to do with him. 6. A business card that is completely repelling image on oreilly 7. He knows those cards are inappropriate. He broke the code of conduct he helped author. wiredferret's twitter feed. 8. I understand he’s tried to circumvent such codes of conduct by asking women to meet him outside of the conference venue. _sagesharp_'s twitter feed. 9. He doesn’t acknowledge the few women he has worked with ‘I don’t have any experience working with women in programming projects; I don’t think that any volunteered to work on Emacs or GCC.’ Completely ignoring Sandra Loosemore, who is a coauthor, with him, of the Glibc manual. Sandra was involved with LISP standardization, so I would be surprised if he was unaware of her involvement there. As you well know, she has worked significantly on GCC, GCC has several other women contributors, but too few for complacency. 10. ‘My first interaction with RMS was at a hacker con at 19. He asked my name, I gave it, whether I went to MIT (I had an MIT shirt on), and after confirmation I did, asked me on a date. I said no. That was our entire conversation.’ corbett's twitter feed. This is but one of many reports of utterly inappropriate social interactions. This also ignores that GCC seems to remain relevant despite Stallman rather than because of him.
williamtwild 6y ago
Is the quality of RMS's work so good that he is worth all of this effort?
- mhh__ 6y ago
  No. His writing is still prescient but his leadership seems to have no upsides I'm aware of in the last few decades or so. GCC Plugins leading to LLVM come to mind, Chris Lattner even offered LLVM to the FSF (not sure of the exact chronology here, can dig up the emails later if desired). Oops
- prepend 6y ago
  I would hope that we don’t boil everything down to a utilitarian “is it worth the effort to fight for what is right.” I would hope that any contributor to a community would have this level of activity to right a wrong, not just the famous people. On utilitarian grounds, I don’t think this individual person is “worth all this effort,” but I think trying to establish community norms is worthwhile if our goal is a healthy community with strong contributions going forward. If a member can be expelled based on a blog post then that’s bad and will detract from people’s willingness to participate, I think.
thinkingemote 6y ago
I think people should just create their own foundation and get on with things. It seems like the FSF is going to be doing things their way - there's no compulsion for anyone to follow them, listen to them or to agree with what they do. So why not just start your own Foundation?
- mhh__ 6y ago
  Because the FSF control FSF projects and thus - regardless of steering - could (Stallman has) deter contributors to projects that desperately need them now that the industry has moved (say) from GCC to LLVM
- mkl 6y ago
  Even ignoring FSF projects, there's an awful lot of software with a license like "GPLv2 or any later version". That means whoever controls the FSF controls the future licensing of a lot of software, and software developers have invested a lot of trust in the FSF in the belief that the license will stay true to its original intent. An awful lot of people are hence compelled to follow the FSF and listen to them. I think creating a new foundation wouldn't solve many problems.
verytrivial 6y ago
So should we eject all Austism Spectrum / Asperger's people from positions of leadership, or just this one guy? [Edit] I've worked under at one, perhaps two ASD people, both brilliant engineers, and you're probably using some of their infra software right now -- he's been poached a few times. The one certain guy did not have a diagnosis that I knew of but would come out with the most outrageous opinions regarding world issues. Logical and anti-social. The thing is you could reason him out of these opinions because he valued logic to such an extent that he 'beliefs' were secondary. The problem was he'd share these opinions before testing the waters. He was quite rightly kept away from leadership positions that required communication on anything other than technical topics because of this. I've not seen RMS engaged on sharing his 'troubling' opinions. Show me that and I'll change my opinion (the hint being here that many HNers are somewhere on the spectrum, including me.)
- pjc50 6y ago
  RMS claims not to be Austism Spectrum / Asperger's. Conversely, plenty of people who do manage not to behave in the way he has.
- vkou 6y ago
  Being on the autistic spectrum does not require you to act like an asshole. I know a couple of autistic people. The main difference between them and RMS is that they give a shit about what other people think of their behaviour. He's an incredibly intelligent man, who is quite capable of understanding that people don't want him to act like a creep. Many different people, at many different times, have explained it to him, and have asked him to stop. He's already been given far more patience and leniency and second and third and fifth chances in this respect than any other person would have. Even if he is incapable of understanding why his behavior is wrong, he is an adult that is capable of understanding that he should stop it. He just doesn't care.
- hutzlibu 6y ago
  So .. you propose people should be able to say anything free of consequences, because of "aspergers"? Because no one ever made that claim. It was always about sexism and co. Or is sexism related to asperger in your opinion?
orra 6y ago
The sexual harassment apologists are out in force, and it's depressing as hell.
- regularjack 6y ago
  What are you referring to?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ruph123 6y ago
Can we go back to discussing if Rust is better than Go please?
