This would make intuitive sense as there are two different crowds watching two movies here.

The older, more male-skewed crowd is familiar with rms from his pioneering work in Free Software, and is willing to cut him leniency on past indiscretions, cringey jokes, and off-the-cuff political rants.

The younger, more gender mixed crowd sees little to no value in the FS movement; GPL is a nuisance to the Silicon Valley companies at which they work, and they've all been raised on iPhones, etc. rms is yet another toxic male from the old guard; another loathsome dinosaur.

I don't think your description of the second group is very charitable.

Charitable or no, it seems to be accurate in a day and age where large corporations "heart" "open source" while simultaneously hindering software freedom, digital privacy, and the like on never-before-seen scales. It seems mighty convenient that public outrage happens to be aiming at one of the most vocal opponents of things like DRM and online surveillance, and happens to be of at least some benefit to those peddling said DRM and online surveillance.

And it doesn't seem like that second group has much of an intention to be "charitable" to those in the first group or the sympathizers thereof. That doesn't necessarily mean there's free reign to be as uncharitable as possible, but it does encourage that feeling to be mutual.

But this is begging the question. The post assumes that Stallman's good work does outweigh the bad and that the only way to conclude that he is causing problems is if one doesn't believe in the FSF principles at all. But that's just not true. One can absolutely be in support of the most intense FSF principles and still conclude that Stallman is not an appropriate leader. As evidence, consider the actual FSF members who support his ousting. They aren't just corporate stooges who see GPL as a cancer.

This would be a more compelling argument if many of the signatories of the anti-RMS letter weren't also former employees of the FSF.

This is not an argument at all.

If you ask any former employee about his old boss, the opinion is more likely to be negative (or else he'd be a current employee). It is rather rare for people to part with the job amicably.

If RMS as a boss consistently makes hundreds of people, who are otherwise interested in working at the FSF, unhappy enough to quit. That is absolutely an indictment of his abilities as a leader.

Also, the fact that these people were ever employees of the FSF invalidates the claim that they're a group that "sees little to no value in the FS movement; GPL is a nuisance to the Silicon Valley companies at which they work", since they're FSF employees who don't work for Silicon Valley companies and presumably like the GPL, as they work at the FSF.

Could you please publish your results? Exploring this would be interesting. Did you account for non-english and gender neutral names? So far it seems that Americans are over-represented in the open letter.

What about the ratio on this one?

https://www.wetheweb.org/post/cancel-we-the-web

What's the ratio of each? Is there a tracker?

Not sure where you're getting your numbers from, but I get the feeling they'd be different if you were only counting biological women as female.

>Not sure where you're getting your numbers from, but I get the feeling they'd be different if you were only counting biological women as female.

Leah is an outspoken defender of FSF.

https://libreboot.org/news/rms.html#rms-is-not-transphobic https://twitter.com/n4of7

Transpeople are probably still targeted by the propaganda more than biological women are.

I mean those as two intersecting groups (lost the word when editing).