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Comment by creamytaco | Hacker News Reader

Stallman is a bastion of software freedom in a world turning progressively dark. The fact that he never ever compromised his ideals and principles, never sold out and has been repeatedly proven prescient and absolutely on the money on countless issues, makes him someone that we should strive to protect.

There are many invididuals in the Free Software world that backstabbed RMS and tried to destroy him with malicious character attacks. Here is one example:

https://wingolog.org/archives/2019/10/08/thoughts-on-rms-and...

Has Andy Wingo apologized?

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For what would this person be apologizing?

I'm not sure I understand your logic. It seems to me that we should be wary of our impulse to be protective of people whose principles we support. We often don't want to hear about the problematic things those people do.

> Stallman is a bastion of software freedom

In my judgement, he has done marginally more good than harm. Under his leadership the FSF has had only limited impact. Mirroring his own behavior, it has instead often wasted money and good will tilting at windmills instead of of effecting change.

I support the ideals of software freedom, but I do not support the FSF or Richard Stallman. He was key to getting the ball rolling decades ago, but has mostly been a distraction and impediment since then. Other projects, such as Debian and Mozilla, have made far larger contributions over the past couple decades.

Wikipedia was tied up in a code documentation license (GFDL) that didn't really make sense for it. Stallman allowed it to be relicensed into creative commons, someone else's baby.

Many people in the same position would have let their ego take control and keep it under the license they created or were most associated with out of pride.

Andy Wingo was and still is right, and more people should say it publicly. What he wrote then had been widely believed among many free software developers - including many who had worked closely with the FSF and with GNU - for years, but the public worship of RMS was too strong for any of the people doing the actual work to say anything without getting seen as traitors to the movement by people like you. He and the other GNU maintainers who wrote that statement called out an accurate problem, and the free software movement would have been stronger had RMS and the FSF listened.

Every single thing that RMS refused to compromise on has been a weakness for the cause of software freedom. RMS didn't compromise on his technical vision for GNU's kernel, and the HURD barely works today. RMS didn't compromise on allowing GCC to have an IR, and LLVM, a weak-copyleft compiler, has caught up. RMS didn't compromise on his personal unwillingness to use non-free JS on the web and basically decided to ignore the web entirely as a result, and it was basically an abandonment of setting any strategic direction for the free software movement re the web. We have a whole generation of folks who are ready to insist that "open source" means anything on GitHub, license or no license.

We could have had a victorious free software movement. What we got was a cult of personality.

I concur: Wingo's opinion is widely shared within GNU, and I wrote about it a few months ago, too:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25193674

The whole deal[0] was a character assassination campaign.

[0] https://sterling-archermedes.github.io/

This is an abridged view looking at a couple of statements and news articles from a few days in September 2019. The free software community's frustration with Richard Stallman had been going on for many, many years before then. The most you can say is that it provided a public impetus for the organization to act, and perhaps that public impetus was driven by journalists who misread his words.

http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2019/10/15/fsf-rms.html

> I have been silent the last month because, until two days ago, I was an at-large member of FSF's Board of Directors, and a Voting Member of the FSF. As a member of FSF's two leadership bodies, I was abiding by a reasonable request from the FSF management and my duty to the organization. [...]

> 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, and that it was my duty to FSF to speak out about this within the organization. Those who only learned of this story in the last month (understandably) believed Selam G.'s Medium post raised an entirely new issue. In fact, RMS' views and statements posted on stallman.org about sexual morality escalated for the worse over the last few years. When the escalation started, I still considered RMS both a friend and colleague, and I attempted to argue with him at length to convince him that some of his positions were harmful to sexual assault survivors and those who are sex-trafficked, and to the people who devote their lives in service to such individuals. More importantly to the FSF, I attempted to persuade RMS that launching a controversial campaign on sexual behavior and morality was counter to his and FSF's mission to advance software freedom, and told RMS that my duty as an FSF Director was to assure the best outcome for the FSF, which IMO didn't include having a leader who made such statements.

(Copious internal links evidencing those claims omitted, check the original.)

No need to apologize for expressing their opinion, neither on RMS's part nor on the part of his detractors. What purpose is served? Both expressed their (presumably) legitimately held opinions, that is their right.

Why should they apologize? Everything they say is true.

GNU software absolutely has been stagnating for the past 2 decades under Stallman's leadership. It is a little known fact that in 2005, there was an offer to merge the LLVM project into GCC, and assign the entire copyright to GNU. The patches to do so were even submitted. [0]

They were rejected [1], because GNU wasn't interested in producing a modular compiler. They thought that if the compiler was allowed to be modular, then it might be used by proprietary software behind their backs.

But it turns out that modular compilers are generally quite useful, even for huge quantities of FOSS software. So the LLVM project continues, outside of GNU, and here we are 15 years later and essentially all academic research, and all new tooling development, happens in the LLVM ecosystem. Massive self-inflicted wound.

