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I agree, Stallman is an incredibly poor leader and holds back the free software movement, FSF, and FSF projects at this point. It's not just that I disagree wi

I agree, Stallman is an incredibly poor leader and holds back the free software movement, FSF, and FSF projects at this point. It's not just that I disagree with his absolutist view on free software, he holds back the movement from achieving the goals that he espouses. As a product manager he has done a poor job. For years he prevented GCC from moving to a simpler more modular architecture because he said that would make it easier to build non-free software on top of it. In the meantime Clang implemented this modular architecture and started taking market share from GCC. Years later GCC moved to a modular architecture anyway because Stallman finally blessed it. At the same time he prevented emacs from officially embracing better integration with Clang and Clang style compilers that provide a richer debugging and syntax checking experience. He did this because GCC didn't support the same experience. Eventually (after years) emacs did integrate with Clang and GCC style syntax facilities. He made similar stalling moves preventing the adoption of git for emacs (and other FSF projects). First he pushed Arch, the he forced repositories to migrate to BZR after git had clearly won the version control battle (I'm fuzzy, but emacs moved to BZR around 2009-2011). Finally he conceded and emacs moved to git in 2014. After emacs migrated to git he used the emacs mailing list asking for simple git support that he would have understood if he hadn't remained purposefully ignorant about the VCS. The FSF still revolves around Stallman and he hasn't done much work to find and promote a successor to himself to lead the organization. He is a poor steward of his own movement. There were also his comments about Minsky and Epstein. He is entitled to his opinions, but as a leader of an important org with such stringent beliefs, delving into other topics was a distraction for the org. Being a leader requires focus and direction, inviting controversy with comments on unrelated current events is the opposite of focus. In total I think that a lot of Stallman's actions have more to do with his ego and self importance than advancing the free software movement.

forclarity 5y ago
> There were also his comments about Minsky and Epstein. He is entitled to his opinions, but as a leader of an important org with such stringent beliefs, delving into other topics was a distraction for the org. Being a leader requires focus and direction, inviting controversy with comments on unrelated current events is the opposite of focus. You're likely aware, but I wanted to take this opportunity to surface that a lot of the coverage of his comments on Minsky and Epstein was misleading if not malicious. Notably, articles from Vice and The Daily Beast accused him of defending Epstein and asserting that victims were willing, and both of those accusations are false, as can be reasonably discerned from careful reading of the quotes that appear in the articles themselves. Rather, Stallman defended Minsky and said that victims probably appeared to Minsky to be willing even if they were being coerced out of his sight. In addition to any judgement we're applying over his choice of whether to talk about it in the first place, we should be sure we're judging him for what he said (which I do believe deserves criticism) and not for what some people want to pretend he said.

forclarity 5y ago

> There were also his comments about Minsky and Epstein. He is entitled to his opinions, but as a leader of an important org with such stringent beliefs, delving into other topics was a distraction for the org. Being a leader requires focus and direction, inviting controversy with comments on unrelated current events is the opposite of focus. You're likely aware, but I wanted to take this opportunity to surface that a lot of the coverage of his comments on Minsky and Epstein was misleading if not malicious. Notably, articles from Vice and The Daily Beast accused him of defending Epstein and asserting that victims were willing, and both of those accusations are false, as can be reasonably discerned from careful reading of the quotes that appear in the articles themselves. Rather, Stallman defended Minsky and said that victims probably appeared to Minsky to be willing even if they were being coerced out of his sight. In addition to any judgement we're applying over his choice of whether to talk about it in the first place, we should be sure we're judging him for what he said (which I do believe deserves criticism) and not for what some people want to pretend he said.