Sunday IT Wire counted up the number of signatories on two open letters, one opposing Richard Stallman's return to the FSF and one supporting it. - The pro-Stallman letter had 3,632 individual signers - The anti-Stallman letter had 2,812 individual signers (plus 48 companies and organizations). ...
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If there were a third open letter for people who want a compromise, I wonder what that should include. any thoughts?
“we believe that the fair way to resolve the issue is through creation of a formal process in fsf”, or something like that?
because it is to none of our advantage that free software enthusiasts are now cancelling each other based on which letter they signed.
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Well said.
What’s the back-story, anyway?
Stallman is a 68 year old unpopular-with-the-ladies mansplaining type of guy that has a very crude humour and low interpersonal skills. He’s also a bit of a genius when it comes to software. He’s got a laundry list of things he’s said and done that are distasteful towards women. Nothing illegal however. He’s one of those guys that would rather be technically right than anything else.
Unfortunately he’s a victim of mob justice and cancel culture.
I don’t like Stallman, I do respect his contributions to the FOSS movement. I agree cancelling Stallman outside of due process is a really bad look for the FOSS movement.
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Is that because of the
?
Or was there another reason to remove him?
(I am very out of the loop)
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“allegedly”.
Supposedly on his blog there is no bad attitude towards women at all, quite the opposite.
There are people who searched it.
He is uncoruptable like Sokrates. Probably the real reason.
The misstreated women is used over and over to stir up drama to remove uncorruptible people.
The uncorruptible part is clearly why every single company are against him.
They fear loosing power to good free opensource software, that does not sell people lives.
This what appears to be a storm in a glaswater drama just makes me trust him even more to be a genuine person.
And I don’t know much about him.
That makes sense. But if there really is a conspiracy, there will be evidence of it too. That’s the kind of thing anyone can research and find the evidence for … if it’s real.
Not a conspiracy, just interests aligning and politics.
Okay so it’s not that he was doing a bad job or that they found someone else who would do a better job, and it’s not that he broke any explicit FSF rules or refused to obey an FSF rule.
It’s thought-crime, essentially. He had strong and unpopular ideas, sany people disliked him, so he’s bad for the FSF’s image.
But you could argue that that kind of creativity, the inclination to ignore convention and forcefully invent and argue for your own vision of that world - that’s a requirement for the job of leading the FSF.
I haven’t had time to start doing my own research about him (given how influential he was in the course of 20th century history) but I will.
I think I’d like him. He sounds great. I must listen to his lectures (or interviews or whatever he does mostly)
Cancel culture isn’t a real thing. Look at the man… he’s not fit to look after himself, let alonr represent a movement.
its a shame that the EFF, and Tor Project are dogpiling on the FSF, i greatly respect these organizations and use the Tor Browser, and Orbot daily.
Agreed, but they both have flaws. EFF had a big article posted about how evil social media trackers are posted right along side their twitter and facebook share buttons. I contacted them and asked them to follow their own guidelines and they replied they’d look into it. That was months ago.
As for Tor, a story under an old account called dirtfindr tells of them banning him or her on IRC for bringing up problems with their support of DDG. The chat log is posted there.
But like FSF in varying degrees of flawedness, their massive contributions far outweigh their oversights.
Edit: Here is another exmaple of EFF hypocrisy:
What I like about the FSF compared to the others is that they actually stick to their values. No compromises, you don’t have to run any proprietary JS to view their site, etc.
They actually seem to practice what they preach
Bullshit. Where was the transparency when they decided unilaterally to bring a child-abuse apologist back on the payroll? That shit came out of nowhere, which is why the whole board is being held to account.