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John Sullivan resign as executive director of the Free Software Foundation

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Re: John Sullivan resign as executive director of the Free Software Foundation

#81

Post by mhh__ »

simion314 wrote: post #55

We almost Linus Torwalds because of the cancel culture, would be a big loss to lose RMS because he is no longer good PR to have him, bonus points if some big business like Google or Red Hat could grab the leadership of FSF and GNU. There was a few days back a post for people to support RMS and I admit I did not put my name on the list because i am afraid this could affect my future, cancel culture could get worse and…

Well the difference is that Torvalds remains competent?

Easy example: Stallman's idealism is why LLVM is now the academics favoured compiler to work on (i.e. no plugins for GCC)

More human example: Someone I know who works in the GNU ecosystem on a reasonably major project mentioned that rms was cordial until he found out that this maintainer had children. And this was in response to someone handing already GPL code over to the FSF

Re: John Sullivan resign as executive director of the Free Software Foundation

#82

Post by haunter »

vmception wrote: post #78
haunter wrote: post #61

Says a lot about the HN community that a lot of people need to post under throwaways because there are legit others would otherwise go after them or their employers Say whatever you want about reddit but at least it's more anonym than this site

imagine not having sockpuppet accounts on HN [or reddit] imagine posting under your real name and having all that in your bio imagine thinking hackernews is different than a subreddit

imagine this is 4chan

Re: John Sullivan resign as executive director of the Free Software Foundation

#83

Post by p_l »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #64
davty wrote: post #39

It was briefly discussed in this episode of floss weekly https://twit.tv/shows/floss-weekly/episodes/622?autostart=fa... and I think the guest made an interesting observation in that quite a big issue in FSF is that the board is entirely self-selected, the community is not really involved. Thus, the future of the GPL is entirely in the hand of a few people who picked themselves so to say.

>Thus, the future of the GPL is entirely in the hand of a few people who picked themselves so to say. What does this even mean? As Linux staying on v2 shows, the FSF doesn't have any real control over GPL licenses. And I'm fairly sure the only limitation on modifying the GPL myself is I couldn't use the word "GNU."

As Wikipedia shows, FSF has/had a lot of power (Wikipedia was originally GFDL licensed)

Re: John Sullivan resign as executive director of the Free Software Foundation

#84

Post by tjpnz »

arpinum wrote: post #20
risky_opinions wrote: post #9

I'm creating a throwaway that I hope won't irk dang. If this breaks the rules, I'm sorry and I'll stop. Richard Stallman single-handedly created the free software movement, and he's the reason we all have jobs. Google and Facebook might not have been possible in a world where you couldn't spin up a server for free and compile code without paying a license. Richard Stallman has said some sexist and edgy things. He als…

RMS does not have the skillset needed for a leadership position today. If you care about the movement, it needs a leader people want to follow. Just because RMS is not at the top doesn't mean he is being denied chances and isn't forgiven. I'm sure he can continue writing code. He just isn't good enough as a leader of a broad movement. That isn't a slight, most of us couldn't do it.

>RMS does not have the skillset needed for a leadership position today.

Care to define what that skillset is? Leadership requires all sorts of skills and some of the most effective leaders I've seen share very little in common.

Re: John Sullivan resign as executive director of the Free Software Foundation

#85

Post by haskal »

risky_opinions wrote: post #9

I'm creating a throwaway that I hope won't irk dang. If this breaks the rules, I'm sorry and I'll stop. Richard Stallman single-handedly created the free software movement, and he's the reason we all have jobs. Google and Facebook might not have been possible in a world where you couldn't spin up a server for free and compile code without paying a license. Richard Stallman has said some sexist and edgy things. He als…

> What do we do about this?

Step 1 would be to groom people to leadership positions. How is it that an organization of 35+ years doesn't have a good rank next generation who will take the baton from the old guard? I bet you can't name another member of the FSF. For Linux kernel, I can think of GHK, for Ruby I know quite a few people, but for FSF, the bus factor seems to be 1.

Even without all the accusations, FSF should have a leadership they can fallback to. I feared for FSF after Stallman (before the controversy), now I fear for FSF, full stop.

