RMS: No Radical Changes In GNU Project

[andyprough]

I personally think Stallman is an absolute dumpster fire of a person and his philosophies are utterly asinine vs those behind permissive licensing. I am firmly in the Open Source rather than Free Software camp

That's moronic. At the time he created the GPL he did it in response to the fact that permissive licensing weenies were suing each other out of existence and creating legal precedents that would have made it impossibly expensive to share source code. If it hadn't been for the GPL, you would not have a whole lot of toys that you enjoy today. Your modern uses have little to do with his motivation to create copyleft.

[DebianLinuxero]

I read those dissidents are pushing to remove the Freedom 0.

For me, this is clear : they are paid to do all of this.

If you are a developer who don't like the GPL, you have plenty of alternative licenses, free or open source.

So pushing to destroying GPL only makes sense if you don't like the other developers have this alternative to license.

So, corps.

[milkylainen]

This is like public medieval witch stoning. Albeit in our century. I find it UTTERLY DISGUSTING.
We got a legal system to deal with issues like sexual harassment / discrimination etc issues.
If people are unhappy with it they should fix the laws or the legal system.
This SJW/PC public "outing" in media will destroy the persons life, regardless if he/she is guilty or not.

I cringe when I think about what people has become in the name of some utterly stupid conformity.

[jacob]

I'm still calling for this, its myopic to think this is about a single event. His personality, beliefs, and leadership style can't be "debunked".

That's patently absurd. His personality and beliefs are no-one's business but his own. If you want to sack people due to their beliefs and personality, welcome to the USSR.

His leadership style on the other hand has served the community remarkably well. Without him and his GNU project there would be NO community, there would be no Linux, even the Open Source community that explicitly distances itself from Stallman and from Free Software would not exist. In fact there probably wouldn't even be a free software BSD community because they wouldn't have had the missing tools and pieces (especially GCC) to get started. So everyone is free to bash Stallman, but very few people have achieved as much as he did for our community.

[kpedersen]

I would prefer the toe fungus eater to have

Haha, I totally forgot about that.

His unique quality of having zero inhibitions is... refreshing. The FSF and GNU would be losing a great asset!

Do people really think that someone who does this in public should be held completely accountable for something written (and then later apologized for) on the internet? They should give the poor guy a break quite frankly. No-one is perfect; they should readjust their expectations. Perhaps calibrate them upon our politicians that run the country. All prime examples of honesty and integrity XD.

[GI_Jack]

Mixxed feelings on this, but at this point, I say this is a good thing.

Not only is Stallman aging, but he hasn't been directly involved in the technical development of GNU in a long time now. In fact he doesn't do much programming anymore. He also doesn't use a GUI or a cellphone, so doesn't really understand probably one of the biggest hurdles of our day, Smartphones, and how they are generally the least Free, without much of the attention of the rest of the community to remedy the situation. Cellphones are quickly becoming the most popular ubiqitous computer used, and certainly most abused. This should be made a bigger priority. We need someone who understands modern priorities.

RMS did a lot of good. He introduced me and an entire generation of young men to ethics in software, and made sure we had a Free as in beer and as in speech powerful operation system to play around with, along with complete tool kit. The enormous amount of agency that comes with having toolkit and documenation over computing, information, and telecommunications software is immense. Also immense when this platform can be used for other tasks such as writing and proofing essays and stories, recording and editing sound and video, etc...

The agency of Free software lessened immensely the consumer/producer divide. It allowed anyone to host a website on the internet, and allowed a generation of startups, as well as escape the strict censorship and block of increasingly expensive homogeneous domestic media.

He did this all, in a decade, the 1980s, when this was extremely unpopular and a lot of old 60s and 70s hackers were cashing in their chips for high paying jobs that eschewed ethics behind faceless corporate entities.

Like most people from the 20th century, Stallman did in fact hold some objectionable views, but overall the good outweighed the bad. The fact we even have as much of a platform to debate this here, right now on the internet, you can probably give thanks to GNU, the GPL, and GCC which carried a Free and Open internet for decades.

[Templar82]

He also doesn't use a GUI or a cellphone, so doesn't really understand probably one of the biggest hurdles of our day, Smartphones, and how they are generally the least Free, without much

He doesn't use a phone because he does understand how un-free they are.

[euler271]

At this point who is still calling for this? Have they been living under a rock since the initial misinformation campaign against RMS? It's been debunked for weeks...

For instance, look here, from today: https://www.zdnet.com/article/gnu-pr...ed-leadership/
From the first Paragraph:

Richard M Stallman (RMS) recently put his foot in his mouth by defending a sexual abuser and was pressured into resigning from the Free Software Foundation (FSF).

Also, linking in the same paragraph to their own previous article (https://www.zdnet.com/article/richar...re-foundation/ ) , from 3 weeks ago telling the same lie, about how Stallman defended Jeffrey Epstein "Richard Stallman resigns from Free Software Foundation after defending Jeffrey Epstein behavior". However the one from today is way worse, because now we do now that he didnt do that, yet the fake news media keeps doubling down.

[JorgePeixoto]

Hello guys. I strongly support Dr. Stallman. His vision has strongly changed my worldview. I owe to him my knowledge and concern for digital rights, software freedom, privacy and in fact, through his personal website, also a significant part of of my knowledge about social and economic justice, environmentalism, and a few other subjects. He may have his flaws, but the public assessment of his character is now drastically contaminated by a storm of hate. I made a simple website about this situation (please publicize it): https://jorgemorais.gitlab.io/justice-for-rms/

[smitty3268]

What does Stallman actually do these days?

I'm just curious. It sounds to me like he really just goes around to conferences giving speeches, which shouldn't really be affected one way or the other no matter whether he remains in these groups or not.

So I don't really see this as a big deal one way or the other. It's just a Rorschach test for commenters and their politics to comment on and get outraged about (on both sides).