Not the First Time We Tried (FSF, GNU, RMS, etc.)
harihareswara.net
harihareswara.net
I read these complaints and don’t think they are very important. Especially over a period of decades. If this is the worse that people can bring up, then I just don’t get it.
In the future will we have two kinds of organizations, one where people file complaints about “ such as taking over sessions through loud disruptions” and one where people don’t care?
I suppose that people care about different things, but then for people who don’t care will we all end up being in one end, and everyone who wants “ Safe Space Policy” I partially applied in other orgs.
The challenge I face is that I don’t want the Postel’s law group full of only jerks. But I also don’t want to be part of an org that spends so much time on what I see as administrative bikeshedding.
Of course people are free to do whatever they like, but I certainly won’t donate to FSF if they go the way I disagree with. And I don’t think a safe FSF will further free software in the best way.
I don’t see myself stop supporting free software, but I’ll want some way to participate to fill that FSF shaped community hole.
I don't believe this approach has only positive outcomes. Taleb wrote[0] "It suffices for an intransigent minority –a certain type of intransigent minorities –to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences"
To say this leaves me feeling deeply uncomfortable would be putting it mildly.
[0] The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
If it's a "dictatorship", it's a very, very soft one.
"Don't care" or "aren't told" ?
> Halal meat: small minority cares deeply, majority doesn't care or even notice
I suspect this - as in so many cases - comes down to a labelling issue. Are consumers able to make an informed judgement if they're unable to see what product they're buying?
"Leading [UK] supermarkets [said] some of the meat they sell could qualify as halal but is not labelled as such"[0]
If there is a large constituency that refuses to eat halal meat, it's just out of hostility towards the minority, not because of any quality of the meat. Your quote is evidence for this.
Two thought experiments:
Would one notice if meat was or wasn't halal if one wasn't explicitly told?
Would one notice if fruit juice was or wasn't kosher if one wasn't explicitly told?
Does this make him a bad person, or imply he has bad technical judgement? No. I don’t think someone less opinionated could have started the free software movement like he did. I’m glad I met him and I have appreciation for the work he did.
But I don’t want him to represent me or the work I do. Most software engineers in the opensource / free software world are polite, well read, practical and shower from time to time. And, especially in leadership we accept that at the end of the day it’s critically important that we follow our own rules and decision processes, no matter our own opinions.
To me it’s not about cancelling rms. (I hate cancel culture). I just think the FSF (and opensource as a whole) would be more successful with someone other than RMS as the figurehead. He’s a bad role model. And claiming he’s above the rules undermines the very organisation he’s trying to run. If the federal government wants to call up the “leaders” of the opensource community to decide if Linux is good fit, I don’t want RMS to be the person they talk to. He’s a great visionary type person. But the FSF needs dependable, stable and mature. RMS just isn’t that guy.
I think your argument would apply in its entirety if he was representing some kind of umbrella organisation for FOSS, but that’s not the case. It would also then be reasonable for members of such an umbrella to pressure the FSF into who should be on its board. But it is not the case.
Perhaps this argument shows that we need such an organisation, with RMS not heading it.
I appreciate the moderation you show in your comment. That's why I'm going to answer that here rather than on a less thoughtful comment: free software and open source are not the same. Open source is a movement that today is trying to increase rentability and profits via information and code sharing. The rules that apply make it completely straightforward for a company to share only the part of code that they feel won't diminish profits, or even will increase them.
On the other hand, free software is a militant movement and ideology that is seeking to destroy a large part of the proprietary software that exists. While you would expect an open source proponent to shower, and even wear a tie, because he has to be entreprise friendly, the same codes don't necessarily apply to militantism. Going further, what you seek as the figurehead of some kind of consensual vision of open source will probably not be the same as for a militant organization.
I'm of course exaggerating a bit, but this is at the core of a lot of misguided arguments I see here and there. RMS is basically being accused of being shocking in his viewpoints and in who he is. Well, the very idea of free software was extremely shocking 30 years ago, so maybe it's no coincidence. I'm not condoning all he did or all he said, but I certainly wouldn't like some watered down open source ideologist as the head of the FSF, which has so far been a necessary uncompromising force in the ideological landscape of open source software.
