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Comment by GNUfanaticism | Hacker News Reader

>It’s time for Richard Stallman to go.

>We need more leaders of color, women, LGBTQ representation, and others besides.

The FSF is dying. What we need is women, people of color, minorities, and other people who have never played a major part in contributing, spreading or practicing free software ethos to lead the movement.

There is nothing inherently wrong with diversity, but this is an attempt to spread an agenda, not save the Free Software Foundation.

A character like Richard Stallman is and have been a necessity for the movement to be what it is. We cannot let people of weak character lead the movement. We must reject non-free, proprietary software, not fall into a spiral of pragmatism until we are OSS.

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We've banned this account for flamewar. Not what this site is for.

HN is for curious conversation—which rules out $X-fanaticism for pretty much any X.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The (fairly short) comment history doesn't really indicate flaming, IMHO. Having strong opinions while having the word "fanaticism" on their profile doesn't seem like a rule violation.

If I may, I'd ask you to refrain from such bans until the poster proves a chronic flamer. At least give them a warning first (unless you already did, and they continued, in which case please ignore this comment).

I get why you'd post this because in a way it's a borderline call. In another way it isn't though. If an account shows up with a name like that, only posting on that topic, and showing clear signs of flamewar*, the outcome is unfortunately pretty predictable. I felt like it would be better to just nip the problem in the bud and be clear up front—though I can see that my explanation presupposed too much that it didn't make explicit.

* The combination of "women, people of color, minorities, and other people who have never played a major part in contributing, spreading or practicing free software ethos" with "people of weak character" points clearly in a flamewar direction—a hellish one, in fact.

Fair enough.

Discrimination ("RMS should go because he's a white male") cannot be fought with more discrimination ("minorities never contributed to free software"), I agree on that wholeheartedly.

>HN is for curious conversation—which rules out $X-fanaticism for pretty much any X.

My name is irrelevant to the contents of this post. I believe I said nothing wrong, nor did I intend to start a flamewar or oppose diversity. Promoting free software over proprietary software will be a reoccurring theme to my posts but it looks like that ended already if my privileges are revoked.

I'm sorry I didn't explain this more clearly when I posted earlier—I was moderating in haste, which is never a good idea.

The username is relevant because it suggests a single-purpose account and those are not allowed on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Pre-existing agendas are antithetical to the curious conversation we want here—which, at its best, meanders through whatever catches a person's fancy.

> nor did I intend to start a flamewar or oppose diversity

If you say that wasn't your intent, I believe you! but your comment pointed in exactly that direction—enough that we got emails complaining about it. It's fine with me if people disagree about Stallman and whatnot but the ideological battle aspect is just poison. (And yes it was in the original article too.)

I’m not sure why putting more women, people of color, and/or minorities on the board would mean they have no qualifications. Do you believe that there are no women, people of color, or minorities that have played a part in contributing, spreading or practicing free software ethos?

"Listen, I'm trying really hard to create a false dichotomy out of thin air so this suddenly becomes an issue. And I need to assume there are literally zero LGBTIQ contributing to Open Source so we can discuss this".

This comment implies that only white men have ever played a major part in the free software ethos, which is incorrect and offensive.

The FSF is based in Boston, US. Something like 75% of US programmers are male, around 65% white and a further ~20% Asian [0].

If we want the best advocate, assuming they hire somewhat locally, there is a 75% chance that candidate is male, and an 80% chance they are white or Asian. The FSF movement already struggles to make up numbers of people who actually care about freedom, it can't afford to be picky adding extra requirements on who it is searching for. Maybe the best person is any weird combination of traits, but the post is pretending the FSF has a luxury that it does not.

The original post is not calling for what is best for the Free Software movement, or a sober approach to figuring out what is best. They want to use the FSF as a vehicle for political goals not related to freedom.

And besides, the FSF doesn't appoint leaders. Leaders appoint themselves. The FSF didn't come along and found Stallman.

[0] https://www.zippia.com/programmer-jobs/demographics/

I don’t think being a Boston resident is a requirement. I believe some of the board members are already non-local (Henry Poole lives in California as far as I can tell, Odile Bénassy lives in France).

That's not really how I read it.

Many characteristics would be necessary to lead FSF. Gender, sexuality ot race are not important in this context.

By all means, if a person with the meaningful characteristics to lead belong to your preferred minority groups, that's awesome! But looking for a minority group first and the desired characteristics later definitely seems to be a roundabout way to push an agenda.

"but this is an attempt to spread an agenda" yikes. Consider this: asking Saudi Arabia to let women drive and work any job isn't just a woke agenda. There's a strong practical and economic argument too.

If you don't know how Stallman is a strong net negative, you haven't been paying attention, and you certainly haven't seen him in person. I write a bit about this here:

https://blog.stuartspence.ca/oh-stallman.html

It's always a little cringe when people write something on here just to advertise their crap, drab, poorly written blogs...

There are no ads. I have a great job. What am I advertising?

This keeps coming up, so I wrote about my experience. HN comments written on the toilet only do so much.

> people who have never played a major part in contributing, spreading or practicing free software ethos

I think you're being uncharitable here, appointing a random person of color to a leadership position in the FSF is absurd and not what he's saying, but doing the work so that more than just pasty white nerds join are actively involved in the FSF and rise to the level of leadership is a worthwhile goal. It's basically an argument to be less exclusionary and expand and embrace a larger community which is very much in the realm of saving the FSF.

I’m no fan of Stallman but he’s got quite a following in LATAM so this is a weird angle.

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