It is a one-sided view, and I see at least one important inaccuracy. FSF and RMS were certainly not asked for their view. Given that, would it make sense for RMS or FSF to write anything about this post publicly to give it validity and attention? Very doubtful.
Given all that, I found this bit pretty amusing: "I'd be surprised if he or any of the people with any influence even read it", how would the author ever find out? lol.
It is sad that this person cares about emacs, but dropping a big dis track and walking away without even suggesting any practical solutions really does not help things. Emacs has a very few core maintainers, FSF has a small staff augmented by volunteers, this is not some faceless entity like a big corporation or government.
Update: the author has since published their email address. Good for them.
It's not like Free Software is exclusive property of rms and FSF. Many parties can take part in the fight.
I also find Stallman's position on a contributor/project head positions imbalance to be perfectly reasonable. Contributor has to convince project head to do something. Project head doesn't need to do that. If a contributor is unhappy, he can fork the project, become the head himself (with all the problems that such position brings), and do a better job.
Sometimes people's flaws prevent them and the people they work with from doing good work.
A lot of people I'd describe as "principled" don't want to be anywhere near Stallman for various reasons, often related to their principles. Maybe he's just cleared his orbit of anyone else who actually fits your 4 criteria, so only appears to be unique. This seems like a rather common failure mode of personality cults, tbh.
RMS’s behavior is way past “some flaws”.
No company on earth would have let him stay this long.
Because no company on earth wanted what he wanted.
If he had different flaws, ones which companies found acceptable, it is doubtful that the state of technology we enjoy today[1] would exist.
[1] Almost all of which was built on free software foundations.
Huh? Working together in a group at a company does not imply any kind of standard for behavior, although companies pretend outwardly that there is some professional standard they abide by. The truth is that work places are filled with all kinds of horrible human behavior, always have and always will be.
People work together in bands, on art projects, on house renovations, on family housework, on adventures, on radical political movements, and it is OK for them to have complicated human relationships while they do so and capitalist companies do not deserve to have a say.
Yes, it took too long.
The system (at two separate companies) eventually worked.
That's not the only reason companies will get rid of people of course, because they are ultimately capital-dedicated authoritarian organizations. But it is a reason, which is my point.
And across the industry there is something akin to a floor of acceptable behavior. I cannot go into the office nude. I'm generally not allowed to abuse the other employees (however the higher up you are/the more important you are, the harder it gets to remove you, and it always relies on reporting).
There is a floor, and it's in practice lower than I'd like, but it exists.
Welcome to the finish sauna located inside the office.
It always context dependent. Organizations and companies in particular have cultural filters. I know people who find it toxic when people mix alcohol and work, while other find it useful to grease the professional relationship. Personally I find having a work get together at the sauna more suitable then the bar, but I am pretty sure 99% of HN belong to cultures that disagree.
define toxic.
Companies often promote people that would be immediately kicked out from any other of those examples.
Nobody would start a band with Elon Musk.
There isn't really an ideological bent there that can throw a wrench in the works unless you are doing harm as a company.
To give a counter-example: in my observation, in academia (in particular math and physics departments), there is a lot more tolerance towards excentric traits than in companies - and collaborating in a group nevertheless works.
Thus, companies are an insanely bad example to define a reasonable floor. Rather, the traits that are considered acceptable in companies are whether they are useful for making the company money. For example dark triad traits can be useful for that, so such traits are somewhat accepted in companies.
I think it might be you that’s missing the irony.
I also accept the FSF/GNU don't operate like a typical authoritarian company - although I do think there are probably more similarities due to the fact power structures and human psychology dictate certain behaviors than FSF or Stalmman care to admit. But we absolutely shouldn't expect him or the FSF to operate in a similar manner, corps are what produce the toxic behaviors in the first place (not human toxic, toxic to society).
Being nice and polite, and being forced to murder kids and pillage third world countries, that has always had the smack of pure evil to it to me.
Maybe being polite is overrated after all. Fuck off, hitler (or whomever the evil dictator is).
The whole point of FSF is that everyone can have control over their software and do whatever the heck they want with it, even if it makes no sense. Here you have an excellent example, and you're suggesting there's the same freedom in finding somebody else to control your work.
Companies represent a floor of acceptable behavior for people working together in a group in a company (and that's not even true between different companies).
There are an infinite number of people working together in a group that do behave acceptably but not in the same way a company would.
for example: politics, unions, military, volunteers, churches, research etc
They can go start their own Foundation (and those sort of people probably will do exactly that). GNU sounds silly anyway, and all the licenses are FOSS compatible. We've seen schisms already, that generally end well.
The Open Source people already did that at a grand scale, it was a massive success. Stallman's entire ideology is perfectly compatible with people doing a great job out-competing him at his own game. We would be lucky to have multiple organisations working to promote freedom in the software world, in multiple different ways.
Stallman's principles are important, the man saw really far into the future towards which we have been heading. However, in the GCC AST case these principles really got in the way of good work.
Free software is supposed to be the superior software. It seems obvious to me that superior software would be easy to interface with and build upon. GCC should have been no exception but he chose to make it hard on purpose because some proprietary software somewhere might interface with it some day and he didn't want to help those people. It's my understanding this is one of the many reasons why clang is so relevant today.
This unwillingness to help proprietary software shows up in other parts of the free software culture as well. For example, nobody seems to care much about binary interfaces, only source code that can be recompiled.
