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Comment by ndr | Hacker News Reader

You are, of course, free to choose who to support.

Does "support RMS being on the FSF board for life" mean supporting him on everything he says, or even suggest supporting him for this quote?

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Well, it means supporting the exclusion of every person that feels alienated by Stallman's behavior and publicly stated views. For as long as Stallman's alive.

Irrespective of any moral or ethical concerns, keeping Stallman doesn't seem very pragmatic and forward-looking for an organization that is hurting for young blood anyway.

A leader should be able to recognize when he's driving people away, and act accordingly.

This might be an unpopular opionion, but anyone who feels that Stallmans antics make him unfit for leading the FSF is also not someone I want have any say in that organizsation. It shows a lack of ability to discern between message and messanger, as well as private and professional opinion.

He is the single most consistent arbiter of open source, clinging to views we all here admire; With such a dedication that it is hard to imagine ANYONE, even fictional, who would be better suited for that particular position (head of FSF).

Aleniating people is in and of itself not a problem for a leader, it works the same way in any other area: Would you want to attract people to Black Lives Matter who would be alienated by Martin Luther King? Do you really find it problematic that the buddhists don't try to attract people who can't stand the Dalai Lama?

Is it really a Problem that the FSF didn't attract people who would critizise Stallman ONLY on points which have no bearing on the mission of the FSF?

And the article really makes a great point about how most of that criticism consists of misrepresentation, faulty analysis and double standards. Keeping people like that out of the FSF is not only fine by me, it is absolute paramount to keep it working.

Opinions like your are what has kept FSF stuck in 1990s obscurity. Enjoy alienating people and remaining irrelevant while everyone else moves on.

Obscurity???!

FSF is a _fenomenally_ successful organisation in achieving their mission. Free Software is everywhere, it has spawned endless businessess and has completely changed the way people create software.

No thanks to the FSF or GNU. Then phenomenal success has been in spite of, not because of, the last 20 years of FSF (RMS) pedantry.

Absolutely thanks to FSF and GNU, who started this all. And their pedantry is the gold standard people should strive for. Not everyone can achieve such software purity, but everyone should know that it is the right thing.

Just because you say so does not make it so. You provide no argument, only assertions.

> Does "support RMS being on the FSF board for life" mean supporting him on everything he says

Of course not.

I just say that I understand if people would not like no associate with him.

My opinion is that such people are stupid. I can understand people that disagree with RMS on his free-software philosophy, or views on software development, or management style, or his personal quirks or whatever and not wanting to work with him - fine, freedom of association, it's yours to choose. That's valid and understandable.

Making a choice because of a random opinion voiced once - which is completely immaterial as RMS himself is not a woman and his opinions about personal decisions of women have absolutely zero importance (which does not preclude him from voicing them, everybody can have an opinion, just some of them are pretty worthless and useless) - is just stupid. It's manually disabling your own intellect, removing all the huge body of useful information you could base your decisions on and concentrate your attention on one immaterial detail. It's like you being offered an awesome job in a great company with huge salary and you quitting on the first day because one person in your office has a pen of a wrong shade on his desk. I can only attribute such decisions to performative virtue signalling, because the alternative would be insanity.

"When people tell you who they are, listen."

We choose to disassociate open source from anything to do with RMS and FSF.

Well, you told who you are, then. Virtue signalling is more important to you than the work done by the open source community and the FSF, and you'd gladly destroy the latter for a chance of the former. OK, listened.

Do you realise that every time you use terms like "woke" and "virtue signalling" you are, in fact, virtue signalling?

If open source could only be done by sexual abusers and misogynists it would indeed be sad.

No, I do not realize that because it is not true. I am expressing my opinion, not trying to fit within some cultural mold that requires of me performative actions where the only purpose is to demonstrate my allegiance to "right" people and my non-association with "this kind of people". When I use the term "woke", I mean people who call themselves this term, or are functionally and ideologically equivalent to those people. I didn't invent this term, I don't like it particularly, but it came to identify a specific group of people with specific views and action patterns, so I use it. And I am completely sure when I use it, you know who and what I mean. So using it is an efficient communication practice.

> If open source could only be done by sexual abusers

This is an extremely wrong "if" which nobody actually claimed before you. By implying that your opponents said something like that, you are lying. Do not do that.

> it would indeed be sad.

It would be, but it's not because your initial assumption is false. What is currently sad instead is that you have to resort to falsities to advance your point. Or maybe not - maybe it's just a sign you have nothing better in your quiver.

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