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I will also point out that this is an anonymous blog post from someone who has published no way to contact them privately and has never posted to the emacs mailing list (at least from the domain of their blog).

It is a one-sided view, and I see at least one important inaccuracy. FSF and RMS were certainly not asked for their view. Given that, would it make sense for RMS or FSF to write anything about this post publicly to give it validity and attention? Very doubtful.

Given all that, I found this bit pretty amusing: "I'd be surprised if he or any of the people with any influence even read it", how would the author ever find out? lol.

It is sad that this person cares about emacs, but dropping a big dis track and walking away without even suggesting any practical solutions really does not help things. Emacs has a very few core maintainers, FSF has a small staff augmented by volunteers, this is not some faceless entity like a big corporation or government.

Update: the author has since published their email address. Good for them.

I'm not sure what sorts of "practical solutions" you could possibly imagine. The core problem here is that Stallman has strongly held positions he won't budge on which harms the competitiveness of Free Software, and that all of GNU is subject to his whims. Would you have been more happy if the post had ended with "GNU and the FSF must replace Stallman"? Maybe if it ended with "GNU shouldn't be under the BDFL model anymore, there should be a leadership committee"?

Whatever Stallman views are, you can always start a new org and express your views that benefit the Free Software instead of harming them. Thus you we'll naturally outcompete the FSF and improve Free Software competitiveness.

It's not like Free Software is exclusive property of rms and FSF. Many parties can take part in the fight.

Okay but a major point of the post, whether you agree or not, is that Stallman's views is harming the technical merits of GNU software, making copyleft software less competitive than it should be. That's not going to change just because you start a new organization which tries to evangelize for Free Software in a better way.

Well I agree that it is a major point of the post. An no, I don't agree with this major point, in that Stallman's views somehow harm GNU anything. Anyone who believes he can do a better job can try doing a better job. But for some reason most such critics want Stallman do a job according to their expectations. No, it is not how it works.

I also find Stallman's position on a contributor/project head positions imbalance to be perfectly reasonable. Contributor has to convince project head to do something. Project head doesn't need to do that. If a contributor is unhappy, he can fork the project, become the head himself (with all the problems that such position brings), and do a better job.

Nothing prevents such future FSF successor organisation from forking all GNU projects and setting a different contribution policy or whatever. You won’t be able to change/upgrade the licensing terms unless you get the blessing from FSF itself, but then, Linux seems to be managing fine on GPLv2 so maybe it’s not such a big issue.

> We can tolerate some flaws in people who are doing good work.

Sometimes people's flaws prevent them and the people they work with from doing good work.

A lot of people I'd describe as "principled" don't want to be anywhere near Stallman for various reasons, often related to their principles. Maybe he's just cleared his orbit of anyone else who actually fits your 4 criteria, so only appears to be unique. This seems like a rather common failure mode of personality cults, tbh.

I agree with tolerating “some flaws”. People can be eccentric.

RMS’s behavior is way past “some flaws”.

No company on earth would have let him stay this long.

> No company on earth would have let him stay this long.

Because no company on earth wanted what he wanted.

If he had different flaws, ones which companies found acceptable, it is doubtful that the state of technology we enjoy today[1] would exist.

[1] Almost all of which was built on free software foundations.

I was referring solely to HR issues.

HR issues are the subset of people issues that affect the functioning of a company. If there's no company there are no "HR issues", only personal legal issues. Has Stallman broken any laws?

If the sole justification for your position is "It's not illegal", that's not a good look.

Ok, let's make it, has he infringed upon the rights of others or caused them material harm, both of which have copious amounts of laws against them? Otherwise it's nothing more than you disagree with him or don't like him for whatever reason.

As if companies are the source of truth on things?

Companies aren't the source of truth, but they do represent a floor of acceptable behavior for people working together in a group. Which is what matters for this discussion.

> they do represent a floor of acceptable behavior for people working together in a group

Huh? Working together in a group at a company does not imply any kind of standard for behavior, although companies pretend outwardly that there is some professional standard they abide by. The truth is that work places are filled with all kinds of horrible human behavior, always have and always will be.