Re: John Sullivan resign as executive director of the Free Software Foundation

#86

Post by 533474 »

bitwize wrote: post #17

I've given a lot of thought to this issue and though I've wanted to give Richard Stallman the benefit of the doubt, I've come to an inescapable conclusion: The FSF board of directors really stepped in it bringing Stallman back, especially in the clandestine manner that they did. They have squandered the goodwill of the community by promoting a controversial figure known for his toxic opinions and decades of bad behav…

If you really want to give him the benefit of doubt, I suggest reading this [1]

[1] https://www.wetheweb.org/post/cancel-we-the-web

Re: John Sullivan resign as executive director of the Free Software Foundation

#87

Post by pjmlp »

risky_opinions wrote: post #9

I'm creating a throwaway that I hope won't irk dang. If this breaks the rules, I'm sorry and I'll stop. Richard Stallman single-handedly created the free software movement, and he's the reason we all have jobs. Google and Facebook might not have been possible in a world where you couldn't spin up a server for free and compile code without paying a license. Richard Stallman has said some sexist and edgy things. He als…

Sorry, while I appreciate what he has done and this seems a bit like witch hunt to me, I was already working in IT before GNU happened and most of my work is unrelated to GNU/Linux.

Without it, I would still be using Solaris, HP-UX, Tru64, Aix, BSD, ....

Re: John Sullivan resign as executive director of the Free Software Foundation

#88

Post by e3b0c44298 »

bitwize wrote: post #43
fen4o wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See https://rms-open-letter.github.io/ and the counter-letter https://rms-support-letter.github.io/

One is signed by the directors of major open-source projects and initiatives. The other is mainly signed by Russian bots.

The fact that the Twitter Khmer Rouge are currently making lists of people signing the Stallman support letter might help explain why only Russians, safe from American wokeness and cancel culture, are willing to sign that letter.

Re: John Sullivan resign as executive director of the Free Software Foundation

#89

Post by bartread »

kosinus wrote: post #19
risky_opinions wrote: post #9

I'm creating a throwaway that I hope won't irk dang. If this breaks the rules, I'm sorry and I'll stop. Richard Stallman single-handedly created the free software movement, and he's the reason we all have jobs. Google and Facebook might not have been possible in a world where you couldn't spin up a server for free and compile code without paying a license. Richard Stallman has said some sexist and edgy things. He als…

> American freedom of speech This specifically is such a weird expression. Other than that, just because Stallman did a good thing once, doesn’t excuse him from other mistakes. And making mistakes is not itself a problem, you can always own up to them and learn. But what I gather from the discussion is that there is a _pattern_ of bad behaviour.

> Other than that, just because Stallman did a good thing once...

Come on: this is a massive trivialisation of RMS's achievements. I have often disagreed with him but his contributions to OSS, and to the wider foundations of modern software and software development, are huge and are the product of decades of devotion - of consistent, motivated effort - from him.

Like it or not, all of us who work in software - even those of us who aren't necessarily strong advocates of free software - benefit from RMS's work.

I've also got bad news for you: we all exhibit _patterns_ of bad behaviour. Fortunately, we are all equipped with the capacity to change even long ingrained habits and patterns.

(To be clear: I am in no way defending any bad behaviour from RMS towards other people, or suggesting that he shouldn't change that behaviour.)

Re: John Sullivan resign as executive director of the Free Software Foundation

#90

Post by [deleted] »

incrudible wrote: post #71
aboringusername wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't want to live in a world without American freedom of speech - where we can't be blunt and speak our minds. I take issue with this. I'm not hugely adept at history but from my understanding there has never been a time where you can just blurt out a communication and have it be "accepted" by society - this seems to me very American and appears very detached from reality and real world experience. Yes, you are…

> Yes, you are accountable for the communications you make, whether via keybord, orally, or any other way. I agree that you are accountable for the things you say. Unfortunately, people are attempting to hold RMS accountable for things he did not say. This situation is the result of willful misinterpretation and dishonest and sensationalist media reporting. The principle of charity must be applied, particularly with…

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