michaelsbradley 6y ago
Seems creepy: https://github.com/sticks-stuff/highlight-RMS-supporters https://github.com/sticks-stuff/highlight-RMS-supporters
- bsagdiyev 6y ago
  Not sure why this is greyed. This sort of stuff is childish, especially coming from adults. Well I guess they’re more “adults” at this point if this is how they treat people who disagree with them.
  - temac 6y ago
    This is not "childish", this is the essence of the actions done by the people the drama originated from : when a target has been found, the idea is to ostracize them, and any of their "support", interpreted as including those who disagree on some point with the target but think the mob is going too far, and in extreme cases, selectively those who did not take a public position. This is the very object of the RMS open letter : they openly want RMS to disappear from everywhere and the whole FSF board to resign. There is still hope at some organization level, if they have strong constitutions, for example Debian has called for a vote among their members and is not threatening, officially, "dissident" people of being ostracized. Maybe "individually" some members will fall in that trap against others (in quote because the individual aspect will often not just be them avoiding intetaction, but them actively trying by openly or covertly pressuring everybody to prevent interactions between others, like we see here) The sad part is that this guerilla is highly assymetrical. Benevolent and correctly functioning adults won't even try to cancel the cancellers, or to make transitive lists of who can not be talked to anymore, because how would that be better than what they are doing? Of course some declaring support for cancelled people will attempt a counter boycott but their stance is not reasonable and they should be ignored as well on this point.
Traster 6y ago
Personally, I don't think the leader of any organisation is really free to make public comments about controversial issues and expect them not to reflect on the organisation they lead. I don't want to know what the leader of the FSF thinks about rape, the age of consent of the pros and cons of aborting foetuses. Which leaves two options: Either RMS stops publicly talking about those issues, or RMS stop being the leader of the FSF. When you want to lead a public organisation you give up certain freedoms in order to serve the interests of the organisation you lead. I also think it's quite funny seeing the letter from the people who are being accused of being a mob. It's a relatively unemotional statement of their case with citations pointing to the underlying issues they're referring to. Where the reponse, which is meant to be the balanced rational people supporting an unfairly attacked man is highly emotive, poorly argued and doesn't actually address half the issues RMS is being criticised for. Some of the most obvious arguments against RMS leader the FSF actually come from the letter defending him. >His words need to be interpreted in this context and taking into account that more often than not, he is not looking to put things diplomatically. Well maybe that's not a good trait for the leader of the FSF.
- read_if_gay_ 6y ago
  That seems weird - you’d rather have RMS keep his controversial opinions in secret than have him state them and ultimately change his mind?
  - Traster 6y ago
    Hey, if he changed his mind I'd be happy with that, but I still don't think he should really getting in to those conversations as the leader of the FSF.
  - slenk 6y ago
    Where did he say he changed his mind? I can't seem to find anything where he takes back his statements
Elaine-H 6y ago
I signed the support rms letter with my real name. I hope you do the same if you want to support him. I was born in mainland China and these attacks on rms remind me of the Cultural Revolution.
- bm3719 6y ago
  Being in the US and in the industry, deciding to sign it gave me pause. There's already talk on Twitter about what to do with the list of signatories. Like others have said here, my daily life is substantively better thanks to rms. I use GNU Emacs all day and of course benefit from the vast infrastructure that GNU and other GPL-ed software provides. There's probably no one many of us (including many in the anti-rms crowd) owes more to than rms in the context of technology. Once it's clear FSF won't be bending the knee, I'll be adding an FSF membership to help counter some of the corporate sponsorship pullouts. I wish there were more I could do to give back.
  - Elaine-H 6y ago
    Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Could you please share a link to the Twitter talk about "what to do with the list of signatories"?
natmaka 6y ago
L. Dachary take on it seems really good to me: https://blog.dachary.org/2020/02/10/how-the-cancel-culture-was-leveraged-against-rms/ https://blog.dachary.org/2020/02/10/how-the-cancel-culture-w... Details: https://jorgemorais.gitlab.io/justice-for-rms/ https://jorgemorais.gitlab.io/justice-for-rms/ https://sterling-archermedes.github.io/index.html https://sterling-archermedes.github.io/index.html About the "cancel" approach: https://quillette.com/2021/01/27/beating-back-cancel-culture-a-case-study-from-the-field-of-artificial-intelligence/ https://quillette.com/2021/01/27/beating-back-cancel-culture...
unrequitedlove 6y ago
As an outsider (i.e. someone from a different culture) this is equal parts hillarious, terrifying and englightening to watch. Like, all of a sudden you people can’t say racist, sexist or edgy things, and no one can explain why – it’s some kind of unspoken axiom, it’s just, like, wrong, man, dont’ you get it, it’s not polite. Not halal. Well, who deciced that politeness is halal? Did you people have a vote or something?

