I know what I have to do but I don't know if I have the strength to do it.
Stallman's essays and the free software movement in general are what lead to my first utopian imaginations of communism back in the early Bush years. He was blinded by idealism, but he was generally right about the social ills of proprietary software.
It seems like he's a creep though and I have no idea why GNU and the FSF have to die on this hill.
The GNU Project and the FSF are dying on this hill because Stallman founded both of them, and both projects are essentially just Stallman and his favorite handful of useless tech bros in suits.
He seems to be self aware about being a creep though and he seems to be able to separate his creep shit from his FSF work. I think it's fine to keep him, you don't really have to like the guy personally and I don't think he ever did anything illegally creepy.
The issue here is not whether or not the FSF should let Stallman back. The FSF demonstrated that they can't do anything without Stallman, so it's thus not much of a "foundation" and it needs to die so better free software orgs can take the spotlight instead.
Stallman straight up defended a dead MIT professor who was named by a 17-year-old Epstein victim, and in this statement he compares false rape allegations to police brutality. He doesn't name the victim. He doesn't apologize. He should stick to being another weird old coder on Gentoo forums. It would be a far more graceful and respectable course of action than what he is doing now.
Fair points I guess, I admit I'm not really well informed on the situation.
I mean if you did so much as to read Stallman's own statement linked here you'd see:
False accusations -- real or imaginary, against me or against others -- especially anger me. I knew Minsky only distantly, but seeing him unjustly accused made me spring to his defense. I would have done it for anyone. Police brutality makes me angry, but when the cops lie about their victims afterwards, that false accusation is the ultimate outrage for me. I condemn racism and sexism, including their systemic forms, so when people say I don't, that hurts too.
It was right for me to talk about the injustice to Minsky, but it was tone-deaf that I didn't acknowledge as context the injustice that Epstein did to women or the pain that caused.
Emphasis mine. Minsky was the MIT pedo professor named by an Epstein victim. Here, he's not even acknowledging that Minsky was a pedo. Stallman is saying that he is vindicated in his stance of... checks notes ... shitting on an Epstein victim.
edit: it's really a garbage move to condemn Epstein, condemn sexism, and then claim the high ground to then shit on a child sexual violence victim.
Oof yeah I just googled Minsky, yeah he should have definitely shut the fuck up there.
it needs to die so better free software orgs can take the spotlight instead
Which ones do you think are likely contenders?
Off the top of my head, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is excellent and handles a few open source initiatives (but mostly focuses on digital privacy and digital freedoms, First Amendment stuff). There are also some specific free software communities that tend to be socially progressive and accepting, such as the KDE, BSD, and Plan9 communities.
Software Freedom Conservancy is likely the next org to take over the hole that the FSF will leave. It's already more or less a legal arm that has gone to court over license violations and won and a fiscal sponsor for free software projects. The big difference, I guess, is that they are not completely exclusionary of software that may be used on unfree systems or bring in unfree components, like how FSF has never once recommended Debian despite the fact that it's entirely free software in the base install.
Outside of that, there's various smaller groups that more or less just fiscal sponsors like Software in the Public Interest.
Stallman is shitty, and this is a very shitty statement. The only statement you need to know from it is:
It was right for me to talk about the injustice to Minsky
Stallman wants to talk about how he cares about women's rights all of a sudden, and that he cares about Epstein victims, but he can't own up to the fact that this backlash happened when he publicly accosted an Epstein victim. Virginia Giuffre is not named. Giuffre doesn't matter to him. He'd rather defend the legacy of a dead pedo MIT professor.