People work together in bands, on art projects, on house renovations, on family housework, on adventures, on radical political movements, and it is OK for them to have complicated human relationships while they do so and capitalist companies do not deserve to have a say.

Yes, all of that is true. It is also true that they have organizations can and will get rid of people that are too toxic to work there. Sometimes the system even works! I've known of several people who, despite being brilliant engineers, repeatedly said the kinds of things you just can't say in polite company and so were eventually let go.

Yes, it took too long.

The system (at two separate companies) eventually worked.

That's not the only reason companies will get rid of people of course, because they are ultimately capital-dedicated authoritarian organizations. But it is a reason, which is my point.

And across the industry there is something akin to a floor of acceptable behavior. I cannot go into the office nude. I'm generally not allowed to abuse the other employees (however the higher up you are/the more important you are, the harder it gets to remove you, and it always relies on reporting).

There is a floor, and it's in practice lower than I'd like, but it exists.

> I cannot go into the office nude

Welcome to the finish sauna located inside the office.

It always context dependent. Organizations and companies in particular have cultural filters. I know people who find it toxic when people mix alcohol and work, while other find it useful to grease the professional relationship. Personally I find having a work get together at the sauna more suitable then the bar, but I am pretty sure 99% of HN belong to cultures that disagree.

> is also true that they have organizations can and will get rid of people that are too toxic to work there

define toxic.

Companies often promote people that would be immediately kicked out from any other of those examples.

Nobody would start a band with Elon Musk.

Not agreeing or disagreeing, however I believe their point is that companies care about profit over principles and as long as an employee Disable the produce or foster work that is used to produce profit, thats is really all that matters to them.

There isn't really an ideological bent there that can throw a wrench in the works unless you are doing harm as a company.

Companies keep who they perceive to bring profits. Sometimes this is actually what brings profits, sometimes it isn't. Why do you think companies tend to grow huge parasitic managment systems, as they grow bigger? Not because the judgment of a company is sacrosanct, but because a company is a system that breeds and favors a certain kind of individual if the company doesn't work against that tendency constantly.

> Companies aren't the source of truth, but they do represent a floor of acceptable behavior for people working together in a group.

To give a counter-example: in my observation, in academia (in particular math and physics departments), there is a lot more tolerance towards excentric traits than in companies - and collaborating in a group nevertheless works.

Thus, companies are an insanely bad example to define a reasonable floor. Rather, the traits that are considered acceptable in companies are whether they are useful for making the company money. For example dark triad traits can be useful for that, so such traits are somewhat accepted in companies.

Yes, the behavior of people working under a rigidly hierarchical, authoritarian structure in which they sign over all their ideas and work and have no control over them. The complete opposite of what Stallman advocates. You don't find any irony in suggesting to regulate Stallman by this norm?

> Emacs is not an independent project, and it isn't governed by its contributors. I'm the head of the GNU Project, and that includes Emacs.

I think it might be you that’s missing the irony.

No. The confusion on your part is you think Stallman acting like this makes him part of some authoritarian structure, but it does not. He is not telling anybody how to do their work, because they can just fork his code. He is simply ignoring what they want for his project because they are not his manager or PM. Under these circumstances, what obligation has he to make nice with what some consider "acceptable behavior" for a company man?

Then why is the workpace any different? Nobody is telling you what to do, you can just get another job.

Because people are literally telling you what to do everyday, and getting another job doesn't change that, only who tells you?

The whole point of FSF is that everyone can have control over their software and do whatever the heck they want with it, even if it makes no sense. Here you have an excellent example, and you're suggesting there's the same freedom in finding somebody else to control your work.

False equivalency - I agree Stallman might have had some outdated visions for his projects (word processing? Realy? Nobody cares about that anymore).

I also accept the FSF/GNU don't operate like a typical authoritarian company - although I do think there are probably more similarities due to the fact power structures and human psychology dictate certain behaviors than FSF or Stalmman care to admit. But we absolutely shouldn't expect him or the FSF to operate in a similar manner, corps are what produce the toxic behaviors in the first place (not human toxic, toxic to society).

