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Comment by jordigh | Hacker News Reader

RMS is not free software, and it's very distressing that people think he is. This is a cult of personality.

100% agree. But he's not attacked because he farts in elevators or because of his awkward social antics. He's attacked by Microsoft and Google because he represents free software, or at least an important part of it. This attack is joined by an army of well-intentioned people who attack him by legitimate reasons like you do. The fact that these two attacks are parallel is really harmful.

Churchill was a horrible person, far more horrible than RMS can ever be. Would you have supported a coup to defenestrate Churchill during the Battle of Britain? On whose side would you be in the light of history if you did that?

> He's attacked by Microsoft and Google because he represents free software

Almost none of the 2000 signatories are Microsoft and Google. There's no conspiracy here. You don't need to find a hidden villain in this story to explain why we don't want Stallman anymore. This is all out in the open. We really all know him over the decades and we know he needs to step down.

I hope you are right. Time will tell. But it breaks my heart to see the world falling around us while we fight about using the correct pronouns.

I don't understand this gloom and doom. Wasn't the /re/instatement of rms whole reason for the current 'world falling around us' ?

Are you saying Microsoft and Google have cleverly infiltrated FSF and reinstated rms knowing fully well that the FLOSS ecosystem would implode?

No. The world is crumbling around us because we are more and more encroached by the dystopian nightmare that big tech is building. The FSF is one of the last beacons of sanity (regardless of who leads it), for they are amongst the few to have an uncompromising stance for the right to read [0] and for general-purpose computing [1]. Now the FSF is being attacked by a Microsoft-led mob (via Sarah Mei, from Salesforce in partnership with Microsoft), and they write damning "open letters" that are hosted by Microsoft. They are opportunistically joined by people from the Open Source Initiative, and also by well-intentioned people like jordigh who are legitimately concerned by the FSF leadership, but in my opinion have chosen the worst moment to act. I'm really sad and embarrassed by all this. I just want to keep hacking but I'm full of gloom and doom instead.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

[1] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Coming_War_on_General_Com...

Although, yeah my comment was a passing snark and perhaps didn't contribute much, from your response it is evident that you have a more pessimistic and blinkered view of the world than I do.

> The FSF is one of the last beacons of sanity (regardless of who leads it)

No. Emphatically No. This is what was always unappealing to me about FSF.

They pretend that they are the only ones who care. Furthermore only things that they care about (software freedom) are the only things that should matter. Even your comment regarding pronouns reflects this. In an alternate world, the Freedom to choose my pronoun foundation is the last bastion fighting against the evil FSF.

Why is it hard to see that we won the one battle in making the world a better place. FLOSS is what it is today thanks to FSF (and the BSDs, and Apache, and PSF, and...). It is time now to continue this war by speaking about intersectional freedoms.

Even if you don't believe the battle is won, why sacrifice the war for the sake of one outdated commander?

No it's not, most people DON'T like his personality. It's the exact opposite. He's tolerated because of his views and actions on free software.

"Cult of personality" doesn't literally mean someone's personality. It means making a cult out of a person. The way people are saying that attack rms is attacking free software itself is very much a cult of personality.

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

rms is not free software. The 2000 signatories of the letter are free software. We are a community much larger than a single man.

Seeing the signatories of that letter is like seeing all of my old friends. I know that guy from debconf and that one from pycon and oh yeah we used to hang out in that irc channel man remember when we worked together on that bug.

People are attacking the FSF BECAUSE of stallman. YOU and your lot are the people that are making him a cult of personality. Again, he is a quirky old man who is in that position, because of his contributions and his views. I sat next to him and I never particularly liked him. But this is the same shit that you people did when you destroyed Mozilla to make an example out of Brendan Eich only to get him replaced with the Chief of Marketing and then wondering why Mozilla's direction is weird.

You don't get to turn this into a cult of personality yourself, then attack it and then blame the other side for it. Your logic here is nothing short of insane.

I don't see you calling for the tearing down of founding fathers statues and the US constitutions. All but 3 of them were slave owners, so probably have a bunch of cruelties they did while they were alive.

> But this is the same shit that you people did when you destroyed Mozilla to make an example out of Brendan Eich

"You people"? Come now, stay classy.

> I don't see you calling for the tearing down of founding fathers statues and the US constitutions. All but 3 of them were slave owners, so probably have a bunch of cruelties they did while they were alive.

I don't see anyone here trying to erase RMS from history, so I don't see how this applies. But I imagine if your founding fathers would magically come alive, it would be a dumb idea to elect one of them president.

> I don't see anyone here trying to erase RMS from history

Define "here". Is it this thread, or the current attack on RMS and the FSF at large? If the latter, Sarah Mei and the author of this article, to name some examples, are definitely trying to erase RMS and his achievements. This particular article is mostly garbage (I think you'll agree) but the people trying to reframe RMS' entire life history in terms of alleged harassment and various moral infractions are definitely trying to get him erased.

Keep in mind that Sarah Mei also looks through everything in terms of diversity through the american lense of literal black and white skin color[1], completely disregarding the fact that some of these people in Europe - myself included - have had their fair share of racism across Europe even though we are considered "white" in the US. Ask turks how they are treated in Germany or people from the Maghreb region in southern france or Romas even though they're "white caucasian dudes" in these peoples eyes. Besides myself getting pepper sprayed from old Germans myself on the top of my head there is a study in Germany that gives you a 50% less chance of getting hired if you have a non central European name. The self righteousness and ignorance of these people knows no bounds.

[1] http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2015/02/01/the-fosdem-conundrum...

vrms is free software though. In the unlikely event you're not already using it, you should. It looks through your installed packages to find non-freely licensed software, and if none if found then you win.

It's admiration of an admirable person who has accomplished a lot of good in the world. How do you call that a cult?

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