7 ms·

That is a really well written statement in my humble opinion. It’s almost like they’re trying to tell people “look we need this guy, and yeah for many it sucks

That is a really well written statement in my humble opinion. It’s almost like they’re trying to tell people “look we need this guy, and yeah for many it sucks, but for the betterment of the mission and the future of free software, we have to come together because he is simply too valuable to ignore“ I was intrigued at “ The announcement by RMS at LibrePlanet was a complete surprise to staff, all those who worked so hard to organize a great event,” This sounds like RMS almost torpedoed his own board seat by announcing it on his own. I think compared with the totality of the evidence, the history of FSF, The importance of knowledge, and the betterment for the group as a whole, bringing RMS was the right decision. It’s great they’ve implemented changes, maybe this will be a roadmap for others canceled but still needed to atone and renter the public square.

ashtonkem 6y ago
> look we need this guy The apocryphal Charles de Gaulle quote that applies here is "graveyards are full of indispensable men". RMS is one man, the FSF is an organization that is supposed to have aims that are bigger and larger reaching than one single person, which is why it's an org in the first place. If the FSF cannot get by without RMS now, they will not survive RMS himself in the long run. > This sounds like RMS almost torpedoed his own board seat by announcing it on his own. Again, RMS is really bad at this stuff. I genuinely have no idea why anyone wants to keep him. Especially having met him personally, he seems unpleasant to deal with on a constant basis. > I think compared with the totality of the evidence, the history of FSF, The importance of knowledge, and the betterment for the group as a whole, bringing RMS was the right decision. I'd argue that you are probably overweighting the early history of the FSF. In my professional lifetime it has been a complete non-entity, and all I've ever seen RMS do publicly is get into slap fights over "GNU/Linux" and create drama out of thin air. What has that org been doing for 20 years other than slowly lose ground to Apache and CNCF?
- ghaff 6y ago
  Mostly I'll grant the GNU Project and the GPL and associated philosophical underpinning. Whether you favor copyleft or not, it has almost certainly been useful to have that basis for FOSS--given that the permissive licenses were mostly about pragmatism. Having said that, one of my lawyer friends has pondered whether the FSF's focus on licensing as the primary software freedom tool hasn't led to some of the licensing debates going on today.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    That's all well and good, but it is completely orthogonal to whether or not he should be on the FSF board. The GPL was an important contribution he made to the community ... 30 years ago. The FSF has been fighting for the GPL over more permissive licenses for a while, and losing badly. Maybe it was a doomed fight from the get go, but it is certainly clear that he has not been successful. Obviously without him the FSF and GNU as we know it would not exist, but leadership is all about what you will do in the future, not what you did in the past. So the question is, why is he indispensable to the FSF today?
    - ghaff 6y ago
      He's not. And I'm not convinced the FSF as a whole is needed, certainly not with the current leadership. I was mostly responding to "I'd argue that you are probably overweighting the early history of the FSF." I'm just saying there were some important things in that early history but I agree much less since.
sthomas1618 6y ago
I could not disagree more. This whole statement is "sorry, not sorry". If someone is known to be a toxic person (and currently still is), you do not let them on to your team. Ever.
- semitones 6y ago
  Toxicity isn't a binary thing - there's levels to it. If the benefits one can bring to a team outweigh their negative attributes, then you should let them on your team. As far as how to determine whether the good outweighs the bad, that's a different topic. He brings a lot to the table, and I don't think he should have his work and life "cancelled" because some people disagree with his opinions...
  - danpalmer 6y ago
    Cancellation isn't a binary thing either, and I'm not sure anyone is suggesting that RMS's past contributions to the FSF be dismantled or that no one should employ him, I don't think anyone seriously want's to cancel his life's work. The suggestions are that he shouldn't hold a leadership position in a community when he's shown an inability to lead a community safely.
    - AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
      Alas, cancellation is binary. It's akin to bullying: once started things begin to go downhill really quick. There are always enough people willing to raise there self-esteem by kicking a dead lion.
      - danpalmer 6y ago
        I disagree that it's binary. Brendan Eich seems to be doing pretty well running Brave after being "cancelled" for donating for anti-gay-marriage causes. I think people remember that but have mostly let him get on with his life because he a) apologised, and b) no longer runs something as visible as Mozilla.
DasIch 6y ago
What if, RMS is hit by a bus tomorrow? The FSF is not a new organization. That it cannot function without RMS means it's failing to stand on its own. That may be acceptable for a new organization but in case of the FSF that's just a massive failure to build a sustainable organization. If you care about the work the FSF is doing (I don't), this announcement should be extremely worrying.
- pieter_mj 6y ago
  >this announcement should be extremely worrying. I agree it's slightly worrying, there's currently no replacement for RMS. The libre software movement risks falling apart if he is no longer there. FSF and RMS should make quick work of finding someone valuable.
  - DasIch 6y ago
    One person is not a movement. It's not enough to find someone else. The organization, the entire group of people it consists of, needs to be able to its job.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    I'm not even sure what this libre software movement even is that would fall apart in the absence of RMS and the FSF.
    - solipsism 6y ago
      Yes.. please God someone tell me, which parts of the sky would fall if the entire FSF org disappeared tomorrow?
- ghaff 6y ago
  Exactly. So this >30 year old organization spends a paragraph to basically say they're crippled as an organization without RMS. Imagine a company welcoming back a founder who was forced out for some sort of highly questionable behavior and public statements--and the company to come out with a statement a year later that they just couldn't go on without their founder's wisdom. We would rightly say the board and senior management of that company wasn't doing their job.
na85 6y ago
>look we need this guy, and yeah for many it sucks, but for the betterment of the mission and the future of free software, we have to come together because he is simply too valuable to ignore But he's not valuable any more, that's the thing. He hasn't written code in like 30 years and to the best of my knowledge all he does is go around giving the same tired lecture over and over. This pretend apology does nothing to address the very real concerns expressed by the people who have had to work with RMS. The guy is just generally an asshole, with the charisma of a wet towel. We give some assholes some slack if they continue to make valuable contributions (Torvalds, de Raadt), but RMS makes no valuable contributions.
- throwaway3699 6y ago
  Writing code isn't that valuable. Many people contribute to coreutils (& other GNU projects) but there is only one RMS. His position is an ideological one.
  - na85 6y ago
    To a first approximation, zero people at the global scale are proponents of Stallman's FSF. Free Software deserves a better figurehead.
  - DasIch 6y ago
    What political successes did the FSF have in the last 20 years and what role did RMS play in those?
paulmd 6y ago
> This sounds like RMS almost torpedoed his own board seat by announcing it on his own. > bringing RMS was the right decision The idea that he has such severe problems with social interactions that he almost torpedoed his chance at getting back his board seat suggests that he is not, in fact, the right person to be leading a large organization. I get the hacker ethos that this is "his" organization but if the guy can't even hold it together for a week without nearly blowing it, he's not going to be an effective advocate for his views and isn't the right person to lead a large organization. Long-term the organization needs to move past him anyway: he's 70, if the movement can't survive without him then it'd better figure out how that's going to work damned quickly because statistically they don't have that many more years.
shadowgovt 6y ago
An organization in which one man is indispensable dies with that man. If FSF can't see a way to exist without Stallman at the helm, I wouldn't make any long-term bets on them sticking around as an organization of relevance.