Being nice and polite, and being forced to murder kids and pillage third world countries, that has always had the smack of pure evil to it to me.

Maybe being polite is overrated after all. Fuck off, hitler (or whomever the evil dictator is).

> they do represent a floor of acceptable behavior for people working together in a group

Companies represent a floor of acceptable behavior for people working together in a group in a company (and that's not even true between different companies).

There are an infinite number of people working together in a group that do behave acceptably but not in the same way a company would.

for example: politics, unions, military, volunteers, churches, research etc

I mean, I’d much rather work professionally with RMS than a boss who farts in my face or rapes my coworkers in the Cosby room. Just saying…

That is quite the false dichotomy (trichotomy?)

When the parent is attempting to say that for-profit corporations provide a "floor" of acceptable behavior, and by implication that RMS wouldn't meet this floor, I believe it's a perfectly valid comparison.

> Maybe he's just cleared his orbit of anyone else who actually fits your 4 criteria, so only appears to be unique.

They can go start their own Foundation (and those sort of people probably will do exactly that). GNU sounds silly anyway, and all the licenses are FOSS compatible. We've seen schisms already, that generally end well.

The Open Source people already did that at a grand scale, it was a massive success. Stallman's entire ideology is perfectly compatible with people doing a great job out-competing him at his own game. We would be lucky to have multiple organisations working to promote freedom in the software world, in multiple different ways.

> We can tolerate some flaws in people who are doing good work.

Stallman's principles are important, the man saw really far into the future towards which we have been heading. However, in the GCC AST case these principles really got in the way of good work.

Free software is supposed to be the superior software. It seems obvious to me that superior software would be easy to interface with and build upon. GCC should have been no exception but he chose to make it hard on purpose because some proprietary software somewhere might interface with it some day and he didn't want to help those people. It's my understanding this is one of the many reasons why clang is so relevant today.

This unwillingness to help proprietary software shows up in other parts of the free software culture as well. For example, nobody seems to care much about binary interfaces, only source code that can be recompiled.

> Free software is supposed to be the superior software.

Free software isn't supposed to be anything except free. If it's superior that's nice but that isn't really the goal.

Eh kinda it is supposed to be superior because it doesn't have secret backdoors, fewer security flaws, more features usable by a wider audience...

The first one I think is pretty important, as the saying goes if the cure is worse than the disease its not worth it.

Security flaws is arguable, not enough people have an incentive to work on free software, not because it doesn't get used, but because companies themselves haven't and aren't built to contribute back. We could have solved this fairly easily, just not in the software world, but I digress.

Lastly, more features, by which I don't mean in the sense you are probably thinking i.e. the narrow mindset popularized by MVP thinking "can it do X". More in the sense, "can you do X in Y manner". If you have ever used software and thought "why does it do this stupid thing or take so long" etc., its what I mean. Corps often build MVPs and "working" software that is otherwise horrible, free open source software is often used and improved by end users. Technical users, often, but they wear a user hat as well. Users can complain and request things directly.

It can produce bloated software as well, but when you don't have a budget you can do things like refactor. It will take a while but it can happen, where I think often corp software is held back by layers of deadlines, product owners, and BAs - the users are so far at the end of the chain the software they learn to live with is an absolute nightmare. They use it for some business reason, not because the software is in the least bit good.

>> Free software is supposed to be the superior software.

Superior, yes, but only for "some definition of superior."

It's not meant to be "better in every way" and could never be that anyway since "best" of anything, is always a compromised nuanced collection of competing interests. With the FSF there aren't competing interests, there is one overriding interest and all others are subservient to that.

Thus GNU software is always the "most free", but is also unsuitable for most users. Emacs may be free, but my mom uses MS Word. Her definition of "best" might be different to mine, not least because her goal is writing a letter, not analysing source code.

To the original author I suggest the following - let the FSF be the FSF and decide for yourself what tools best suit you. There are plenty of alternatives to GNU software for anything that matters. If gcc doesn't do done thing the use clang etc.

The "pure" FSF approach to computing is not meant for the masses, it is meant for a tiny few. You are not one of those few. (I mean that in the pragmatic, not pergoritive sense.)

