October 14th, 2024 Richard Stallman (aka “RMS”) is the founder of GNU and the Free Software Foundation and present-day voting member of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) board of directors and “Chief GNUisance” of the GNU project. He is responsible for innumerable contributions to the free software movement, setting its guiding principles, organizing political action, and directly contributing to a flourishing free software ecosystem. The majority of Stallman’s political activity has been of priceless value to society at large.
he’s not particularly relevant at this point, but even this one note (and its retraction) feel like they should put to bed whether or not Richard Stallman should have any influence over anything:
like, bro, what are you doing. beyond being abhorrent, this is the sort of nonsense Reddit used to be infamous for and it made the website fucking rancid. why would anyone want to share a political movement with Stallman when he has to be debated out of positions like “you should not have sexual relations with people under the age of 13.”
Yeah it’s a very thorough report and makes it very clear just how little excuse there is for FSF and Stallman’s other defenders to continue to enable and support his behavior. Agreed that he himself isn’t particularly relevant, but his supporters are still very influential in some areas of the open source community.
hilariously you can see some of the reflexive defense of him over in the FOSS thread of this article. way too many people feel obliged to run defense for this guy and it’s just cringeworthy to watch
Yeah. Well, discussions about stuff like this are good at revealing people to block and ban.