131 points by mthld 6y ago

oblio 6y ago

Is this related to Stallman going back to the FSF?

sparkling 6y ago
More likely related over the outrage of Stallman going back to the FSF
fen4o 6y ago
See https://rms-open-letter.github.io/ https://rms-open-letter.github.io/ and the counter-letter https://rms-support-letter.github.io/ https://rms-support-letter.github.io/
- risky_opinions 6y ago
  I could see companies starting to screen applicants using these lists. Different companies would choose which list to use according to their own politics and culture. Totally hypothetical: Coinbase and Google will probably turn rms-open-letter into a denylist. Twitter will do the opposite. This is all conjecture, but I could see it happening. It's why I feel I shouldn't sign.
  - user-the-name 6y ago
    One list is full of people who have achieved big things, and are in positions of power. The other is full of throwaway and inactive github accounts.
    - beaconstudios 6y ago
      which isn't particularly surprising if people are worried about getting cancelled. (FWIW I haven't signed either, and don't know enough about RMS' actions to commit to a perspective).
  - twic 6y ago
    There's already a script to block people on GitHub based on signing one of the letters, written by an infosec furry (but i repeat myself): https://twitter.com/kyhwana/status/1375651591672324096 https://twitter.com/kyhwana/status/1375651591672324096
- secondcoming 6y ago
  I know it's impossible but it would be very interesting to see how the participants in each list break down by $IDENTITY_GROUP. Edit: it seems some people are not interested in this data
- bitwize 6y ago
  One is signed by the directors of major open-source projects and initiatives. The other is mainly signed by Russian bots.
  - yellowapple 6y ago
    That doesn't seem like a fair characterization. Yeah, a lot of the names do look Slavic, but what makes you believe they're bots?
  - e3b0c44298 6y ago
    The fact that the Twitter Khmer Rouge are currently making lists of people signing the Stallman support letter might help explain why only Russians, safe from American wokeness and cancel culture, are willing to sign that letter.
    - mhh__ 6y ago
      I understand the point but Khmer Rouge?
  - willeh 6y ago
    I hope that I'm wrong here and there is evidence of actual bots, but as far as I can tell you're making this judgement based on the fact the people signing the RMS support letter have Russian sounding names. First off, yes I don't doubt that the totalitarian oppressive and oppressive governments are using this type of technique, in fact they are probably using it a lot because it is highly effective. However, it seems exceedingly unlikely that they have any interest in a spat in an, on the whole, insignificant professional organization. I think it is worth reevaluating your opinion, as understanding the other side of an argument is useful and helps us understand the world better. Generalising, a bit in my experience Russians tend to be slightly technocratic valuing pragmatism over ideology, which seems natural considering that it was beaten out of them by a series of absolutist despots. Still their opinions are valid even if most people in Europe and the US, no matter their political beliefs, will consider RMS to have perjured himself as an ideological leader to the extent that trust can not be mended, and consequently must resign.
- Glavnokoman 6y ago
  Thanks for the links! And I guess the rms-support is getting yet another "russian bot" signature.
  - mandmandam 6y ago
    2 hours and this still isn't grey? What the f*ck is your deal HN.
  - mpol 6y ago
    I'm not a Russian bot and yes, I did sign the support letter.

prvc 6y ago

A little bit more background would be useful.

enriquto 6y ago
The FSF has been under a lot of (undue, in my opinion) pressure lately, regarding the composition of its board. It is understandable that the ED, who is part of the hired staff and not a member of the board, has a limited patience. I hope all is well with him, his work as executive director has been great.

