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The funniest part is that this Devault's argument is the exact opposite of "inclusion and representation".

Make arguments for RMS's removal based on his actions, but wanting him gone because of his gender, skin colour and/or age is just as exclusionary as Ku Klux Klan is.

It's just wrong.

I worked for a company which licensed its product as GPLv2. One of our clients (who we trained on the product) saw this and then began competing with us by selling their own version of our product. The company released a newer version of the code and made it proprietary. The FSF answer to this is that this is exactly how the GPL is intended to work

Updating GPL code and making the resulting product proprietary is one of the main things the GPL is supposed to prevent.

No idea how they did it; nobody ever sued us over it. We did continue to distribute some source to our clients, but not GPL. It may have been a kind of LGPL or something, and then V3 and V4 of the product simply imported the V2 as a library to build on top of

> Updating GPL code and making the resulting product proprietary is one of the main things the GPL is supposed to prevent.

It works perfectly fine if you own the copyright to all your code. You can't relicense somebody else's code of course, but you can relicense your own. So a company that develops something in-house and then slaps the GPL on the public release can change their mind on the license for future releases all they like.

It only gets tricky if they accepted external contributions. In which case there's often a contributor agreement, in which the contributor agree the company can relicense the contributed code.

You are correct, of course. I was writing in the context of the above story, but I failed to clearly express that.

I should have written,

"Updating someone else's GPL code ..."

Thank you.

Could not agree with you more, it's one thing to say a person is a product of their time and we need leadership to take the same approach however with new modern social viewpoints and diplomatic approaches. RMS is not a proper businessman, and not a social butterfly either, he has many haters whether you agree with what he says or not.

However, it is a complete other thing to say 'we'll fix this with more inclusion, yep, that'll fix it', this is the pinnacle of doing the least amount of effort, just like a convincing leader that use anecdotes to sell their vision..its cheap.

>However, it is a complete other thing to say 'we'll fix this with more inclusion, yep, that'll fix it', this is the pinnacle of doing the least amount of effort, just like a convincing leader that use anecdotes to sell their vision..its cheap.

It's amazing how the article present five points and y'all are obsessed over this one point (which concerns the removal of RMS and open up for more diversity & inclusion). But sure buddy, that's the issue.

TBF, it is not "this one point". It is the first point of an enumerated list of changes. Of course people will focus discussion on it, since it is intentionally presented as the most important one.

Yes, you don't want inclusion to be your only bar, but if you don't state it as a goal from the beginning then it won't even be considered. It is becoming a bigger and bigger red flag for an organization to not have some diversity of gender or race, pointing it out is not inappropriate.

> if you don't state it as a goal from the beginning then it won't even be considered

I don't think it should be a goal. I think it should be a societal goal to provide equal opportunities to everyone, and we can probably measure the results of those efforts by a statistical sample at the end of the pipeline: what % of engineers are black, white, etc. If we find over-representation of one group in a field which usually requires a college degree, then we can probably intuit that not everyone is getting the same opportunities at the beginning of the pipeline. However, it should not be a goal to solve those problems at the end of the pipeline.

> It is becoming a bigger and bigger red flag for an organization to not have some diversity of gender or race, pointing it out is not inappropriate.

I think that in 2020, the zeitgeist was towards every company doing something for DEI. I also think that this was born out of the BLM protests that summer as well as the flatline-zero interest rates set by the federal reserve. Now that that political fad is over (new president) and the economy has become more strict (higher interest rates), companies have cut DEI programs as investors expect them to be more financially responsible. To sum up my point: I think fewer people care about DEI in the corporate world today than they did 3 years ago

My view is WE are society, change starts at home etc.. Again, my point here was that pointing out lack of diversity is absolutely appropriate. I disagree that we get to just say it's the pipeline's fault and not try to do better in our organizations.

The only thing an organization is obligated to do is:

1. Treat all candidates equally, regardless of race, sex, etc.

2. Hire the most qualified candidate for the job, regardless of race, sex, etc.

3. Not engage in conscious or unconscious selection bias when looking for new applicants. I consider it to be a valid hiring practice to make sure you show up to career fairs at HBCUs or women's universities

Doing anything beyond that is not only a bad solution, it is immoral to press your hand down on the weight of one candidate over another based on his or her identity categories. It is as wrong to prefer a white candidate as it is to prefer a black candidate.

> Doing anything beyond that is not only a bad solution, it is immoral to press your hand down on the weight of one candidate over another based on his or her identity categories. It is as wrong to prefer a white candidate as it is to prefer a black candidate.

This is a very convenient position to take for white men in power. Now we insist it must be a perfectly level playing field, never mind the centuries of racism.

This is a racist statement

Yes, we do insist that. If you have a problem with wanting a level playing field, too bad.

If there was a replacement RMS, they too would have to say no on points of principle to things, make enemies of people who want them to say yes, be whispered against, be unpopular.

That's what the role is, say what nobody else will say, make people uncomfortable when apathy is comfortable, and when nobody else will act, take action and rally others against things that are bad. It's not a role that will inspire universal love whomever takes it.

If instead FSF stops with that and tries not to upset anyone it will be dead, not just in decline.

The goal of FSF is not one which people inherently identify with. You can either die on that hill (and you surely will die), or you can go out of your way to try to be diplomatic and convince people of your mission.

If living the FSF moral means being like RMS, you'll never convince anyone. Here is how he browses the internet:

> I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it.

https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

This is the behavior of a lunatic, and not someone who I consider tethered to modern society or the economy that relies on technology. He reminds of the guy in "better call saul" who has removed all forms of electromagnetism in his house. If I met this person IRL, and he tried to convince me of literally any opinion, I would assume outright that these are the ravings of a mentally ill person with paranoid delusions of grandeur

That way of interacting with the Internet wouldn't be that strange at the very beginning... it probably seems like integrating things into emacs from his point of view.

I use noscript and uBlock... my wife thinks about that the same as you think about RMS' 12ft pole browsing. However she is just perfectly fine with Linux as her OS for 20 years now. How Linux came about IS bound up with - is thanks to - RMS and his particular place in the autistic spectrum. If he wants to use email as a frontend to the web instead of wget what's really the problem when his other activities have led to net wins that have affected everyone positively? Can you really sum both things up fairly with one word, "Lunatic", because it's not how you'd browse the web?

I would not take opinions on technology very seriously from people who use technology like it's 1985. RMS does not have a real job as a software engineer and never has, and also does not work in the private sector. He is out of touch with reality and stopped growing as a human being at MIT

Anyone promoting diversity as an end goal in and of itself, especially as a solution to a political organization focused on politics other than race, gender identity, etc. is simply promoting distracting the organization from its real goals. Just like how the schedules for all conferences about various technical subjects become 50%+ "Navel gazing about being X in tech" instead of about, y'know, the tech. The FSF's limited political capital will be more and more wasted on various diversity initiatives instead of their primary goals of promoting software freedom. And unfortunately I think the FSF has already fallen victim to this trend to various extents, but following the author's advice will merely accelerate it.