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Comment by detaro | Hacker News Reader

How is the FSF fundamentally incompatible with how the FSF Europe, the Tor project, the Software Freedom Conservancy, ... want to make money? IMHO there's too many people who have worked a lot and deeply for Free Software goals against him to explain it as an attempt to make Free Software weaker.

If I'm being cynic, if you are a large company wanting the FSF to be less relevant, you should probably encourage them to let RMS alienate more people. To quote a recent HN comment of mine: "RMS came to speak at my university. He probably did more damage to general student perception of anything associated with the FSF than industry-ass-kissing professors did in the 3 years prior in that one day", and my impression is that the FSF is worse off to achieve its stated goals with him at the helm.

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>if you are a large company wanting the FSF to be less relevant, you should probably encourage them to let RMS alienate more people.

Perhaps they want to steer the direction of the free software movement to be more corporate friendly, i.e. get people to write software for free but none of that pesky copyleft stuff. More directly, there is an optional "or any later version" in the GPL, so if they can get the FSF to make the next version of the GPL more corporate friendly that also includes a lot of existing software (although I don't know how popular this clause is in practice).

The vast majority of useful free software is already corporate funded if not MIT licensed.

Can you direct me to the thread in which you detail what Stallman did to damage "student perception of anything associated with the FSF" at your university?

I have seen Stallman speak at various universities over the years, and I have witnessed the same speech and its intrinsic message fall flat on its face at, say, Stanford, whilst receiving a rapturous response from students at Berkeley just a week later.

The prevailing student culture has much to do with how well a message is received, particularly in these politically charged and volatile times when people so easily get distracted from the message by the messenger himself, or even third-party reports regarding the messenger's past.

It's a marathon, not a sprint; I'll bet the pure Streisand effect of more people even simply knowing who RMS is could likely outweigh any of this short run "alienation."

The GPL license is incredibly corporation hostile.

I'm not sure how that addresses anything in my comment, which is entirely about how non-corporate entities perceive him?

The GPL is not “incredibly corporation hostile”, it's a verbose legalese for “tit for tat”. You got that libre software for free? Fair enough, just give back what you added to it.

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