tester34 6y ago

vocal twitter minority reaching their goals again? current state of internet is pretty sad, I bet you'd just need 30 people/twitter(or reddit) accounts in order to create drama of significant size

wiz21c 6y ago
seems so. It'd be a better world if people would understand the difference between walking a thin line and actually crossing it.
Jonnax 6y ago
https://rms-open-letter.github.io/ https://rms-open-letter.github.io/ The organisations that I've heard of which called for the board at the FSF to resign: - X.org Foundation - Tor Project - Mozilla - The HardenedBSD Foundation / The HardenedBSD Project - SUSE - GNOME Foundation - The FreeDOS Project - Creative Commons - OBS Project Isn't this a bit more than a vocal twitter minority?
- sparkling 6y ago
  Did these organisations ask their respective members if they agree with signing this letter? On the support letter* there are a number of GNOME contributors, so clearly there is not one single opinion within these organisations. * https://rms-support-letter.github.io/ https://rms-support-letter.github.io/
  - Foxboron 6y ago
    There are two listed, both former. But there is a difference contributing to GNOME projects and being part of the GNOME foundation.

rich_sasha 6y ago

A whole different angle, I wonder how well the FSF folk get on with RMS. For all the defenses people mount of him, no one says he's a nice guy to be around. I'm still against the Twitter mob etc., I do wonder though if RMS nuked his own organisation by joining the helm again. Life's unfair.

Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
It does not matter if rms is a nice person or not. He didn't do anything criminal, his only offense is stoically and pedantically expressing his views, unyielding to public pressure. In other words, displaying those very qualities that helped him change software development forever. People should not be destroyed for not being nice enough to certain individuals prone to offenses, and conforming to someone else's views should not be a necessity to work in your chosen field.
- SamoyedFurFluff 6y ago
  Not having a board position isn’t anything close to being destroyed. I’m totally against heavily exaggerating everything RMS did wrong but can we not swing the other way around and equivocate a highly privileged position with life and livelihood?
  - Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
    Pushing a person from his life's work and from the organization that exists only because of him is effectively destroying. This won't stop with him resigning again. What do you think, this mad cancel mob will tolerate rms to appear at some Libre Software conference? Hell, no! They'll harass organizers till they quit, threatening with boycott and pressuring all the sponsors and venue providers. We've seen this in action many times. This mob must be stopped.
- iSnow 6y ago
  Then again, if you are of a divisive personality type, you maybe should not lead an organization as others might not want to work with you, companies might want to withdraw funding because they don't like to be associated with the controversy around you. And lastly, you might reduce the reach of your own ideas.

risky_opinions 6y ago

I'm creating a throwaway that I hope won't irk dang. If this breaks the rules, I'm sorry and I'll stop. Richard Stallman single-handedly created the free software movement, and he's the reason we all have jobs. Google and Facebook might not have been possible in a world where you couldn't spin up a server for free and compile code without paying a license. Richard Stallman has said some sexist and edgy things. He also has Asperger's, which poses challenges many of us do not face. He hasn't, as far as I know, committed any crimes. Do we destroy the pillar we've built our entire livelihoods upon to satisfy a mob? Have all of us been truly without blame? Who hasn't said something they shouldn't have? Or done something that marginalized someone at some point in time (even if it wasn't on the basis of sex, gender, race, etc.)? I don't want to live in a world without American freedom of speech - where we can't be blunt and speak our minds. I don't want to live in a world where we can't be forgiven. I was reading comments in another HN thread, and one poster suggested that this might arise from raising kids without bullying. Like the immune system, if we don't develop a central tolerance, perhaps we start attacking everything we find unpleasant? No basis in behavioral science, of course. And then there's the engagement-driven social media monster. Twitter, in particular. It's destroying careers. We're badgering the members of the FSF. We're denying Richard Stallman any chances. This isn't good. It's horrific. What do we do about this?

enriquto 6y ago
> What do we do about this? There's not much we can do about that; the world is a horrible, unfair place. If Socrates was born again, we would kill him again.
- QuesnayJr 6y ago
  Your last sentence perfectly captures something I think all the time, but could never articulate pithily.
  - QuesnayJr 6y ago
    I know that you're not "supposed" to comment on voting here, but I feel the need to call out the fundamentally broken culture here around voting. I said something mildly nice about some else's writing, and I've gotten 3 downvotes? Really? I think the people running the site really needs to consider consequences for excessive downvoting. Having a discussion here is really unpleasant, because of the random drive-by voting. It's easier to have a discussion on Reddit, and Reddit is terrible.

aboringusername 6y ago

I apologize if this particular thread isn't the appropriate forum for this but this type of activity is inevitable at one point or another, and perhaps he just wants to retire of there are politics/shenanigans at play, no organization can be free of politics afterall. Yet, there are many examples of software projects with "BDFLs", the Linux Kernel being the most prominent one I can think of. I suspect there are people just waiting, biding their time until Linus retires - who takes over him? How does the governance structure change? Who takes over David M's net stack? Greg's stable trees? I find it fascinating to think about and I am very curious when known figures step down and to watch what happens next, how things change. Are they subtle? Are they more obvious? How does this play out in 5 years? To me it's one of the more interesting aspects of communities since one person can really make a huge difference (for example, Ballmer/Satya at MS).

