I'm not a Russian bot and yes, I did sign the support letter.

I hope that I'm wrong here and there is evidence of actual bots, but as far as I can tell you're making this judgement based on the fact the people signing the RMS support letter have Russian sounding names. First off, yes I don't doubt that the totalitarian oppressive and oppressive governments are using this type of technique, in fact they are probably using it a lot because it is highly effective. However, it seems exceedingly unlikely that they have any interest in a spat in an, on the whole, insignificant professional organization.

I think it is worth reevaluating your opinion, as understanding the other side of an argument is useful and helps us understand the world better. Generalising, a bit in my experience Russians tend to be slightly technocratic valuing pragmatism over ideology, which seems natural considering that it was beaten out of them by a series of absolutist despots.

Still their opinions are valid even if most people in Europe and the US, no matter their political beliefs, will consider RMS to have perjured himself as an ideological leader to the extent that trust can not be mended, and consequently must resign.

"in my experience Russians tend to be slightly technocratic valuing pragmatism over ideology"

Strange, I always experienced the FSF as ideological and Linux as pragmatical with their grey areas of closed drivers. This reads like the world upside-down :) Is Copyleft Free Software suddenly pragmatic? No offense, mostly just curious.

None taken. My comment wasn't necessarily about Free vs Open source software, but about leaders for the free software movement. From my point of view RMS seems like a strong leader from a technocratic perspective, he has written significant portions of the code for the GNU "operating system" and of course is still the leader of the GNU project. His means of accomplishing his political goals are practical - writing software with copyleft licences and boycotting other alternatives. To accept RMS as a leader we must take a technocratic view we ignore everything but his performance, in a narrow sense.

I myself am no fan of RMS (although I'm also critical of the way he was "cancelled") so it is much harder to put justification for an opinion I don't share to paper but I hope this clears up my previous post somewhat.

Russian sounding names, many with little GitHub activity and most are certainly not major contributors to major projects. So already pretty sus.

Then there's this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26618253

Even assuming that each and every one of those signatures has a human behind it, it smells more like a brigading attempt than it does an outpouring of genuine good will toward Stallman from members of the community in good standing.

A sizeable segment of corporate-backed OSS is against Free Software for business reasons, and that mission currently aligns with the interests of the anti-rms mob. Those corporations see the FSF turning into a copy of the neutered OSI as a positive outcome.

Signatories of the support letter have all left links to their GitHub profiles or personal websites. Not comprehensive, but a quick glance of the 20 or so around my signature shows actual humans, most of whom are actively making commits to projects on GitHub in the past year or so.

That doesn't seem like a fair characterization. Yeah, a lot of the names do look Slavic, but what makes you believe they're bots?

I understand the point but Khmer Rouge?

I know it's impossible but it would be very interesting to see how the participants in each list break down by $IDENTITY_GROUP.

Edit: it seems some people are not interested in this data

I could see companies starting to screen applicants using these lists.

Different companies would choose which list to use according to their own politics and culture.

Totally hypothetical: Coinbase and Google will probably turn rms-open-letter into a denylist. Twitter will do the opposite.

This is all conjecture, but I could see it happening. It's why I feel I shouldn't sign.

There's already a script to block people on GitHub based on signing one of the letters, written by an infosec furry (but i repeat myself):

https://twitter.com/kyhwana/status/1375651591672324096

One list is full of people who have achieved big things, and are in positions of power.

The other is full of throwaway and inactive github accounts.

which isn't particularly surprising if people are worried about getting cancelled.

(FWIW I haven't signed either, and don't know enough about RMS' actions to commit to a perspective).