Programmers see computers as "a thing" - 99% of the world see it as just another tool to get through the day. My mom cares about her computer about as much as I care where, or how, paper is made. She cares about her software about as much as she cares about her coffee machine.

In one sense RMS is a visionary leading us all to software nirvana. In another he's irrelevant. In many ways he can be both at the same time.

It doesn't matter whether emacs does this, or gcc does that. We don't really need a more pragmatic FSF - there are already lots of open source advocates filling that space.

If you want to be pure, the FSF is the home for you. If you want to be more pragmatic then find somewhere else.

Personally I am not one of the tiny group of perfectly-pure users with no reasonable phone or laptop. Personally I think the FSF stance is absurd in most cases and out of touch in most others.

But I completely respect their mission, and I completely enjoy many of the freedoms that mission has brought me indirectly. Open Source exists because of the FSF stance - a happy side effect of it maybe - and that is a very important thing.

The world needs extremists who model an alternative extreme. Homesteaders don't make me want to live off-the-grid, but they do inspire a model of more sustainable living, I'm encouraged to use alternative water for some uses, perhaps install some solar and so on.

Long may the FSF set a standard for impractical, unwavering dedication to an unrealistic computing standard. They set a boundary for the rest of us to see in the distance, and they allow a middle ground far closer to that boundary than we would otherwise aspire to.

The FSF is gloriously irrelevant, and long may it last.

I will dispute this notion that volume of technical work is related to how famous someone is. Today, there are lots of people in opensource doing backbreaking work that we rely on, but whose name we don't even know.

Indeed, fame is often the result of them being outspoken.

> We can tolerate some flaws in people who are doing good work.

Not trying to be snarky, I'm genuinely curious. I know that RMS has been very active in the emacs-dev mailing-list. Not sure if he's become more active after he was forced to step down from FSF board, and what impact (if any) his return has made. Aside from turning emacs-dev mailing list into a weird place where one has to be a bit careful even when asking technical questions, what "good work" has RMS done in the past decade? Again, I'm not trying to downplay his achievements and accomplishments in the past, I'm sincerely interested to know about his work. I know he wrote tons of essays, but he doesn't contribute to Emacs codebase anymore, right?

> We can tolerate some flaws in people who are doing good work.

The real question is whether RMS is actually doing good work. I don't question his intent, but the outcome is… let's call it "debatable." And, arguably, the gaussian on that outcome very much includes negative results — not sure where the overall curve goes…

The outcome is several pieces of software that millions of people adopted as optimum solution for a long list of different needs, and that are stable and work really well.

How this could be tagged as not good enough work for somebody is beyond my comprehension.

That might be the outcome of his work in the 1980s and '90s. I'm more concerned about the outcome he's achieving now.

The problem is, how many people has Stallman personally put off working in GNU software? Certainly me, and at least two of my friends. I can't know exactly, but I bet lots of others.

Maybe you aren't the sort of contributors he wants. If RMS were more milquetoast, perhaps you and your friends would contribute, but at what cost? How many hardcore free software zealots would be repelled?

> If we had a big pool of people who are better than Stallman and more willing to work on the cause then we'd talk about them

There 100% was such a pool of people but Stallman scared or domineered them all away.

Bullshit. If there were, they would have started their own orgs, forking whatever with most of the work done for them already.

That's not such an easy thing to do, you know.

That's my point. It's hard and apparently nobody else is capable of it, even with most of the work done for them.

> most of the work done for them

You say this as if there's not much more work to do, not many more features or improvements to be had. So your point appears to be wrong.

All four virtues boil down to the third: devoting one's waking hours for a non-profit cause.

This puts Stallman in a pretty massive demographic, one that includes the clergy, public school teachers, and professional baduk players.

The article quite clearly debunks 3, and all of the others are sort of redundant. Someone who is principled, motivated, and wrong to proselytize might better be described as "obstinate", and we don't generally like those people.

(To be clear, re #3, there exist people who have done as much or more for free software as RMS, but people don't idolize most, except perhaps Linus, to the same degree)