keenreed 6y ago
Linux is mature enough to handle less centralization. Each distro already maintains its flavor of patches, there is Android fork, several embedded forks... It will be more similar to FreeBSD development.

bitwize 6y ago

I've given a lot of thought to this issue and though I've wanted to give Richard Stallman the benefit of the doubt, I've come to an inescapable conclusion: The FSF board of directors really stepped in it bringing Stallman back, especially in the clandestine manner that they did. They have squandered the goodwill of the community by promoting a controversial figure known for his toxic opinions and decades of bad behavior to a leadership position. The FSF is at grave risk of losing its funding and its reputation, both of which it needs to carry out its mission. As such, it is appropriate for Stallman and the entire FSF board to resign. John Sullivan has made the right decision. He will doubtless be followed by others -- and hopefully, if Stallman refuses to resign, he will be ousted by the new board. All of the leadership in open source does not want Stallman in a leadership role because of the toxic effect he has on the community, in particular driving women -- and more recently, those repulsed by pedophilia -- away. There are times to fight social pressure; this is not one of them.

Number157 6y ago
This community is toxic and drives good but flawed people away.
- bitwize 6y ago
  A talented asshole is a net liability. An untalented, nontoxic person can become a valuable contributor with the right training and mentoring.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - ionwake 6y ago
    Surely this is not the case if the talented asshole has already contributed in a massively vast way to the team / society.
  - orra 6y ago
    Additionally, an asshole can drive away multiple people. Even if an asshole is three times as productive as your typical contributor, they can easily drive away ten people. Not to mention the morality of pedestalling creeps.

Number157 6y ago

Never apologize to the mob. It emboldens them.

davty 6y ago

It was briefly discussed in this episode of floss weekly https://twit.tv/shows/floss-weekly/episodes/622?autostart=false https://twit.tv/shows/floss-weekly/episodes/622?autostart=fa... and I think the guest made an interesting observation in that quite a big issue in FSF is that the board is entirely self-selected, the community is not really involved. Thus, the future of the GPL is entirely in the hand of a few people who picked themselves so to say.

boomboomsubban 6y ago
>Thus, the future of the GPL is entirely in the hand of a few people who picked themselves so to say. What does this even mean? As Linux staying on v2 shows, the FSF doesn't have any real control over GPL licenses. And I'm fairly sure the only limitation on modifying the GPL myself is I couldn't use the word "GNU."
- p_l 6y ago
  As Wikipedia shows, FSF has/had a lot of power (Wikipedia was originally GFDL licensed)
  - boomboomsubban 6y ago
    It still is licensed under the GFDL, I'm not seeing how this is an example of them having power, and this is the GFDL is not the GPL.
    - p_l 6y ago
      Significant portion of the text on Wikipedia is now dual licensed Creative Commons and GFDL (specifically unversioned), something that was made possible by change introduced in later version of GFDL (1.3, afaik) that didn't exist in earlier one. The licensing move was done in 2009.
- Denvercoder9 6y ago
  The FSF can issue new versions of the GPL, which will automatically apply to software licensed under the GPLv2 or GPLv3 with the "or any later version" clause (which is present in the standard boilerplate). A completely non-representative grep through copyright information indicates that about two-thirds of the GPL-licensed packages on my Debian system have the "or any later version" clause.

iseanstevens 6y ago

Re: RMS, without passing judgement: - I think people can have great ideas but not be great long term leaders. FSF has high ideals, and fundamentally needs buy in from people on a lot of levels for them to succeed. It needs community. They could be really thankful to RMS’s getting things going but I don’t really understand why, now, they would add him back to the board. Is he saying new things that aren’t linear from the creation of FSF where his continued high level involvement is more helpful to the end goals than the community upset I would hope the board was aware of as a possibility?

remirk 6y ago
Stallman is only one person on the board. It's quite a proven strategy to have people with vastly different skillsets on the board of an organisation. In FSF's case, Stallman might be a good fit to contribute his software freedom ideas. As long as there are other people who can focus on PR.

simion314 6y ago

We almost Linus Torwalds because of the cancel culture, would be a big loss to lose RMS because he is no longer good PR to have him, bonus points if some big business like Google or Red Hat could grab the leadership of FSF and GNU. There was a few days back a post for people to support RMS and I admit I did not put my name on the list because i am afraid this could affect my future, cancel culture could get worse and my actions could be misinterpreted as the worse things possible(like I must support pedos if I support RMS).