My question then is this: would the FSF be more or less effective in their political goals with someone else at the helm?
My worry is that RMS’s prickliness and generally poor social skills harm the free software movement more than they help it. Every story about RMS from people who actually interact with him seems to be really cringe inducing. And that’s not what I want from a leader. And I don’t see how abandoning respectability outside the software/political arena helps them campaign for their goals.
What they need to do is to set out a clear vision for the future, make useful code and inspire young engineers to carry the flame. Reading comments here shows me that some people find RMS inspiring, which is good. And maybe the FSF doesn’t have anyone better suited for the job. But in any case, the FSF as it stands now isn’t an organisation I’ll ever want to be involved with.
I know people who are serial doers of things - be it starting a business, an organization, a whatever, but are lousy at running and shepherding their creations, if they're lucky, they're aware of these limitations, if not, well... I think RMS is in the not category - and while he can and should continue as the spiritual leader of the movement, he probably should not be the one doing the day to day leader for the future, beyond that, what of succession planning, the man is 68.
Most of the complaints I've seen about RMS are.. well.. pretty normal among geeky people, he's socially clueless, applies logic instead of empathy, etc. He has no doubt, said many problematic things but the paucity of actual harms from these things is notable.
In short, I agree with the sentiments here, FSF needs an effective leader, and whatever annoying/clueless things RMS has said, isn't really relevant to that discussion.
That behavior makes women uncomfortable. I suspect he feels like "I made an offer, you said no, and it's done." It doesn't work that way. The best analogy I can draw is if a stranger came up to you before a meeting and asked you to give him your watch. That's going to feel uncomfortable and weird, for the rest of the day and longer.
Even if neurodivergence makes it difficult to discover that for himself, it's surely been explained to him. That means he knows he's making people uncomfortable and doing it anyway.
That is relevant to the discussion. He's driving off half the potential population of people to work on things. That half is under-represented -- and part of the reason they're under-represented is that the community keeps making excuses for people who behave like that. Then they wonder why nobody has ever explained women to them -- and why women keep being upset.
The "problematic" things seem to me like the least of it. He's rude to people whose help he needs -- not just women, but to women in a way that's specific to women in addition to all of the other ones. That's exactly the opposite of what a leader does. Leaders get people to work together, especially when the worker are volunteering.
I would ask you to consider the possibility that one can be an idealist about free software, even a militant extremist, while not being a viscerally offensive human being. You're trying to ascribe nobility and necessity to traits in Richard Stallman which bring no benefits to the cause free software, and which often work to its detriment. And a truly militant organization would recognize when their leader has become a hindrance to the cause and put them out to pasture.
Which comes to show the glaring disconnect between organizations and the user base. As the organizations are too busy showing each other how good and inclusive they are, while at the same time they give fat raises to their CEOs and fire their workers.
For example, I will absolutely defer to Matthew Garrett and Benjamin Mako Hill and Bradley Kuhn over... uh, "agentOfChaos."
But if you go to /g/ now, you'll see plenty of activity around this letter.
But if you go to /g/ now, you'll see plenty of activity around this letter.
I think the term "free software users" defines them better.
> which is signed by Free Software contributors.
Really? Could you please tell me how "Z" (signature number 2771 right now) contributed to the Free Software movement? I'm intrigued.
If you examine which Free Software contributors signed the anti-Stallman letter and you are familiar with the respective projects, it is easy to see that a lot of them are vocal activists.
One project I know has 100 developers, about 8 signed, the rest are silent for good reason (or signed the pro-letter under a pseudonym).
But the woke crowd instead targets Stallman because he is an easy target, he looks like a vagrant and has disgusting habits. Can please someone point out what he did? (No, off-colour jokes don't count, only real-life troubles for another person).
D & I much? Pass the bucket, I'm going to throw up.
