Truth always lies in the middle. I suggest to read this article by Hannah Wolfman-Jones with a response from civil-rights expert Nadine Strossen about the whole ordeal and make up your mind [0]. I am indifferent but I think everyone should read the two sides of the story

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

Also try https://stallmansupport.org .

That article doesn't show both sides of the story. It, as well as the response, paint Stallman as a moral paragon whose flaws are just points of virtue, and dismisses criticism of him as nothing but cancel culture hysteria. It doesn't even attempt to be neutral or sympathetic when portraying the "other side."

I would think the point was to have you read an article on the other side, not to find one magic article that presents both sides.

No, the point was for the author to present their inclusion of Richard Stallman as co-author of their book as some kind of valiant effort in defense of free speech and against the cancel culture she believes unfairly maligns him. The point of the response in that article was not to provide a contrary point of view but to further defend Richard Stallman and portray his critics as enemies of free speech engaged in a witch-hunt.

And no charitable reading of a comment that says "Truth always lies in the middle. I suggest to read this article by Hannah Wolfman-Jones with a response from civil-rights expert Nadine Strossen about the whole ordeal and make up your mind" implies said article will only show the pro-Stallman point of view (literally to sell a book with his name on it) while arguments pro the other side are to be left entirely as an exercise for the reader, rather than presenting a point and counterpoint.

Can you please stop breaking the site guidelines? We ban accounts that post like this, because it destroys what HN is supposed to be for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Which article shows both sides fairly?

If I ever see one, I'll let you know. The politics around Richard Stallman seem to be such that no one without an agenda would write such an article to begin with.

Read Na85's and then one I shared. You get the two sides

Free software wouldn't even exist as a movement if it weren't for Stallman. Linux and *BSD wouldn't exist. Emacs and gcc wouldn't exist. Stallman is the FSF and they're irrelevant without him.

Lmao he is just a figurehead. Fsf doesn't depends on or needs him

>Stallman is the FSF and they're irrelevant without him.

So will the FSF just cease operations when he dies?

BSD wouldn't exist without Stallman? Could you explain that?

BSD per se would exist without Stallman--it already existed before the GNU project. But it was non-free because it contained AT&T proprietary Unix code. Stallman was influential in getting the proprietary parts replaced and the BSD license fixed to be usable for free software. Without that effort on his part and the GNU project's (e.g. the AT&T C compiler was replaced by GCC), BSD today would be quite irrelevant if not outright dead.

I thought I had read that Stallman badgered the original dev of FreeBSD into adopting an open source license, but I can't find any references now. I probably misremembered, sorry!

You may be thinking of http://techrights.org/2020/09/15/rmsf/ :

"So I asked Bostic himself. Originally, his reply was: 'It’s true. John Gillmore & Richard Stallman convinced me that opening up the sources was worthwhile, we wouldn’t have done that without their urging.'"

stallmans the founder and face of the free software movement plus most people like him despite the numerous hitpieces and toxic comments such as your own

Unless you plan on putting Richard Stallman's head in a Futurama jar, the FSF is going to have to learn to live on without him sooner or later. And if you can't even conceive of the possibility of other or better leadership, then you're not part of a movement, you're part of a cult.

*later rather than sooner

ftfy

my suspicion is most people "tolerate" him as he is irrelevant to their daily existence.

Who do you think is the best leader to grow the Free Software movement?

Just about anyone would be better.

Free Software is first and foremost a political movement. It would be better to have someone at the helm who isn't totally inept at navigating media and politics.

I sincerely doubt that.

[Tongue in cheek] Someone completely inept at navigating media and politics is perhaps the most apt choice possible given the general FOSS user experience.

Literally some 15 yr old speaking in Eastern European lecture halls “I think free software would make the world better” is a better spokesperson.

How would a 15 year old in Eastern Europe have the opportunity to perv on women in tech in the US? Isn't that sort of the GNU brand? That and shitty docs.

>How would a 15 year old in Eastern Europe have the opportunity to perv on women in tech in the US?

I never implied he would've had the opportunity.

I should've elaborated, I meant a 15 year old traveling to eastern European lecture halls to blah blah blah GNU would be better than a 30 yr retired, water bucket showering, absent minded professor-like toe jam muncher.

Why specifically in Eastern Europe though?

Do you really need to think on why or do you believe they will just come out and say they are racist. The construction of even a foo would be a better bar pretty much implies that foo is in some way diminutive. Example even Gilbert Gottfried would be a better basket ball player than that <currently unpopular player>

I just decided to reply charitably.

what free software movement? Sure the skeletons of orgs still exist but everything has been co-opted by corporations. "Free Software" is just corps outsourcing of sofware creation to suckers who do it for free or for the love, or the corps that took over those projects

it held so much promise. but now open source just exists to empower capitalists with the free labor of others. It's more than a dead dream, it's grown into something inverted against itself.

Linux is everywhere and effectively dead at the same time. What's the point anymore.

Technology is just one big HR department, one big ticket system, one big pair of khakis we can all collectively wear, one big Teams call. All of it.

It was all a mistake.

Your rant says more about you than it does about Stallman.