That's what foundations do: Siphon off money, live on the fruits of labor of idealists, and occasionally throw people under the bus to create fear and stay in power.
The hackers shouldn't have allowed the bureaucrats in.
Because he's an uncompromising advocate for Free Software.
It's quite extraordinary that the hopeless crew at X.Org are even calling for his dismissal from GNU, which is his own organisation! They need to fix their own bugs, before jumping on the Cancel Culture bandwagon, and interfering with the GNU and Free Software foundations. X.Org is closely linked to Gnome and Redhat, neither of which is clearly aligned with Free Software principles.
The best thing about this line of argument is that anyone can be interfering with free software, no matter what they do. Nine former/current Debian project leaders are on this list, as well as several Debian technical committee members - well, Debian isn't aligned with free software either! Several GNU maintainers are on this list - well, they weren't really committed to the cause! Several former FSF board members and staffers are on this list - well, they were insidious traitors all along!
It was absolutely not just the Minsky thing. The media, doing what the media does best, told an incomplete and misleading story that relied on public sources (including themselves). At best the media coverage made it obvious that RMS's continued involvement in the free software movement was harming it.
http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2019/10/15/fsf-rms.html is a post from a former FSF board member who had been working with RMS for years to try to get him to be less of an anti-asset to the movement, and finally resigned.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25193674 says: "GNU is internally managed on a private mailing list. Guix and other GNU maintainers coming out against Stallman may have been surprising to those who aren't privy to that list, but for the rest of us, it has been a long time coming. For a long time, key GNU projects have either effectively quit GNU or, with great effort, wrested authority away from RMS because what goes on "behind the scenes" in GNU is not good. The only change is that now they are doing it in public.
Imagine how much stronger the free software movement would have been today if maintainers and advocates had been free of this distraction decades ago. What the FSF board is saying is that it's more important for the FSF to be a cult of personality for RMS than to actually advocate for free software.
>For the last two years, I had been a loud internal voice in the FSF leadership regarding RMS' Free-Software-unrelated public statements; I felt strongly that it was in the best interest of the FSF to actively seek to limit such statements,
Even trying to give you the benefit of a doubt, and you link to something with lines like this?
Mother of all that's holy what are you all doing At FSF? Freedom of Speech ring a bell? The man is free to have opinions uncensored. It's not FSF's job to censor that, and no, you don't just get excise his right to an articulated view or viewpoint because you happen to be on a foundation's Board of Directors. This is another example of just the sort of reason that Stallman has been right all along. Free Software provides for everyone a resistant platform presence to resist control and survive attempts at deplatforming, or wresting the means of communiccation or outreach from those considered persona non-grata for whatever pearl clutching happens to be in vogue this year. All the complaints you brought up in that are completely tangentumial to the cause of Free Software, and thereby are no business of the FSF to control.
Your second link is filled with content primarily sourced from people who jumped on the bandwagon of misinformation related to the Minsky event and pushed and syndicated hard in every way humamly possible to drsg him through the mud, most of the complaints are complete non-issues in terms of fundamentally turning around any type of organizational issue. Of course Stallman has gotten further away from the code. He's bringing the message to the world, and keeping the philosophy alive and inspiring; something the FSF and seemingly a bunch of GNU maintainers seem to have completely forgotten. Same goes for the third.
Even some of your other posts in this thread demonstrate a woeful lack of perspective. Yes. Debian is not in alignment with Free Software. Open Source? Check, Free? No. It's more of a Gateway drug to RedHat, and does nothing to fundamentally help people understand what goes on under the covers.
Your arguments sicken me. I understand that your heart is in the right place, and I know you think you're fighting the good fight, but you've done more to put me off of FSF and Free Software than that weird old man Stallman has. The group your championing seperating from Stallman to me is nothing but a tumor, and not worthy of trust to hold the line mission-wise. Despite how close I'm getting to No-True-Scotsman, it's worth pointing out in the interests of rooting out self-referential inconsistency:
Part of Freedom is that people are free to do with it what they want. If you start chaining it, and throwing people out of the "club" because you imagine they aren't good fpr it, you aren't fighting for it anymore.
Just. stop. You aren't convincing anyone. You're demonstrating on how easy it is for the monolith to get run away with by vested interests that have nothing to do with the mission.
When you have something grounded in fact that doesn't come down to "Ewwwww. Creepy old man makes everyone uncomfortable...", then you can come get back to me. Whhat you've presented here is weak, inconsequential, and nothing short of the mission being set aside to further political aspirations.
I don't understand what anyone sees in FSF anymore. The only thing they've got going for them is Stallman sees them as a champion of his cause. Sad really. I think he could do better with people who could set aside personal discomfort to get good high quality work done.
I mean, show me a bad Pull Request. A destructive design decision. A broken thing. Anything. Don't throw around that He alienates people. Thisgets cause and effect wrong, People decide to be alienated by not interacting with him. Edges don't smooth off without a bit of tumble drying, and it's good for everyone to put in a bit of effort to overcome theirown discomforts and push the envelope of who they draw the line at accepting into their tribe. Overcoming that is part of being an adult, and to be frank, part of Stallman's of being a leader by example of the Free Software movement comes in part from his odddity and refusal to compromise to the pragmatic approach of being convinced of being a poorer steward to a set of Tools intended to be preserved indellibly for future generations as theirs.
Debian can go permissive license and sell out to RedHat and corporate interests all they want, but GNU and GPL are the lines in thhe sand that must be held if we don't want the Software world to degenerate into some disinclusive fiefdom. Part of what makes the Hacker community great is that it was born out of a bunch of misfits, but still found a place where peoplewho didn't fit anywhere else could thrive, and I'll defend that to my dying breath from all comers. You're free to come and go as you please. But don't kill that which got you where you are.
This happened this weekend, well after that post was written, well after he resigned his FSF roles. The FSF - the same board that chose to reinstate Richard Stallman this weekend - gave him that award, simply because he's that important of a contributor to the free software movement.
Any argument that Bradley Kuhn doesn't belong at the FSF or doesn't care about free software is just simply not based in reality. (Listen to his acceptance speech, in the first link, if you're not convinced. He strongly believes that GPL is a line in the sand!)
And if you think that a bunch of GNU maintainers have forgotten about the message, I don't know how you can say that RMS is successfully "keeping the philosophy alive and inspiring." The easiest people to convince should be GNU maintainers themselves! If they (allegedly) don't believe in it anymore, is that not the clearest sign that RMS has failed as a leader?
If you don't think that the guy who wrote the AGPL and has spent his entire professional career fighting for the GPL is part of the free software movement, if you don't think that the GNU Project is part of the free software movement, if you don't think that Debian is part of the free software movement... who is?
> I mean, show me a bad Pull Request. A destructive design decision. A broken thing. Anything.
Richard Stallman deliberately made GCC poorly designed and refused to accept the technically superior approach of LLVM, despite an offer to make LLVM a GNU project and transfer the copyrights to the FSF. This paved the way for corporate interests to take over LLVM, and they've built a compiler that is just about ready to beat GCC at everything, and it's under a weak copyleft. This has been a massive strategic loss for strong copyleft.
If it weren't for the cult of personality around him and the idea that he can do no wrong, that alone ought to have caused him to step down from a leadership role. But because it's clear that no technical misstep will ever affect his reputation (GNU maintainers have plenty of others stories like that one), the argument isn't technical. It should have been, but it's too late for that.
