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Well, hold up, let's clarify what's meant by "do wrong." A lot of people deeply involved with the free software and open source movement(s), including people w
by geofft 5y ago
Well, hold up, let's clarify what's meant by "do wrong."
A lot of people deeply involved with the free software and open source movement(s), including people who worked at the FSF, had been unhappy with him as a leader for a long time. https://wingolog.org/archives/2019/10/08/thoughts-on-rms-and-gnu https://wingolog.org/archives/2019/10/08/thoughts-on-rms-and... (GNU project maintainer, summarizing - with links - views of other GNU maintainners) and http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2019/10/15/fsf-rms.html http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2019/10/15/fsf-rms.html (long-time FSF staff, Conservancy cofounder, and 2021 FSF awardee) are good places to start reading. Or see how FSF staff unionized (unusually for tech!) to protect themselves from him (https://twitter.com/paulnivin/status/1374532930400227328 https://twitter.com/paulnivin/status/1374532930400227328 , https://twitter.com/NovalisDMT/status/1172573166956437505 https://twitter.com/NovalisDMT/status/1172573166956437505).
It's true that that blog post (which was not anonymous, there's a name on it???) is what catalyzed something to actually happen, and you can dispute whether the blog post by itself merited anything. And - largely because these were things that a small group of people were trying to handle internally (did you know that the FSF staff are unionized?) - there didn't seem to be much public discussion beyond that one blog post. The GNU maintainers' mailing list is private, the discussions between FSF board members are private, etc. So, it certainly looked to the casual observer like it was a single blog post. But that wasn't the reality.
- redis_mlc 5y agoYou know, I read the various anti-rms links 6 months ago and saw nothing convincing, and I still don't today. The wingo link is vague and mostly drivel: bkuhn's link has disingenuous statements. Why does an article primarily about rms have references to Epstein and MIT? How clumsy is that? I'd describe both links as nothing more than ad hominem character assassinations. I'd even go so far as to say they're written to inflate the status of the author (ie. "I know him, but I'm not like him."), not deal with an actual problems beyond "I don't like his style." Major contributors to our society deserve better than essentially publicly-hosted gossip.