Huge news about RMS lately. Is he really that vile?

I doubt that these people even see the irony that they posted their letter on a Microsoft owned server. Say what they will about Stallman but at least he has principles.

I thought he was nice to me. I called him on the phone back in August. He helped me get over an issue that I thought I caused to bring down Savannah. Instead of blaming me he thank me and what I did was a bug and that everybody makes bugs.

For what I understand of him, the sake of our planet is more important than we having more children. Thus he suggests people are capable of having pleasure and can, but we should have fewer offspring because we have limited amounts of resource on our planet. This might make him seem to be a misogynist and a promoter of ableism, I but I definitely disagree.

https://rms-support-letter.github.io/

lol "These sorts of beliefs have no place in the free software" the letter states.

"This is the personal web site of Richard Stallman.
The views expressed here are my personal views, not those of the Free Software Foundation or the GNU Project."
-https://stallman.org/

OVER-exaggerated drama on?

They got him removed from his FSF role before and they want to do this again for
reasons that are not clearly defined with evidence, and are apparently (again) meant
to be evaluated where there are no clear means of evaluating and debating evidence,
no written rules for punishment, no written rules of duration of punishment, or
prohibitions on repeated punishments for the same offense. Things we'd reasonably
expect any rational and respectable justice system to have (such as due process) are
not present in the so-called 'court of public opinion' which is indistinguishable
from a mob. The shameful and glib response of 'speech has consequences' (which I've
seen echoed on this forum/mailing-list) doesn't begin to address the problems in how
RMS's resignation came about.

And (intentionally or not hardly matters) their efforts benefit proprietors. When
viewed from the perspective of qui bono? -- who benefits? -- we see that the
neoliberal open source development methodology (which was formed to eschew software
freedom and deny ethics and software freedom being raised at all) stand to benefit.
The benefit to them comes from having RMS, a notably outspoken defender of software
freedom, kicked out of his duties again and encouraging people to connect Stallman's
talk which some people don't like and software freedom as if these have something to
do with each other. I would have hoped the tech-savvy crowd would be much less
susceptible to smears, more willing and able to challenge the absence of due process
but apparently that was disappointingly not so.

There's much conflation of RMS's personal views with discussion and debate of
software freedom (such as the recent shamefully one-sided Vaughn-Nichols article in
establishment media which never asked people who made this decision to speak about
the decision they apparently made, and threads on the establishment media repeater
sites bringing up whether they like him personally or not like that were at all
relevant). It's not reasonable to expect that one will agree with anyone else's views
even if two people work together toward a common end on some issues. And Stallman has
done an excellent job separating his politics on software freedom from his politics
on other issues. Ironically what helps put these conflations down are the absence of
such talk when Linus Torvalds comes up -- he's still spent more of his Linux
kernel-related career bad-mouthing people with undue vitriol than not. Another factor
that puts down the conflators: nobody has bad words to say about Eben Moglen, former
FSF lawyer. Moglen's talks still resonate and have long been unchallenged sources of
wisdom. And Moglen repeatedly points out in those talks that the software
freedom-minded epiphanies others eventually come around to are ideas that "Stallman
saw first" (or words to that effect). It's tough for those who treat proprietors as
partners to challenge reality, even the proprietor-friendly establishment media
propaganda can't avoid occasionally revealing the truth of non-freedom (so many of
their articles are pointed to in one organized place https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/
now).

The efforts for trying to get RMS removed again appear to be failing; if there were
another successful push for removal one would wonder what happened that led to him
being reinstated on the FSF Board a second time and FSF silence on the matter would
not be taken well. FSF management would have even tougher questions to answer and
this could be seen as mismanagement to the point of causing people to wonder if their
paid membership were worthwhile (from what I can tell very few people even claim to
withdraw their paid membership now; not enough to get me to think that all of those
claims are legitimate or numerous enough to warrant concern for the FSF). So I think
the FSF knows that they push for RMS's removal a second time to the detriment of
their organization.

vim users still at it...

SJW destroy community. They destroy trust. They would destroy all the goodwill we've built up over the years by being nice.
Guys, I think it’s time we all stop using Unix staples like ls, pwd, cd, cat, emacs, vim, etc. until we can guarantee that the original creators were woke on current social justice issues lol

I saw an idea yesterday I just had to follow. Instead of signing some Github letter in support of RMS's return to the FSF they had donated money and made sure to put in the box asking for the reason for the donation "because you brought Stallman back". Glad to say I followed that up last night becoming an associate member of the FSF on a monthly basis and filling in that box the same as that person had.

We are at an interesting point in history where the liberal left is all for censorship and the cancel culture while the conservative right is fighting for free speech.

All of this was already "debunked" last year but here's more recent URL on the subject.
https://www.wetheweb.org/post/cancel-we-the-web

Alexandre Oliva (founder of the Free Software Foundation of the Lating America) also posted this: https://gnusocial.net/notice/9290162

If you want to know more about RMS the book "Free as in Freedom" is for you:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Free_as_in_Freedom_(2002)

To people who wish to counter the madness here's a petition:
https://codeberg.org/rms-support-letter/rms-support-letter

"This repository is made for those who wish to support Richard Stallman, yet (for ethical reasons) wish to stay away from github.
If you happen to visit this page but don't have/want to make a codeberg account, you can send a signed patch to name at domain to show your support :)"

I signed by email.

You'll notice that for some strange reason this petition is clean from duplicates and other incoherences, to the contrary of the "open letter".

Edit: Note that this is exactly what happened to EsR too not long ago. And probably a similar injustice happened to Torvalds a few years ago.
https://www.i-programmer.info/news/136-open-source/13535-co-founder-of-osi-banned-from-.html
http://techrights.org/2020/10/07/empathy-for-provocateurs/

>We are at an interesting point in history where the liberal left is all for censorship and the cancel culture while the conservative right is fighting for free speech.

Yeah, the freedom to lie. So are there any conservatives fighting for RMS? Donald Trump, Carlson Tucker..InfoWars?

I read a little about RMS's controversial views. I don't see where he needs to be silenced.

RedHat is now boycotting fsf over Stallman

https://fedoramagazine.org/fedora-council-statement-on-richard-stallman-rejoining-fsf-board/