This morning I was listening to a radio program about a black woman making theater and podcasts and such things about the history of slavery. Of course, as such this is a topic worthy of attention. But the whole victim mentality in it was quite disgusting. She never quite went as far as literally saying that she hated white people but the implication was there multiple times.
Uh, you mean when Joi Ito was intentionally obfuscating the source of funds because he knew the university wasn't supposed to accept donations from Epstein?
You could fork the entire FSF’s software suite, and mold a culture around it that matches your priorities. That’s the beauty of free software, you don’t need to ask permission. Or write petitions. You just go and do it.
Unless, of course, you meant good at writing large volumes of code, which the GNU projects have historically excelled at. But we all know the other bit of conventional wisdom about that.
"Do I believe that Richard is attempting to deliberately denigrate women? Not in the slightest. But I also don't believe that someone entirely gender-blind would have made the above joke."
If the requirement to be in the WokeFSF is to be, and to always have been, entirely "gender-blind", everybody would be guilty and eligible for expulsion. As this requires selective enforcement, it becomes entirely political.
If I can't have ever expressed the desire to have sex with even a hypothetical woman, even as a metaphor, or have ever said that I wanted to prioritize outreach towards women or minorities in some context, I'm not qualified to join. To be "gender-blind" I have to never have supported affirmative action or quotas, which I have, energetically.
What I'm trying to say is that it isn't specifically that people capable of delivering wouldn't join a WokeFSF, it's that everyone joining a WokeFSF would be in a precarious position. People who remain in an FSF that tolerates it's leader joking about taking away people's Emacs virginity are not in a precarious position, even if they find those jokes gross and don't enjoy engaging with some of the leadership.
Nobody is going to toss you out of the non-woke FSF for being too woke, but the opposite isn't true.
These people should merely create their own organizations. This is what they would often say when for example a red team politician complains about being blocked from twitter.
As far as I can see RMS is a neuroatypical person who just does not have any filters and also applies logic to such interpersonal matters where empathy would be better. I do not think he is malicious but you can't expect women who are constantly harassed to make this distinction -- harassment is just harassment at the end of the day. And this has been made clear to him so many times over the decades and he refuses to change and that's a problem. No matter how much one contributes, they can drive away enough people the lost potential total contribution overweighs that. Trust me, I know :(
You need to elaborate of what you perceive as harassment.
The other thing to consider is that these movements to replace leadership or boards could drive away people who are currently making contributions.
I believe that losing current contributors is a bigger loss than the, arguably hypothetical, new contributor(s) that could be gained.
We have multiple reports on people leaving open source or not starting because of RMS. And other toxic people like Linus Torvalds. Like me.
If management changes, there's definitely a chance they won't stick around depending on what they do in terms of the direction of the FSF.
Some people do. Some do not.
https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/994010501460865025
In Github's 2017 survey, 50% of the 5,500 respondents claimed they had witnessed toxic interactions while working on open-source projects, and that 18% of them had suffered through a negative interaction. Also, 95% of contributors were men and 3% were women.
Are you sure people are still contributing or is it just men who do with very, very few women who is willing to put up with this?
https://www.php.net/credits.php here, count the women. Or rather the woman!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictator_for_life not. a. single. woman.
Not all of this is on Stallman but as he is the figurehead of an entire movement, certainly at least some of it is.
The skewed male to female ratio isn't unique to software developed under the FSF. It's the case throughout the industry and even at the high school/college/graduate school level. Therefore, the lack of women contributing to projects within the FSF isn't because of RMS or the FSF board.
Basically, I was comparing an example where the percentage of male teachers is lower when comparing preschool teachers versus public school teachers in general, like you mentioned the lower percentage of female developers contributing to open source software versus the percentage of female developers throughout the industry.
Even if a male preschool teacher self-reported perceived bias against him, that doesn't necessarily mean that there's general trend of bias throughout the area. Just like a female self reporting bias they perceived for a particular open source project doesn't mean that there's a general of bias in that area.