While most of the GNU maintainers appear to have tried to resolve things amicably with RMS, the social-justice contingent within open source have been calling for his removal for at least a year now, probably much longer, and they usually cite his views on sexuality as the reason why he is "problematic".
However, there have to my knowledge never been similar calls for the removal of the likes of Rubin and Butler from leadership positions in their field by social-justice advocates (within open source or outside it), despite them publicly expressing even more abhorrent views about sexuality with respect to children than Stallman has. The work of Rubin and Butler is foundational to queer theory and gender theory, so modern feminist activists are likely to be at least passingly familiar with them. Stallman may even have been referring to their scholarship when he made his controversial (and imho very wrong) paedophilia statements.
This tells me unpleasant things about the relationship between social-justice activists and paedophilia. They're made more unpleasant by the fact that I have seen at least one social-justice advocacy group defend a known, active paedophile within their ranks.
- Rubin and Butler's jobs are to make controversial statements about sexuality, Stallman's isn't (i.e., the call is to remove him as leader of the free software movement, not to get him to take down stallman.org; if he wants to wage a campaign to change social norms about pedophilia, it's a free country, but people ate equally free to point out that he can't also wage a campaign to change social norms about free software and be successful at both)
- while there may be a group more closely associated with the academic feminism community than the free software community who is dissatisfied with his statements on the merits, and we can discuss whether they are hypocritical in not criticizing Rubin and Butler (or whether there is a fourth wave of feminism and they are in fact criticizing Rubin and Butler, or whatever), the successful campaign to remove RMS from the FSF was not solely or primarily their doing. It was the work of free software hackers who a) have made it clear their concern wasn't solely views but effect of RMS's advocacy of those views on the health of the free software community - a concern that doesn't analogously apply to academic feminists advocating such views - and b) aren't obligated to have opinions about Rubin and Butler anyway.
Or put another way, if a feminist thinks Rubin and Butler's advocacy re pedophilia harm the feminism movement, they can start fourth-wave feminism with differing principles and values. If a free software hacker thinks Stallman's advocacy re pedophilia is harming the free software movement, they can't meaningfully start second-wave free software because there are no different principles and values with respect to free software.
> I still think the FSF is a valuable institution worth helping and saving
Worth saving, as is heading towards implosion and it need to be saved.
If you told members of the FSF Board of Directors that FSF would destroy itself over a political dispute over a question like "was metoo a media frenzy", it would had sounded silly. If I would had said after the 2016 election that FSF would need to take a side, left or right, no one would even consider it. FSF a year ago would never had said if they are pro-feminism, pro-MRA, pro-socialism or pro-liberalism. The closest to a political affiliation that FSF had done in the past has been their occasionally aligning with the goals of the natural allies EFF and ACLU, but even there it has only been in technical topics such as patents, copyright, forced backdoors, and crippling of software. To my knowledge FSF has never commented on non-technical ACLU work.
One thing I completely disagree with the above quotes however is the implication that he equally advocated his political views on sex as with free software. I have been to a couple of his talks and seen several on video, and sex is not a topic he mentioned. His talks are often transcripted and put online so I am open to be proven wrong, but here is a few examples: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-digital-society.html, https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/copyright-versus-community.ht..., https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/danger-of-software-patents.ht...
I don't think this is true - my sense is that 10-20 years ago, claiming "in the future, the FSF will destroy itself because RMS waded into a controversy he didn't know how to back down from" would have gotten responses of "oh, yes, of course," and at least as far back as Gamergate, "the FSF will get caught up in the broader 'culture war'" would have sounded totally plausible too. (I'm not sure "culture war" is exactly the term I want to use, but it serves the right denotational purpose here.)
Relevantly, "is RMS subject to the LibrePlanet code of conduct" seems like a thing that also touches on the "culture war" - and that was an issue in 2017. https://announce.asheesh.org/2018/12/libreplanet-speakers-as...
Oh, and people had accused free software of being socialist/communist as far back as the '90s. The whole reason the "open source" movement got started was to rebrand free software in a corporate-friendly way.
This is an excellent way to view recent events. My compliments to the author!
> The great tragedy of RMS's tenure in the supposedly universalist FSF and GNU projects is that he behaves in a way that is particularly alienating to women. It doesn't take a genius to conclude that if you're personally driving away potential collaborators, that's a bad thing for the organization, and actively harmful to the organization's goals: software freedom is a cause that is explicitly for everyone.
and this, from a former member of the FSF Board of Directors who resigned so he could speak up: http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2019/10/15/fsf-rms.html
> More importantly to the FSF, I attempted to persuade RMS that launching a controversial campaign on sexual behavior and morality was counter to his and FSF's mission to advance software freedom [....] After years of conversing with RMS about how his non-software-freedom views were a distraction, an indulgence, and downright problematic, his general response was to make even more public comments of this nature.
and this, from another former member of the FSF Board of Directors: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/52587.html
> Stallman is driving away our natural allies. It's inappropriate for him to continue as the figurehead for free software.
It is not because they simply disagreed with his political beliefs - he can believe what he likes. It is about the fact that, as a leader in the free software movement, he was driving away more people with both his public advocacy of his views and his behavior (hitting on women at conferences as soon as he met them, etc.), i.e, he was not doing his job.