Hacker News Reader

Comment by underseacables | Hacker News Reader

That is a really well written statement in my humble opinion. It’s almost like they’re trying to tell people

“look we need this guy, and yeah for many it sucks, but for the betterment of the mission and the future of free software, we have to come together because he is simply too valuable to ignore“

I was intrigued at “ The announcement by RMS at LibrePlanet was a complete surprise to staff, all those who worked so hard to organize a great event,” This sounds like RMS almost torpedoed his own board seat by announcing it on his own.

I think compared with the totality of the evidence, the history of FSF, The importance of knowledge, and the betterment for the group as a whole, bringing RMS was the right decision. It’s great they’ve implemented changes, maybe this will be a roadmap for others canceled but still needed to atone and renter the public square.

View on HN

> look we need this guy

The apocryphal Charles de Gaulle quote that applies here is "graveyards are full of indispensable men".

RMS is one man, the FSF is an organization that is supposed to have aims that are bigger and larger reaching than one single person, which is why it's an org in the first place. If the FSF cannot get by without RMS now, they will not survive RMS himself in the long run.

> This sounds like RMS almost torpedoed his own board seat by announcing it on his own.

Again, RMS is really bad at this stuff. I genuinely have no idea why anyone wants to keep him. Especially having met him personally, he seems unpleasant to deal with on a constant basis.

> I think compared with the totality of the evidence, the history of FSF, The importance of knowledge, and the betterment for the group as a whole, bringing RMS was the right decision.

I'd argue that you are probably overweighting the early history of the FSF. In my professional lifetime it has been a complete non-entity, and all I've ever seen RMS do publicly is get into slap fights over "GNU/Linux" and create drama out of thin air. What has that org been doing for 20 years other than slowly lose ground to Apache and CNCF?

Mostly I'll grant the GNU Project and the GPL and associated philosophical underpinning. Whether you favor copyleft or not, it has almost certainly been useful to have that basis for FOSS--given that the permissive licenses were mostly about pragmatism. Having said that, one of my lawyer friends has pondered whether the FSF's focus on licensing as the primary software freedom tool hasn't led to some of the licensing debates going on today.

That's all well and good, but it is completely orthogonal to whether or not he should be on the FSF board. The GPL was an important contribution he made to the community ... 30 years ago. The FSF has been fighting for the GPL over more permissive licenses for a while, and losing badly. Maybe it was a doomed fight from the get go, but it is certainly clear that he has not been successful.

Obviously without him the FSF and GNU as we know it would not exist, but leadership is all about what you will do in the future, not what you did in the past. So the question is, why is he indispensable to the FSF today?

He's not. And I'm not convinced the FSF as a whole is needed, certainly not with the current leadership.

I was mostly responding to "I'd argue that you are probably overweighting the early history of the FSF." I'm just saying there were some important things in that early history but I agree much less since.

I could not disagree more. This whole statement is "sorry, not sorry".

If someone is known to be a toxic person (and currently still is), you do not let them on to your team. Ever.

Toxicity isn't a binary thing - there's levels to it. If the benefits one can bring to a team outweigh their negative attributes, then you should let them on your team. As far as how to determine whether the good outweighs the bad, that's a different topic.

He brings a lot to the table, and I don't think he should have his work and life "cancelled" because some people disagree with his opinions...

Cancellation isn't a binary thing either, and I'm not sure anyone is suggesting that RMS's past contributions to the FSF be dismantled or that no one should employ him, I don't think anyone seriously want's to cancel his life's work.

The suggestions are that he shouldn't hold a leadership position in a community when he's shown an inability to lead a community safely.

Alas, cancellation is binary. It's akin to bullying: once started things begin to go downhill really quick.

There are always enough people willing to raise there self-esteem by kicking a dead lion.

I disagree that it's binary. Brendan Eich seems to be doing pretty well running Brave after being "cancelled" for donating for anti-gay-marriage causes. I think people remember that but have mostly let him get on with his life because he a) apologised, and b) no longer runs something as visible as Mozilla.

Eich didn't apologize. He expressed "sorrow at having caused pain" not remorse for what he did.[1] He wouldn't say he wouldn't do it again.[2] And he argued it wasn't discriminatory since then.

I don't think it's even about visibility. People didn't want to have to choose between leaving Mozilla and following Eich.

