>Stallman was removed because many found his presence unacceptable to their continued participation.
Were any of these people actually contributing in any meaningful sense, or just "participating"?
Were any of these people actually contributing in any meaningful sense, or just "participating"?
Here's the lead developer of the HURD: https://medium.com/@thomas.bushnell/a-reflection-on-the-depa...
Here's someone who spent about two decades of his life at the FSF, including as executive director, and won the FSF's award for contributions to free software on the same day that RMS announced his return: http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2019/10/15/fsf-rms.html
Here's a whole bunch of GNU project maintainers, publishing a statement on gnu.org: https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2019/joint-statement-on-the-gnu-pr...
Here's a couple of high-profile GCC contributors: https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-March/235091.html https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-March/235096.html
Bushnell hasn't been working on HURD for a long time. He joined a religious order and works for google.
> Here's someone who spent about two decades of his life at the FSF
Kuhn is now the president of a competing organisation to the FSF that doesn't mind promoting Facebook or Google for their outreach.
> Here's a whole bunch of GNU project maintainers
Guix has been in disagreement with rms since he didn't want to adopt a CoC for GNU because it was "too punitive" in intent, and suggested using GNU's Kind Communications Guidelines instead.
> Here's a couple of high-profile GCC contributors
Nathan Sidwell is a Facebook engineer who instigated the removal of rms from the gcc steering committee. After the committee did so for technical reasons, he accused them of not being punitive enough towards rms and proceeded to tally various personal suspicions against rms.
(By the way, Kuhn was on the board of the FSF while he was leading this "competing organization." The fact that this was not seen as a conflict of interest, and that the FSF has awarded him for his work at this "competing organization," implies that they are not actually competitors.)
Who, then, has the right to criticize RMS, if they don't? It sort of seems like anyone who raises a criticism of RMS can have that criticism dismissed because they've become a critic of RMS.
Who is a legitimate part of the free software movement other than RMS himself?
Only people who are pure, demonstrated by worship of RMS, are free to criticize him. Of course, if they do so, they are no longer pure, and lose that license.
> Who, then, has the right to criticize RMS
I doubt there is a collective answer, but I encourage everyone to look into the various affiliations of both proponents and detractors of rms' reinstatement and make their own decisions on whom they should trust.
> https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-April/235267.html
Today I learned the name of one of the first toxic people who seriously suggested to write gcc in C++. And they are admitting it themselves! What a tragedy. Of course, RMS was, rightfully again, the main opposing force. We live in sad, sad times.
Quoting this person's message:
> Interactions I've had with the SC, beyond maintainer appointment, seem to run into RMS.
Sounds like a feature to me! The main purpose of RMS's presence is precisely to keep away idiotic proposals like those of Nathan Sidwell.
Being serious, the world needs an easily bootstrappable C compiler. It's a crucial pillar of our society, and we lost it a few years ago. That is a shame.