ashtonkem 6y ago

> look we need this guy The apocryphal Charles de Gaulle quote that applies here is "graveyards are full of indispensable men". RMS is one man, the FSF is an organization that is supposed to have aims that are bigger and larger reaching than one single person, which is why it's an org in the first place. If the FSF cannot get by without RMS now, they will not survive RMS himself in the long run. > This sounds like RMS almost torpedoed his own board seat by announcing it on his own. Again, RMS is really bad at this stuff. I genuinely have no idea why anyone wants to keep him. Especially having met him personally, he seems unpleasant to deal with on a constant basis. > I think compared with the totality of the evidence, the history of FSF, The importance of knowledge, and the betterment for the group as a whole, bringing RMS was the right decision. I'd argue that you are probably overweighting the early history of the FSF. In my professional lifetime it has been a complete non-entity, and all I've ever seen RMS do publicly is get into slap fights over "GNU/Linux" and create drama out of thin air. What has that org been doing for 20 years other than slowly lose ground to Apache and CNCF?

ghaff 6y ago
Mostly I'll grant the GNU Project and the GPL and associated philosophical underpinning. Whether you favor copyleft or not, it has almost certainly been useful to have that basis for FOSS--given that the permissive licenses were mostly about pragmatism. Having said that, one of my lawyer friends has pondered whether the FSF's focus on licensing as the primary software freedom tool hasn't led to some of the licensing debates going on today.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  That's all well and good, but it is completely orthogonal to whether or not he should be on the FSF board. The GPL was an important contribution he made to the community ... 30 years ago. The FSF has been fighting for the GPL over more permissive licenses for a while, and losing badly. Maybe it was a doomed fight from the get go, but it is certainly clear that he has not been successful. Obviously without him the FSF and GNU as we know it would not exist, but leadership is all about what you will do in the future, not what you did in the past. So the question is, why is he indispensable to the FSF today?
  - ghaff 6y ago
    He's not. And I'm not convinced the FSF as a whole is needed, certainly not with the current leadership. I was mostly responding to "I'd argue that you are probably overweighting the early history of the FSF." I'm just saying there were some important things in that early history but I agree much less since.