[1] https://brendaneich.com/2014/03/inclusiveness-at-mozilla/

[2] https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-ceo-gay-marriage-firestorm...

I have been anti Eich since I heard about all this. I dis-recommend Brave to everyone I know and will never support another Brendan Eich product again. I'm frequently surprised that the HN crowd largely seems to give him a pass on his hateful opinions towards LGBT people.

He's also an anti-masker and thinks a lot of what Dr Fauci says is actually lies. He is not somebody I look up to or see as a leader, especially in recent years.

Not sure how to define 'cancelled' globally but I will not support Eich for the future.

It may be a dumb question, but if the product is good, why should I care about personal views of whoever created it?

When people go to the market, are they supposed to ask "okay, I see your eggs are free range, but do you guys support gay marriage?"

The 'personal views' isn't even what this is about. He has demonstrated severe lack of understanding of the current world - he is spreading hatred and lies about people. He donates his money specifically to causes that actively make oppressed people suffer even further. It's not 'simply' a matter of personal views here. I think he does real, physical damage to the world and I don't personally want to support that.

I don't care about your personal views if they are not hateful or actively causing harm to people. But if your 'views' are spreading hatred and also harming people (even killing people by being anti-mask) then I think it's pretty clear that caring about it makes sense.

> When people go to the market, are they supposed to ask "okay, I see your eggs are free range, but do you guys support gay marriage?"

Obviously we cannot discover everything about everyone we deal with. We have to prioritize and live life, and yes it is awful to accidentally do business with hateful people, I do understand it cannot be avoided fully. We have to live life somehow if we want progress.

If it becomes known that the egg people are anti-gay-marriage then certainly I wouldn't buy from them any more.

Do you happen to have details of the story?

Looking around I see he has donated $1000 to banning gay marriage. This whole opposition looks kinda dumb to me, but qualifying it as hatred is definitely an overkill.

With that phrasing, this is a loaded question.

Instead, imagine you are facing court and ask your lawyer:

"okay, I see you are a lawyer, but do you make highly controversial statements in public?"

This is a legitimate concern. The public credibility of your lawyer affects the outcome.

On top of that our "lawyer" RMS walks barefoot in court and wears dirty clothes.

Good point (and the username stands out too).

Imagine though you're asking "okay, I see you're a lawyer, but you're a black lawyer and I'm afraid that your public credibility in this part of the country may (alas!) be compromised"?

We DO NOT choose our ethnicity, nationality, natural hair color, food allergy so we SHOULD NOT be discriminated for that.

We DO choose how to act, like engaging in public speaking or not, showing up to court/convention poorly dressed or barefoot, or being rude to people and so on.

With choice comes accountability.

With public presence comes public accountability. Very simple.

> We DO choose how to act, like engaging in public speaking or not, showing up to court/convention poorly dressed or barefoot, or being rude to people and so on.

Hey, you solved Asperger, depression, and all mental issues. Quick, someone give this guy a Nobel prize!

Yeah I think that's all pretty stupid. For me these are good reasons not to work for Brave, but less good reasons not to use Brave. I think Mozilla is a bit different because of their leadership in the community. I know the Mozilla Foundation is separate, but it's part of that community and I think it was inappropriate for Eich to be in a position of leadership in that community.

I think Steve Jobs is a good similar example here. He was an asshole. I don't think I'd have wanted to work for him directly, and I don't think he should have been running a charity or a company where the community engagement was important, but I still bought an iPhone.

Good points except for the gratuitous insult.

To add on: cancellation === accountability. Which many people seem to forget.

I'll give you that things are hardly ever binary. But toxicity is something that can be determined. They are the people do not care about others. They do not listen, no matter how many times you've talked to them. They see themselves as correct in their attitude, and others wrong. They do not change, or at least not in the short term (and definitely if they never suffer consequences). I've worked with these kind of people. We all have.

This whole "good outweighs the bad" is wrong.

1. Toxic people damage the company in general. Whether that be the reputation or culture. The consequences of their actions and words waste company resources.

2. They damage the productivity of others. Either indirectly or directly.

3. Most importantly: they hurt others. Nothing can outweigh the hurt they cause others.

Indeed we all have met them, they are usually to be found in Steering Councils while pretending to be noble and good.

What exactly does he bring to the table, other than creating drama? What is the FSF doing these days? Because literally all I see it doing is trying to clean up after RMS' messes.

