RMS addresses the free software community

Thanks for the detail

one thing that bothers me in the context of cancel culture is that it seems people put the equal sign between the work/art someone produces and their ideas outside of that area.

Having wrong or plain stupid ideas does not mean you should die and all the [brilliant] work you are doing should go to waste.

the bigger the target you attack, the better. right? what is your contribution to this world?

they are not even close to the same thing. look, RMS is a weirdo - everyone understands this. But most people are not even close to his level. This exceptionality has it’s drawbacks and its cost. Do you really think the FSF wants to deal with all this? What is the thought process behind reinstating RMS?

> Then why do you care at all about the FSF in the first place? It sounds like you're here just to spread rumors and opinions in this case.

I can't answer for the OP but it's clear that the FSF was a in a leadership position within the software world in the 1980s and 1990s. That position has slipped precipitously despite the increasing importance of the GNU software they developed in every aspect of modern computing. RMS, both in his behavior while representing the FSF at conferences and his (lack of) understanding of the modern computing environment[1], was/is very clearly part of the reason for that decline. I think the principles the FSF stands for are good and important, however without an organization to promote them they will continue to wither in the modern age and bringing back RMS will not help to reverse that trend.

[1] How can a man who spent years refusing to use normal web browsers and insisting on having web pages e-mailed to him possibly be positioned to develop policies to promote the principles of Free Software within the framework of the modern web?

That was sort of the opposite of competent:

- Because it was a new license, it necessarily resulted in license fragmentation, which is an ongoing headache for the free software community. It's worth doing if there's a serious need that outweighs the costs and you can guide the community towards dropping the old license, but....

- The Linux kernel had always been GPLv2 only and remained GPLv2-only, which meant that the most interesting GPL-licensed code on TiVos and similar devices was not subject to GPLv3.

- Embedded devices like TiVos generally want a small userspace. The most popular choice was Busybox, which announced that it was GPLv2-only.

- Also, Busybox turned out to be a reasonably straightforward product to replace, which hurt the ongoing aims of GPL enforcement - including regular old GPLv2 enforcement about simply getting source code at all: https://lwn.net/Articles/478249/

- The FSF moved its own projects to GPLv3 only, but that scared the largest surviving commercial UNIX vendor (Apple) enough that they remained on GPLv2-only versions, and eventually started sponsoring the development of permissively-licensed competitors to even reasonably difficult products to replace, such as LLVM and its ecosystem (lldb etc.) instead of GCC and its ecosystem, which are now technically on par with GCC, if not much more advanced. (Historically, one of the FSF's biggest successes at making inroads in the proprietary software world was getting Steve Jobs to use GCC and release the Objective-C frontend for it!)

- Because the FSF couldn't guide enough other major projects towards GPLv3-only, many brand-new GPL'd software projects continue to use "GPLv2 or later" to this day to work around license fragmentation (i.e. so they can share code with other GPLv2+ projects), meaning any additional strictness of GPLv3 is irrelevant in enforcement.

- Of the major issues around software freedom and digital autonomy today, approximately zero of them are TiVoization - and, as described above, that's not because GPLv3 was wildly successful in combating the threat, it's because it turned out not to be that pressing of a problem.

There is basically no leverage in GPLv3. Just about everything you'd want to do with free software today, you can do with GPLv2 or permissively-licensed works.

He didn’t apologize authentically. He might not be capable of it. And... if he did it doesn’t at all follow that his apology would be accepted. It is neither timely, nor adequately sincere and it doesn’t indicate that he is taking appropriate actions to atone. This statement is as self countered and RMS centering as his actions were. I suspect he isn’t capable of change without intervention and a lot of therapy, neither of which have been indicated here. Note: I’ve directly witnessed and dealt with RMS’s awful behavior towards women twice in my career.