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Comment by enriquto | Hacker News Reader

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?

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> 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?

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