mhh__ 6y ago
Well the difference is that Torvalds remains competent? Easy example: Stallman's idealism is why LLVM is now the academics favoured compiler to work on (i.e. no plugins for GCC) More human example: Someone I know who works in the GNU ecosystem on a reasonably major project mentioned that rms was cordial until he found out that this maintainer had children. And this was in response to someone handing already GPL code over to the FSF
- hutzlibu 6y ago
  "Stallman's ideology is why LLVM is now the academics favoured compiler to work on" FTFY
- simion314 6y ago
  Any proof that LLVM is chosen now on most universities? Because I also have anecdotes where I was offered a job to work on GCC for a specific hardware architecture and bring improvements. Though I would be more interested on what compiler or license brings the most real value to the society and not which ones brings more money to a small group of mega rich guys. Why not credit GPL or RMS for the Linux success over BSD ? There are many projects using BSD but still a giant number of companies and projects still use the "evil, cancerous" GPL project when they could use BSD and be selfish. Maybe open source will win over free software but that this will not prove the free software movement wrong, will prove that money and greed will win as always.
  - 6y ago

haunter 6y ago

Says a lot about the HN community that a lot of people need to post under throwaways because there are legit others would otherwise go after them or their employers Say whatever you want about reddit but at least it's more anonym than this site

vmception 6y ago
imagine not having sockpuppet accounts on HN [or reddit] imagine posting under your real name and having all that in your bio imagine thinking hackernews is different than a subreddit
- haunter 6y ago
  imagine this is 4chan
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
mhh__ 6y ago
Is there evidence that this is really the case (the "going after" rather than the throwaways)? e.g. I think Stallman is driving free software into the ground regardless of how right he is about it's value, but I'm not going to chase anyone up - beyond thinking they're stupid
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- gjulianm 6y ago
  Given how much the term "cancel culture" is being thrown around, I think that if someone got fired because of something they posted in HN (specially if it's a normal and reasoned opinion like almost all of the ones I'm seen in this thread) we would have seen it go round the presses five times over. I think a lot of it is echo: someone creates an anonymous account to say something because they think they're at risk, people see it and think that they're at risk too and repeat that and in the end you have a lot of people worrying about something that practically does not happen.

secondcoming 6y ago

Some guy wants him removed from the GCC steering committee too [0] [0] https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-March/235091.html https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-March/235091.html

p_l 6y ago
I thought that was done back with EGCS, kinda surprised.
mhh__ 6y ago
The list from the email: 1. 'skeptical that voluntarily pedophilia harms children.’ stallman's own archives 2006-mar-jun I note that children are incapable of consenting. That’s what the age of consent means. 2. 'end censorship of “child pornography”’. Stallman's archives 2012-jul-oct.html Notice use of “quotes” to down play what is actually being requested. 3. 'gentle expressions of attraction’ Stallman's archives 2012-jul-oct.html Condoning a variant of the wolf-whistle. Unless one’s talking to one’s lover, ‘gentle invitations for sex’ by a stranger is grooming (be it child or of-age). 4. Defends someone charged with ‘"sexual assault" on a "child" after a session with a sex worker of age 16.’ stallman's archives 2018-jul-oct Notice the quoting here, implying the child is not a child. ‘The article refers to the sex worker as a "child", but that is not so. Elsewhere it has been published that she is 16 years old. That is late adolescence, not childhood.’ No, they are a child, that’s what the ages of majority and consent mean. 5. The ‘St Ignatius’ ‘EMACS virgins’ non-joke. ‘The commenter writes about seeing the routine when she was only 15, and how RMS singled her out several times during that performance: He actually pointed to me in the back and proclaimed, into the mic, "A GIRL!" causing the audience to turn and look. Mortifying. Then he proceeded to gesture toward me every time he referred to "EMACS Virgins." (I cannot believe that he is still doing the same talk 10+ years later.)’ No wonder women want nothing to do with him. 6. A business card that is completely repelling image on oreilly 7. He knows those cards are inappropriate. He broke the code of conduct he helped author. wiredferret's twitter feed. 8. I understand he’s tried to circumvent such codes of conduct by asking women to meet him outside of the conference venue. _sagesharp_'s twitter feed. 9. He doesn’t acknowledge the few women he has worked with ‘I don’t have any experience working with women in programming projects; I don’t think that any volunteered to work on Emacs or GCC.’ Completely ignoring Sandra Loosemore, who is a coauthor, with him, of the Glibc manual. Sandra was involved with LISP standardization, so I would be surprised if he was unaware of her involvement there. As you well know, she has worked significantly on GCC, GCC has several other women contributors, but too few for complacency. 10. ‘My first interaction with RMS was at a hacker con at 19. He asked my name, I gave it, whether I went to MIT (I had an MIT shirt on), and after confirmation I did, asked me on a date. I said no. That was our entire conversation.’ corbett's twitter feed. This is but one of many reports of utterly inappropriate social interactions. This also ignores that GCC seems to remain relevant despite Stallman rather than because of him.