sthomas1618 6y ago

I could not disagree more. This whole statement is "sorry, not sorry". If someone is known to be a toxic person (and currently still is), you do not let them on to your team. Ever.

semitones 6y ago
Toxicity isn't a binary thing - there's levels to it. If the benefits one can bring to a team outweigh their negative attributes, then you should let them on your team. As far as how to determine whether the good outweighs the bad, that's a different topic. He brings a lot to the table, and I don't think he should have his work and life "cancelled" because some people disagree with his opinions...
- danpalmer 6y ago
  Cancellation isn't a binary thing either, and I'm not sure anyone is suggesting that RMS's past contributions to the FSF be dismantled or that no one should employ him, I don't think anyone seriously want's to cancel his life's work. The suggestions are that he shouldn't hold a leadership position in a community when he's shown an inability to lead a community safely.
  - AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
    Alas, cancellation is binary. It's akin to bullying: once started things begin to go downhill really quick. There are always enough people willing to raise there self-esteem by kicking a dead lion.
    - danpalmer 6y ago
      I disagree that it's binary. Brendan Eich seems to be doing pretty well running Brave after being "cancelled" for donating for anti-gay-marriage causes. I think people remember that but have mostly let him get on with his life because he a) apologised, and b) no longer runs something as visible as Mozilla.

DasIch 6y ago

What if, RMS is hit by a bus tomorrow? The FSF is not a new organization. That it cannot function without RMS means it's failing to stand on its own. That may be acceptable for a new organization but in case of the FSF that's just a massive failure to build a sustainable organization. If you care about the work the FSF is doing (I don't), this announcement should be extremely worrying.

pieter_mj 6y ago
>this announcement should be extremely worrying. I agree it's slightly worrying, there's currently no replacement for RMS. The libre software movement risks falling apart if he is no longer there. FSF and RMS should make quick work of finding someone valuable.
- DasIch 6y ago
  One person is not a movement. It's not enough to find someone else. The organization, the entire group of people it consists of, needs to be able to its job.
- ghaff 6y ago
  I'm not even sure what this libre software movement even is that would fall apart in the absence of RMS and the FSF.
  - solipsism 6y ago
    Yes.. please God someone tell me, which parts of the sky would fall if the entire FSF org disappeared tomorrow?
ghaff 6y ago
Exactly. So this >30 year old organization spends a paragraph to basically say they're crippled as an organization without RMS. Imagine a company welcoming back a founder who was forced out for some sort of highly questionable behavior and public statements--and the company to come out with a statement a year later that they just couldn't go on without their founder's wisdom. We would rightly say the board and senior management of that company wasn't doing their job.

na85 6y ago

>look we need this guy, and yeah for many it sucks, but for the betterment of the mission and the future of free software, we have to come together because he is simply too valuable to ignore But he's not valuable any more, that's the thing. He hasn't written code in like 30 years and to the best of my knowledge all he does is go around giving the same tired lecture over and over. This pretend apology does nothing to address the very real concerns expressed by the people who have had to work with RMS. The guy is just generally an asshole, with the charisma of a wet towel. We give some assholes some slack if they continue to make valuable contributions (Torvalds, de Raadt), but RMS makes no valuable contributions.

throwaway3699 6y ago
Writing code isn't that valuable. Many people contribute to coreutils (& other GNU projects) but there is only one RMS. His position is an ideological one.
- na85 6y ago
  To a first approximation, zero people at the global scale are proponents of Stallman's FSF. Free Software deserves a better figurehead.
- DasIch 6y ago
  What political successes did the FSF have in the last 20 years and what role did RMS play in those?

paulmd 6y ago

> This sounds like RMS almost torpedoed his own board seat by announcing it on his own. > bringing RMS was the right decision The idea that he has such severe problems with social interactions that he almost torpedoed his chance at getting back his board seat suggests that he is not, in fact, the right person to be leading a large organization. I get the hacker ethos that this is "his" organization but if the guy can't even hold it together for a week without nearly blowing it, he's not going to be an effective advocate for his views and isn't the right person to lead a large organization. Long-term the organization needs to move past him anyway: he's 70, if the movement can't survive without him then it'd better figure out how that's going to work damned quickly because statistically they don't have that many more years.

shadowgovt 6y ago

An organization in which one man is indispensable dies with that man. If FSF can't see a way to exist without Stallman at the helm, I wouldn't make any long-term bets on them sticking around as an organization of relevance.