And yet, the stonewalling [2] and bridge-burning [3] [4] continued, long past the point of rationality. Continuing to object to development of useful tools even after the damage was done. At this point, just pissing off a lot of people who were interested in doing the work to help improve the usefulness of GCC.

And not limited to this topic, either. Such as when Stallman decided to leverage his "veto power" in opposition to removing an abortion joke from the glibc manual, against the consensus of nearly all of the glibc core team, despite not having contributed to glibc himself in years. [5]

And if I was interested in continuing to dig through mailing list archives, I could probably pull out a bunch more examples.

[0] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTU4MzE

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00...

[2] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-01/msg00...

[3] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-01/msg00...

[4] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-01/msg00...

[5] https://lwn.net/Articles/753646/

I knew the maintainer of GNU libtool and I remember him getting randomly fired by Stallman one day because he was a macOS user, and therefore not motivated enough to support free software OS uses.

Pretty shitty to do this to an actual maintainer, but on the other hand I wish the Linux Foundation started doing this.

Why? Writing a tool - even an operating system kernel - doesn't mean that that tool is appropriate for everything (for instance, for everyday use). Linux does many things great - a fair number of them industry-leading - but desktop user experience is not one of them and has never been close to being so.

Sure, but I still think that the Linux Foundation should represent Linux and not Microsoft.

Pretty shitty to do this to anyone. The only scenario where firing someone for (legally) using a certain software should be allowed to happen is where it was communicated clearly in advance that using that software is not allowed in that particular job position.

IMO the strongest plausible interpretation of what the comment you’re replying to said would include the Linux Foundation clearly communicating the new practice beforehand.

Thanks for mentioning this. I think you missed the actual message where LLVM was offered to the FSF:

https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2005-11/msg00888.html

https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2005-11/msg01112.html

Even within active GNU projects, this egregious incidence of mismanagement is still not widely known, although many maintainers of active GNU projects have their own stories of when Stallman's ignorance of a subject led him to make poor decisions.

For at least a decade, his near-total ignorance of how people (billions of them!) use computers has been encouraged and deepened by the sycophantic acolytes who encourage him to ignore developments in computing, like the ostrich with its head in the sand.

All the while, the FSF and GNU can do less and less for the users who are stuck living in the dystopia that he predicted in the 80s and 90s.

It's as if, after the first time they booted a computer with a fully-free operating system, they declared the work to be complete, abandoning the future.

I linked the phoronix article which links to them -- but then accidentally overwrote it with another link. Fixed.

> For at least a decade, his near-total ignorance of how people (billions of them!) use computers has been encouraged and deepened by the sycophantic acolytes who encourage him to ignore developments in computing, like the ostrich with its head in the sand.

Can you expand on this point? I don't doubt you, but I'd like to know more.

To be fair, I highly prefer the situation it lead to, with now some competition between GCC and LLVM/Clang. But sure it was not rejected with that outcome in mind. However, some may not like the reasoning behind the unwillingness to move toward a more modular compiler at the time, but there certainly was a reasoning, and we will never know if the expected risks would have occurred in practice for GCC because later other ways were found to mitigate them.

The LLVM world has moved to a non-copyleft one, with results that RMS maybe considers mixed: on one hand it attracts work (but being non-copyleft is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition, and for ex Linux attracts way more work by being copyleft), on the other hand RMS does not think that helping to create proprietary software based on free software is a good idea (of course the main purpose of a compiler is to compile software, even proprietary ones, but the philosophical issues come when you can make proprietary derivatives of the compiler or parts of it, not merely use it)

In the end, for a supposedly stagnant project, GNU is not doing bad. It is still an essential part of mainstream Linux based systems. It is being actively developed. GCC is moving fast and also attracts lots of work nowadays.

OpenOffice is stagnant. GNU? Not that much.

Apologize for what? What in his statement should be apologize for? It's an op-ed that the author himself qualifies with a fairly clear sense of wat exists "on the ground" and his opinion about it, both positive and negative.

Frankly, Stallman has been a boat-anchor to his own cause more than much else for a while, and he is IMHO a vile little imp; his poor hygiene, both physical and emotional, and his chronic id-salving, went through their mileage before the current millennium started, let alone a few decades in.

>his poor hygiene

The social hygiene movement represented a rationalized, professionalized version of the earlier social purity movement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_hygiene_movement

Thing veiled lookism.

People here think he must be autistic and hard to work with because he's ugly and old and dirty.

Maybe you (the collective you) should actually stop assuming that dirty people are incompetent.

Not to my knowledge and he most likely never will. Attacking traditional social values is more important to some people than Free Software. Having people with stronger beliefs about unrelated issues that take precedence over the goals of the organization is a recipe for disaster and ultimately failure. I suspect RMS agreed to concessions such as allowing GNU to go in a direction where these unrelated political issues will increasingly drive decision making and force out major contributors who disagree with them. Time will tell.

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