> have his work and life "cancelled"

Nobody is erasing history. Nobody is deleting the wikipedia page on RMS.

Nobody is preventing RMS to write blogs, emails, show up to conferences and give speeches.

The letter is merely ASKING not to give him a position as public speaker after his countless blunders.

Spoken like a toxic person. There are many ways to be toxic in a team, and most of them are tolerated and encouraged by the moral guardians.

There is no team without him, you are aware of that, right? The core purpose of the FSF is to defend his achievements and to follow the path he laid out decades ago. He is not accused to be a toxic person, he is attacked on various angles by a mismatch of FUD, puritan toxicity and simple hate against unconventional people.

Sure, you can opt to distance from that, but what do you stand for then? Giving up against an irrational mob is not a legacy under which the FSF can prosper.

> There is no team without him, you are aware of that, right?

I certainly hope this is not true. Stallman will die one day. I doubt that anyone in FSF simply intends to just pack it in when that happens.

I also do hope that. It doesn't have to mean that without him at the helm or at the board the organization can not survive. But it can not survive without his philosophy. And for that it's important to create a path that defends him against the baseless reputational assaults, or it will be damaged as well. This statement does it, that way they can continue also after him - hopefully.

FSF could disappear today and FSFE, Conservancy, EFF and many other (saner) organizations would thrive.

> This sounds like RMS almost torpedoed his own board seat by announcing it on his own.

> bringing RMS was the right decision

The idea that he has such severe problems with social interactions that he almost torpedoed his chance at getting back his board seat suggests that he is not, in fact, the right person to be leading a large organization.

I get the hacker ethos that this is "his" organization but if the guy can't even hold it together for a week without nearly blowing it, he's not going to be an effective advocate for his views and isn't the right person to lead a large organization.

Long-term the organization needs to move past him anyway: he's 70, if the movement can't survive without him then it'd better figure out how that's going to work damned quickly because statistically they don't have that many more years.

What if, RMS is hit by a bus tomorrow?

The FSF is not a new organization. That it cannot function without RMS means it's failing to stand on its own. That may be acceptable for a new organization but in case of the FSF that's just a massive failure to build a sustainable organization.

If you care about the work the FSF is doing (I don't), this announcement should be extremely worrying.

>this announcement should be extremely worrying.

I agree it's slightly worrying, there's currently no replacement for RMS. The libre software movement risks falling apart if he is no longer there. FSF and RMS should make quick work of finding someone valuable.

One person is not a movement. It's not enough to find someone else. The organization, the entire group of people it consists of, needs to be able to its job.

I'm not even sure what this libre software movement even is that would fall apart in the absence of RMS and the FSF.

Yes.. please God someone tell me, which parts of the sky would fall if the entire FSF org disappeared tomorrow?

Exactly. So this >30 year old organization spends a paragraph to basically say they're crippled as an organization without RMS.

Imagine a company welcoming back a founder who was forced out for some sort of highly questionable behavior and public statements--and the company to come out with a statement a year later that they just couldn't go on without their founder's wisdom. We would rightly say the board and senior management of that company wasn't doing their job.

I can't even imagine Uber inviting Kalanick back, and they are near the bottom of the pile in terms of reputation.

I can live without bacon.

But with bacon my life is better, fuller and more pleasant in all aspects.

An organization in which one man is indispensable dies with that man.

If FSF can't see a way to exist without Stallman at the helm, I wouldn't make any long-term bets on them sticking around as an organization of relevance.

>look we need this guy, and yeah for many it sucks, but for the betterment of the mission and the future of free software, we have to come together because he is simply too valuable to ignore

But he's not valuable any more, that's the thing. He hasn't written code in like 30 years and to the best of my knowledge all he does is go around giving the same tired lecture over and over.

This pretend apology does nothing to address the very real concerns expressed by the people who have had to work with RMS. The guy is just generally an asshole, with the charisma of a wet towel.

We give some assholes some slack if they continue to make valuable contributions (Torvalds, de Raadt), but RMS makes no valuable contributions.

Writing code isn't that valuable. Many people contribute to coreutils (& other GNU projects) but there is only one RMS. His position is an ideological one.

To a first approximation, zero people at the global scale are proponents of Stallman's FSF.

Free Software deserves a better figurehead.

What political successes did the FSF have in the last 20 years and what role did RMS play in those?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com