williamtwild 6y ago

Is the quality of RMS's work so good that he is worth all of this effort?

mhh__ 6y ago
No. His writing is still prescient but his leadership seems to have no upsides I'm aware of in the last few decades or so. GCC Plugins leading to LLVM come to mind, Chris Lattner even offered LLVM to the FSF (not sure of the exact chronology here, can dig up the emails later if desired). Oops
prepend 6y ago
I would hope that we don’t boil everything down to a utilitarian “is it worth the effort to fight for what is right.” I would hope that any contributor to a community would have this level of activity to right a wrong, not just the famous people. On utilitarian grounds, I don’t think this individual person is “worth all this effort,” but I think trying to establish community norms is worthwhile if our goal is a healthy community with strong contributions going forward. If a member can be expelled based on a blog post then that’s bad and will detract from people’s willingness to participate, I think.

thinkingemote 6y ago

I think people should just create their own foundation and get on with things. It seems like the FSF is going to be doing things their way - there's no compulsion for anyone to follow them, listen to them or to agree with what they do. So why not just start your own Foundation?

mhh__ 6y ago
Because the FSF control FSF projects and thus - regardless of steering - could (Stallman has) deter contributors to projects that desperately need them now that the industry has moved (say) from GCC to LLVM
mkl 6y ago
Even ignoring FSF projects, there's an awful lot of software with a license like "GPLv2 or any later version". That means whoever controls the FSF controls the future licensing of a lot of software, and software developers have invested a lot of trust in the FSF in the belief that the license will stay true to its original intent. An awful lot of people are hence compelled to follow the FSF and listen to them. I think creating a new foundation wouldn't solve many problems.

verytrivial 6y ago

So should we eject all Austism Spectrum / Asperger's people from positions of leadership, or just this one guy? [Edit] I've worked under at one, perhaps two ASD people, both brilliant engineers, and you're probably using some of their infra software right now -- he's been poached a few times. The one certain guy did not have a diagnosis that I knew of but would come out with the most outrageous opinions regarding world issues. Logical and anti-social. The thing is you could reason him out of these opinions because he valued logic to such an extent that he 'beliefs' were secondary. The problem was he'd share these opinions before testing the waters. He was quite rightly kept away from leadership positions that required communication on anything other than technical topics because of this. I've not seen RMS engaged on sharing his 'troubling' opinions. Show me that and I'll change my opinion (the hint being here that many HNers are somewhere on the spectrum, including me.)

pjc50 6y ago
RMS claims not to be Austism Spectrum / Asperger's. Conversely, plenty of people who do manage not to behave in the way he has.
vkou 6y ago
Being on the autistic spectrum does not require you to act like an asshole. I know a couple of autistic people. The main difference between them and RMS is that they give a shit about what other people think of their behaviour. He's an incredibly intelligent man, who is quite capable of understanding that people don't want him to act like a creep. Many different people, at many different times, have explained it to him, and have asked him to stop. He's already been given far more patience and leniency and second and third and fifth chances in this respect than any other person would have. Even if he is incapable of understanding why his behavior is wrong, he is an adult that is capable of understanding that he should stop it. He just doesn't care.
hutzlibu 6y ago
So .. you propose people should be able to say anything free of consequences, because of "aspergers"? Because no one ever made that claim. It was always about sexism and co. Or is sexism related to asperger in your opinion?

orra 6y ago

The sexual harassment apologists are out in force, and it's depressing as hell.

regularjack 6y ago
What are you referring to?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ruph123 6y ago

Can we go back to discussing if Rust is better than Go please?

