Free software advocates seek removal of Richard Stallman and entire FSF board | Hacker News Reader

Free software advocates seek removal of Richard Stallman and entire FSF board

arstechnica.com

33 pointsalsetmusic13 comments

The open letter reads more like a denouncement of a defector by a North Korean newspaper.

Calling people names in public ("transphobic", "misogynistic") is no acceptable mean to approach social conflict. I agree that some of RMS's behaviors are objectionable, but the Open Letter puts the bar even lower. In terms of removing bad behaviors from Open Source, this is a net loss.

calling people "transphobic" or "misogynistic" is almost as bad as being transphobic or misogynistic, huh?

If the goal is to create a better world, don't react to evil with an equal evil, or you will just be part of the problem.

Equal evil?

When "being transphobic" is used to mean "supports transgender people and custom pronouns but objects to one specific pronoun due to his interpretation of grammatical rules" (while a dictionary result for "transphobic" says "having or showing a dislike of or prejudice against transsexual or transgender people"), then, yeah, "being transphobic" is not especially bad and arguably not bad at all. In which case it's quite easy for "making a false and professionally-damaging claim" to be worse than that.

I'll also note the redirection rhetoric (the subject was a criticism of the open letter).

The actual open letter:

https://rms-open-letter.github.io

The title is a little misleading. Whether or not these people are "free software advocates", they appear to be more defined by their social justice cause, and seem to feel that this is more important than actually talking about free software.

That is what I disagree with most, many of these causes are important, but none of them are the one true cause that we need to drop everything and attend to. If you're interested in equality issues, join such a cause, don't try to pretend you're interested in free software so you can co-opt that cause for your own purposes.

Ironically, this kind of behavior actually does the most harm to the people involved in it. There are lots of examples of e.g. gay rights organizations being commandeered by other groups to try and champion their "more important" cause.

i think you're missing the point.

the point isnt to distract from free software by promoting social justice. the point is that regardless of your org's aims or ambitions, ensuring that the leaders of said org are worthy of leadership is the point.

"Worthy" I'm not sure about, but if you're talking about ensuring leaders are effective, I get it. But its something of a self fulfilling prophecy I think. If someone is so distracted / distracting because of issues unrelated to what should be their focus, they could be the best free software advocate imaginable but still not suitable for the job. But it's only because of people deciding that other issues are more important than the purported cause. So I don't disagree that agitators are able to render someone ineffective at their job and unable to lead, but I don't think its right.

What makes a leader worthy exactly, moreso than leading? Half the complaints people have about Stallman aren't even grounded in fact. They all stem from a media hit piece, that resulted out of someone's hysterics because they failed at reading comprehension in one of the most spectacular fashions possible.

FSF is a tiny organization with only a dozen or so employees. It would be very easy when you have all these free software advocates to simply set up a competing organization.

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