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The Free Software Foundation is dying
211–220 of 247 posts
Re: The Free Software Foundation is dying
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
Technical and socially competent leadership is compatible -- actually, well-aligned -- with diverse representation.
There's a difference between organic and forced diversity. When someone starts out with bullet-point one devoted to orthogonal social issues and not the actual goals of the foundation and how to reach them, it's fairly clear where they stand.
To be fair - the author didn't "start[s] out" with that statement. They started out with seven(ish) paragraphs explaining exactly why the FSF has become irrelevant and how the foundation cannot reach its goals.
The author contends that Stallman (and through his leadership, the FSF) ends up repelling the very kind of interconnected community that could sustain the free software movement. Thus, their first suggestion (replace Stallman, and include different kinds of people in future leadership) is directly related to that specific issue.
It's actually a rather nicely written piece, and they support their suggestions in the narrative pretty well. Perhaps you skipped ahead (or perhaps you just disagree, which is certainly your right), but they absolutely didn't "start out" with "orthogonal social issues". They made the case for why those issues matter and then connected them to their suggestions.
Re: The Free Software Foundation is dying
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I am not calling for non-proportional representation, or for forcing proportional representation either. Then what, precisely, are you calling for when you call for more surface-level diversity in the leadership? How do you achieve proportional representation without manual manipulation? And why do you think that DEI is the first problem worth listing? If we're criticizing Stallman as an unpopular and uncharismatic…
The article seems to be making the case that if you want to foster support for a movement, having somebody in a leadership role who alienates a plurality of your potential pool of members is a bad idea. Nit picking that the article didn't pick your preferred example to make the same point seems like, well, nit picking.
he alienates people not because hes white or male but because he's an uncharismatic libertarian toad
Re: The Free Software Foundation is dying
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I am not calling for non-proportional representation, or for forcing proportional representation either. Then what, precisely, are you calling for when you call for more surface-level diversity in the leadership? How do you achieve proportional representation without manual manipulation? And why do you think that DEI is the first problem worth listing? If we're criticizing Stallman as an unpopular and uncharismatic…
The article seems to be making the case that if you want to foster support for a movement, having somebody in a leadership role who alienates a plurality of your potential pool of members is a bad idea. Nit picking that the article didn't pick your preferred example to make the same point seems like, well, nit picking.
He's saying he shouldn't be in charge because he's White, straight, and male.
Re: The Free Software Foundation is dying
#215> Reform the leadership. It’s time for Richard Stallman to go. > We need more leaders of color, women, LGBTQ representation, and others besides. Stallman is in many ways a problem - but the solution is finding technically and socially competent leadership with a vision that aligns with the core ideologies of the FSF and the ability to lay it out as a coherent long-term plan. Forced diversity has not ever and will not…
Technical and socially competent leadership is compatible -- actually, well-aligned -- with diverse representation.
Small groupings of people drawn from populations that are heavily weighted toward white male English speakers organically selected are unlikely to be more diverse than the population its drawn from and many groupings will end up distinctly unequal even without bias being involved.
If you imagine dealing out people like cards into stacks chosen randomly and enumerating the demographics of each stack then large stacks would tend towards the population demographics but many smaller stacks would have all sorts of distributions. The only way to ensure a small group is diverse or a large group isn't is to select them for immutable characteristics instead of skill.
Re: The Free Software Foundation is dying
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lots of talk about "forced diversity" that ignores the diverse pool of talented people that the FSF has pushed away because they don't think "GNU+Linux" is a hill worth dying on or whatever.
It goes beyond just battles on mole hills: the FSF and the GNU mailing lists are full of extremely time-consuming discussions that are fueled by conspiratorial thinking, feature excessive celebration of nitpicking, with participants that regularly lose themselves in groan-worthy tangents, operate on oversimplified models of society with unjustified arrogance, etc --- they are really bad places for constructive discou…
Thanks that explains why their board is filled with drek like a treasurer with a degree in economics from Harvard and Gerald J. Sussman, Professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT.
Re: The Free Software Foundation is dying
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
Emacs 29 has just issued a pre-release. Using it now.
I switched to vim a long time ago but I am definitely impressed with the changes in each new major version of emacs including this one.
I'm a diehard vimmer using Emacs (Evil-mode), and I can say the same thing. I'm very impressed with the changes in Neovim over the past few years.
Re: The Free Software Foundation is dying
#218Why is everyone hating on Stallman, what did he do? Surely you can't eject someone for being a straight white male?
Maybe because he holds incredibly uncompromising views that he defends with much fervor? Sometimes, it appears as if an overeducated child throws tantrums. Mature individuals understand that nothing in the real world is black and white. Even when one holds strong beliefs, it's essential to try and find a compromise. Otherwise, one's rhetoric doesn't differ much from religious fanaticism. Having a fanatic as a leader guarantees to attract haters.
Re: The Free Software Foundation is dying
#219This article could be summed up with "there should be a completely different free software organization that behaves the way I want it to." Ok? Go ahead and start it.
Is your typical answer to any criticism of an open-source project: "You don't like it? Fork it and build your own!"?
It's like a child who flips the board when they don't like being told, "That's not how this game is played..."
Re: The Free Software Foundation is dying
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
Emacs 29 has just issued a pre-release. Using it now.
I switched to vim a long time ago but I am definitely impressed with the changes in each new major version of emacs including this one.
Being one of the oldest GNU projects it's impressive how quickly Emacs is developing and not only that, the pace is accelerating! LSP and tree-sitter support are now built-in to Emacs and integrating them took less than a year to do.
Eli Zaretskii and Lars Ingebrigtsen are doing amazing work as maintainers.