michaelsbradley 6y ago

Seems creepy: https://github.com/sticks-stuff/highlight-RMS-supporters https://github.com/sticks-stuff/highlight-RMS-supporters

bsagdiyev 6y ago
Not sure why this is greyed. This sort of stuff is childish, especially coming from adults. Well I guess they’re more “adults” at this point if this is how they treat people who disagree with them.
- temac 6y ago
  This is not "childish", this is the essence of the actions done by the people the drama originated from : when a target has been found, the idea is to ostracize them, and any of their "support", interpreted as including those who disagree on some point with the target but think the mob is going too far, and in extreme cases, selectively those who did not take a public position. This is the very object of the RMS open letter : they openly want RMS to disappear from everywhere and the whole FSF board to resign. There is still hope at some organization level, if they have strong constitutions, for example Debian has called for a vote among their members and is not threatening, officially, "dissident" people of being ostracized. Maybe "individually" some members will fall in that trap against others (in quote because the individual aspect will often not just be them avoiding intetaction, but them actively trying by openly or covertly pressuring everybody to prevent interactions between others, like we see here) The sad part is that this guerilla is highly assymetrical. Benevolent and correctly functioning adults won't even try to cancel the cancellers, or to make transitive lists of who can not be talked to anymore, because how would that be better than what they are doing? Of course some declaring support for cancelled people will attempt a counter boycott but their stance is not reasonable and they should be ignored as well on this point.

Traster 6y ago

Personally, I don't think the leader of any organisation is really free to make public comments about controversial issues and expect them not to reflect on the organisation they lead. I don't want to know what the leader of the FSF thinks about rape, the age of consent of the pros and cons of aborting foetuses. Which leaves two options: Either RMS stops publicly talking about those issues, or RMS stop being the leader of the FSF. When you want to lead a public organisation you give up certain freedoms in order to serve the interests of the organisation you lead. I also think it's quite funny seeing the letter from the people who are being accused of being a mob. It's a relatively unemotional statement of their case with citations pointing to the underlying issues they're referring to. Where the reponse, which is meant to be the balanced rational people supporting an unfairly attacked man is highly emotive, poorly argued and doesn't actually address half the issues RMS is being criticised for. Some of the most obvious arguments against RMS leader the FSF actually come from the letter defending him. >His words need to be interpreted in this context and taking into account that more often than not, he is not looking to put things diplomatically. Well maybe that's not a good trait for the leader of the FSF.

read_if_gay_ 6y ago
That seems weird - you’d rather have RMS keep his controversial opinions in secret than have him state them and ultimately change his mind?
- Traster 6y ago
  Hey, if he changed his mind I'd be happy with that, but I still don't think he should really getting in to those conversations as the leader of the FSF.
- slenk 6y ago
  Where did he say he changed his mind? I can't seem to find anything where he takes back his statements

Elaine-H 6y ago

I signed the support rms letter with my real name. I hope you do the same if you want to support him. I was born in mainland China and these attacks on rms remind me of the Cultural Revolution.

bm3719 6y ago
Being in the US and in the industry, deciding to sign it gave me pause. There's already talk on Twitter about what to do with the list of signatories. Like others have said here, my daily life is substantively better thanks to rms. I use GNU Emacs all day and of course benefit from the vast infrastructure that GNU and other GPL-ed software provides. There's probably no one many of us (including many in the anti-rms crowd) owes more to than rms in the context of technology. Once it's clear FSF won't be bending the knee, I'll be adding an FSF membership to help counter some of the corporate sponsorship pullouts. I wish there were more I could do to give back.
- Elaine-H 6y ago
  Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Could you please share a link to the Twitter talk about "what to do with the list of signatories"?

natmaka 6y ago

L. Dachary take on it seems really good to me: https://blog.dachary.org/2020/02/10/how-the-cancel-culture-was-leveraged-against-rms/ https://blog.dachary.org/2020/02/10/how-the-cancel-culture-w... Details: https://jorgemorais.gitlab.io/justice-for-rms/ https://jorgemorais.gitlab.io/justice-for-rms/ https://sterling-archermedes.github.io/index.html https://sterling-archermedes.github.io/index.html About the "cancel" approach: https://quillette.com/2021/01/27/beating-back-cancel-culture-a-case-study-from-the-field-of-artificial-intelligence/ https://quillette.com/2021/01/27/beating-back-cancel-culture...

unrequitedlove 6y ago

As an outsider (i.e. someone from a different culture) this is equal parts hillarious, terrifying and englightening to watch. Like, all of a sudden you people can’t say racist, sexist or edgy things, and no one can explain why – it’s some kind of unspoken axiom, it’s just, like, wrong, man, dont’ you get it, it’s not polite. Not halal. Well, who deciced that politeness is halal? Did you people have a vote or something?