It's not just Stallman. This is an attempted systematic ouster of old-school hackers (and new-school hackers with old-school values) from positions of leadership. Stallman is just the latest target and also one of the softest. They have also called for the removal of:

* Linus Torvalds (after he apologized and approved the adoption of their code of conduct)

* Ted Ts'o

* the entire FSF board

The problem is that while the old-school hackers were mainly left-liberal or libertarian, more and more open source developers these days come from the San Francisco web dev community and were immersed in the ideals and principles of the social-justice left, for whom "scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds" is an unstated truism. More struggle sessions and purges are likely to follow, if this contingent is allowed to gain ground, and I fear for a GNU project led by, instead of Stallman or someone who espouses Stallman's liberal ideals, a commissar who strictly polices the use of gender pronouns and scrutinizes every code commit and mailing list post for hidden signs of bourgeois consciousness.

These people do not even support free speech. What makes you think they will give a milligram of respect to free software?

You've whipped up quite a strawman to get angry at, do you have any proof of this conspiracy?

Well he is empirically right about the code of conducts, the public attacks on free software figures, and the denial of free speech. I would call it typical radical leftist behavior instead of a conspiracy, but everything else checks out.

You, for instance, mentioned above that it would be impossible for a minor to engage in consensual sexual behavior without even considering for a moment that there are more liberal (and I'd say more civilized) societies that define "consensual" and especially "minor" quite differently. It is exactly this absolutist enforcement of a particular pov that alienates many observers.

of course they don't. because there isn't any. These people, some of whom, like Andy Wingo and Chris Webber, have been doing this for well over a decade. its asinine.

Why does "they've been doing this for a decade" mean "they aren't trying to oust major free software figures"?

To clarify I don't think the long-time hackers on that list are trying to oust major free software figures.

What they are doing is a partial capitulation to those who are, most of whom are trying to effect a value shift in the free software community that undermines the bedrock principles of free software itself. I refer you to Coraline Ada Ehmke's views on the "pernicious cult of meritocracy" and her attempts to get licenses with legally sticky do-no-evil clauses approved as free/open source licenses.

I stand corrected.

What this may be really about is that Ludovic Courtès wanted a Code of Conduct for the GNU Project and Stallman did not. Since having a Code of Conduct, an easy and fashionable tool for excommunicating those you find problematic due to their pesky different points of view, is obviously the Right Thing, and increasingly considered a requirement, that meant Stallman had to go. Sorry, pal. Maybe if you'd had the right perspective -- maybe if you'd sat at the feet of your moral betters and listened -- 35 years of work wouldn't be flushed down the shitter.

This also stands as a warning to open source devs. If you have started an open source project and it becomes popular or otherwise important, you have two courses of action:

* Adopt and enforce a Code of Conduct, preferably Contributor Covenant version 1.5 or later. Enforce it preemptively against Trump supporters, right-libertarians, Brexiters, people who think border laws are a thing which should be enforced, people who oppose Xi Jinping, or just white men in general.

* Lose maintainership of your own project and have it taken over by your moral superiors, people who truly know how to lead.

(If this sounds to you like venture-capitalist takeover of a startup, you're on to something. Keep going and see where it leads.)

Nothing has happened to Stallman's 35 years of work. Last I checked, nobody's deleting the emacs repo today.

... but he increasingly doesn't represent the future of computing, let alone GNU and FSF. There's a reason so much of Ars Technica's reporting on rms gets headed with that "Old Man Yells At Cloud" meme image. Sometimes, leaders are changed out. Stallman's continued work is up to Stallman, but he doesn't necessarily get the privilege of continuing to lead GNU (and he doesn't have the privilege of continuing to lead the FSF).

Besides, this is open source we're talking about, not a VC company. If people rally behind rms and fork the projects, the projects get forked.

But I anticipate that won't happen, because he increasingly doesn't represent where software is going. I don't think he actually wields the thought-leadership cachet he used to. We shall see.

Stallman never represented the future of computing. He was the same backward guy in the 1990s that he is now, the major difference being that the only feasible alternative to GCC in those days was whatever shitty proprietary compiler your vendor slapped together, so sites adopted the GNU suite because it was better than the alternatives.

It was never Stallman's goal to "represent the future of computing". It was his goal to preserve the spirit of the past, specifically the 1970s AI lab at MIT where hackers could just log in and hack, and didn't have to worry about vendors locking them out from their data or equipment.

Look, I don't agree with Stallman, on a lot of things including software. But without his sort of lone-voice-crying-in-the-wilderness extremism, where would we be? Lots of people, including Gary Kildall, Chuck Moore, and Steve Wozniak could plausibly claim to have been at the vanguard of a culture of openness and sharing in computing. But it was Stallman who had the courage to come out and say, "these are the freedoms we demand, and you're a shithead if you abrogate them." We need more courageous voices like that. They are in short supply, especially as the loudest voices in open source now come from large companies who have much to gain by compromising the Four Freedoms.

You're definitely painting with a broad brush. You can read Stallman's site and see for yourself that he is as left as they come (which is waaaay more left than "liberal"). Insinuating that there is some grand left-wing cabal conspiring to oust the "true hackers" is wrong. Some people apparently think Stallman is unfit to lead GNU, other people think he is. There is no need to throw accusations of malice around.

When I say "left liberal", think Chomsky, not Hillary Clinton. Someone who thinks individual freedom is paramount, but who also thinks that corporations are just as bad as governments.

The presently dominant current in the left prioritizes social justice over individual liberty, up to and including legal restrictions on freedom of speech under a constitution which expressly forbids such restriction (cf. the New York City ordinance forbidding the use of the term "illegal alien").