Free software isn't supposed to be anything except free. If it's superior that's nice but that isn't really the goal.
The first one I think is pretty important, as the saying goes if the cure is worse than the disease its not worth it.
Security flaws is arguable, not enough people have an incentive to work on free software, not because it doesn't get used, but because companies themselves haven't and aren't built to contribute back. We could have solved this fairly easily, just not in the software world, but I digress.
Lastly, more features, by which I don't mean in the sense you are probably thinking i.e. the narrow mindset popularized by MVP thinking "can it do X". More in the sense, "can you do X in Y manner". If you have ever used software and thought "why does it do this stupid thing or take so long" etc., its what I mean. Corps often build MVPs and "working" software that is otherwise horrible, free open source software is often used and improved by end users. Technical users, often, but they wear a user hat as well. Users can complain and request things directly.
It can produce bloated software as well, but when you don't have a budget you can do things like refactor. It will take a while but it can happen, where I think often corp software is held back by layers of deadlines, product owners, and BAs - the users are so far at the end of the chain the software they learn to live with is an absolute nightmare. They use it for some business reason, not because the software is in the least bit good.
Superior, yes, but only for "some definition of superior."
It's not meant to be "better in every way" and could never be that anyway since "best" of anything, is always a compromised nuanced collection of competing interests. With the FSF there aren't competing interests, there is one overriding interest and all others are subservient to that.
Thus GNU software is always the "most free", but is also unsuitable for most users. Emacs may be free, but my mom uses MS Word. Her definition of "best" might be different to mine, not least because her goal is writing a letter, not analysing source code.
To the original author I suggest the following - let the FSF be the FSF and decide for yourself what tools best suit you. There are plenty of alternatives to GNU software for anything that matters. If gcc doesn't do done thing the use clang etc.
The "pure" FSF approach to computing is not meant for the masses, it is meant for a tiny few. You are not one of those few. (I mean that in the pragmatic, not pergoritive sense.)
Programmers see computers as "a thing" - 99% of the world see it as just another tool to get through the day. My mom cares about her computer about as much as I care where, or how, paper is made. She cares about her software about as much as she cares about her coffee machine.
In one sense RMS is a visionary leading us all to software nirvana. In another he's irrelevant. In many ways he can be both at the same time.
It doesn't matter whether emacs does this, or gcc does that. We don't really need a more pragmatic FSF - there are already lots of open source advocates filling that space.
If you want to be pure, the FSF is the home for you. If you want to be more pragmatic then find somewhere else.
Personally I am not one of the tiny group of perfectly-pure users with no reasonable phone or laptop. Personally I think the FSF stance is absurd in most cases and out of touch in most others.
But I completely respect their mission, and I completely enjoy many of the freedoms that mission has brought me indirectly. Open Source exists because of the FSF stance - a happy side effect of it maybe - and that is a very important thing.
The world needs extremists who model an alternative extreme. Homesteaders don't make me want to live off-the-grid, but they do inspire a model of more sustainable living, I'm encouraged to use alternative water for some uses, perhaps install some solar and so on.
Long may the FSF set a standard for impractical, unwavering dedication to an unrealistic computing standard. They set a boundary for the rest of us to see in the distance, and they allow a middle ground far closer to that boundary than we would otherwise aspire to.
The FSF is gloriously irrelevant, and long may it last.
Indeed, fame is often the result of them being outspoken.
Not trying to be snarky, I'm genuinely curious. I know that RMS has been very active in the emacs-dev mailing-list. Not sure if he's become more active after he was forced to step down from FSF board, and what impact (if any) his return has made. Aside from turning emacs-dev mailing list into a weird place where one has to be a bit careful even when asking technical questions, what "good work" has RMS done in the past decade? Again, I'm not trying to downplay his achievements and accomplishments in the past, I'm sincerely interested to know about his work. I know he wrote tons of essays, but he doesn't contribute to Emacs codebase anymore, right?
The real question is whether RMS is actually doing good work. I don't question his intent, but the outcome is… let's call it "debatable." And, arguably, the gaussian on that outcome very much includes negative results — not sure where the overall curve goes…
How this could be tagged as not good enough work for somebody is beyond my comprehension.
There 100% was such a pool of people but Stallman scared or domineered them all away.
You say this as if there's not much more work to do, not many more features or improvements to be had. So your point appears to be wrong.
This puts Stallman in a pretty massive demographic, one that includes the clergy, public school teachers, and professional baduk players.
(To be clear, re #3, there exist people who have done as much or more for free software as RMS, but people don't idolize most, except perhaps Linus, to the same degree)
- There isn't a big pool of people willing to devote time to Free Software. If we had a big pool of people who are better than Stallman and more willing to work on the cause then we'd talk about them. Stallman may not be unique, but he is rare in being simultaneously 1) principled, 2) motivated, 3) willing to work very hard for not a lot of money or prestige in the circles of power and 4) willing to put himself out there pushing a message.
I can find any number of people who are 2/4 on that list. 3/4 is rare. A lot of people who want Stallman gone are going to trade off their principles when they realise that they can get invited to very expensive parties put on by the likes of Google, Microsoft and Amazon. Or plan on just fading in to the background. I think there is an interesting wound to be reopened in the Eich v. Mozilla topic on this point as well.
- No related to this article, but people have completely unrealistic standards for volunteer leadership. The man is human and has flaws. Everyone has flaws. We can tolerate some flaws in people who are doing good work.