Why Richard Stallman's Return to the FSF Is Not To Be Celebrated ...

Relevant Links:

Interesting Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro and Overview
02:00 - RMS Return Announcement
03:00 - Monentization Note and PSA
03:35 - RMS Overview
04:40 - RMS's Contraversal Statements
05:55 - Why People Are Upset
06:58 - Damage Caused by RMS and Similar Figures
09:35 - My time with FSF Savannah
13:00 - View of the FSF while Contributing to HURD
14:30 - 'Ethical' Linux vs. Reality
16:30 - Ideology Tops All
18:30 - The FSF's Regressive Point of View
19:24 - Looking into RMS's Mindset (ft. OLPC)
20:36 - Submit or GTFO
23:00 - Closing Thoughts

On Monday, the Free Software Foundation quietly announced the return of Richard M. Stallman to the board of directors. While originally seen as the father of the Free and Open Source movement, Stallman (also known as rms) has had a long history of conversial comments and creating toxic and hostile work environments. This includes victim blaming, sexism, and advocating that minors are not harmed by adult relationships. RMS was finally released from MIT and FSF in 2019 (for many far later than should be), but was reinstated with no fanfare.

As a major insult to injury, this was done directly after LibrePlanet, a conference held to celebrate free software hosted by the FSF, and no one in LibrePlanet was told in advance of this. This prevented anyone from pulling out or otherwise announcing their displeasure at rms's return. RMS has been a major source of toxicity, and myself and many others have signed an open letter asking for RMS to be dismissed, and for the entire FSF's board of directors to resign. As of writing, there has been no response to this.

As someone who has both experienced RMS taking dump on projects, and a lot of the mentality that goes on within the FSF and their projects, I've warned people for years that getting invovled with the FSF or rms is a horrid idea, but I never really spoke up or went into details about it. However, I've decided to break my silence on this because I can't in good conscious let yet another toxic figure with no remorse step back into a leadership role unchallenged, so this is basically my experiences with the FSF as a volunteer on Savannah, and my view on how many FSF projects work from my time at both Hurd and Canonical, and how the FSF operates as both a church and cult who shuns those who can't or won't conform in an attempt to help explain how we got here.

#FSF #RMS #PublicDisgrace

[Halesnaxlors]

Another point is that it's odd how a community based on freedom and decentralisation has happened upon such strict and centralised leadership, and also how many still support him. Isn't that losing sight of the goal a bit? I don't want Bill Gates or RMS to have power over my software. That's the beauty of FOSS, isn't it?

[JmbFountain]

The funniest thing about the FSF is that their GFDL (GNU free documentation licence) is not considered a Free licence by, for example, Debian

[Jookia]

I haven't been in direct contact with RMS or the FSF, but I can relate to the exhaustion and disappointment in your voice. Everyone who's been even around these communities seems to have an RMS story, and it's never a good one. There's not much I can really add, but I do have some RMS hardware trivia for you:
In 2014 the Novena open laptop was launched and sold. This laptop ran without blobs, had full open source schematics and PCBs, and relied on components that were NDA-free. You could download the technical reference manual for the CPU and write drivers if you wanted! Of course, the creators at the time wanted to see if they could get RYF endorsement. This shouldn't have been a big issue, right? Because at the time the only comparison was old Thinkpads built by Lenovo with hacked together firmware. Well after about a year of emails, RMS' opinion was that this wasn't good enough, simply because you could load proprietary firmware on to the chip at all. The laptop creators even tried to negotiate special production runs where they would blow fuses to prevent loading some firmware, but as there was still some firmware that could be loaded and there was no way for them to really do anything about it the RYF endorsement didn't happen.
I really do wonder just how far RMS has set things back. Who knows, if he didn't micromanage everything maybe we'd have HURD.

[fallen]

I really respect Richard Stallman for his dedication and what he gave the open source community starting with GNU but yeah no one is perfect

[LARPANET_]

I'm trying to get into this free software scene, but it seems like there's a ton of infighting and snobbery. Are there any online communities in this field that consciously try to maintain a better culture? There's no way I can learn all this stuff alone.

[NickNorton]

I feel Richard Stallman is someone with good philosophy to start with.
Became distorted and bitter with years.
I'm almost as old as him and you cant exist with humans by offending them.
It's easy to lash out and say inappropriate things. You need to do the hard things
Or society will not like you.

[zenmark]

this dude literally just fuckin said "oh you're a girl you must be lost" as the opener to his talk because he saw a woman in the audience. a woman from the CS department had organized the talk.

[oneirophon]

Hey, so I just discovered your channel and let me just say it's extremely refreshing to see that you see RMS for what he really is, although I'm so sorry you had to to go through such traumatic experiences, and then watch as the hero worship for this man continues. The way so many people in this community see RMS as this software messiah who can do no wrong is the single most frustrating thing about the open-source community to me, and I will never understand the mindset that just because someone did something really good, they can't possibly be a bad person overall, or that just because RMS founded the movement decades ago, he can't possibly be bad for it or unfit to lead it.

I'm glad to see that most of the comments on this video seem to be in agreement; it brings me hope that he and the FSF will ultimately be remembered by the community as the complicated and uncomfortable parts of our history.

By the way, on the topic of the FSF being cult-like, I've mockingly called RMS's diehard supporters a cult, but never knew how unsettlingly fitting that label was until I saw this video; the way you described FSF's attitude toward the use of proprietary software genuinely reminded me of some of the things I've heard from former Scientologists. They're obviously not anywhere near as bad as something like Scientology, but definitely seem to at least border on being an actual cult. It really is sad that this is the organization that started it all and brought us so much of the FOSS ecosystem, but I truly hope that it soon becomes nothing more than what I mentioned in the previous paragraph -- complicated history.

Sorry for any typos, as it's almost 3:00 in the morning and this comment is a lot longer than I thought it would be, but I just had to get out all my thoughts and support. If you see this comment, I hope it brings you at least a small bit of encouragement and closure!

[AbandonedVoid]

Stallman made some valuable contributions, but he's overblown, long past his prime, and thinks he's more than he ever was.

[pnfisher]

Thanks for posting this. I worked at the FSF from 2001 to 2004. It's important to separate the FSF staff doing their jobs to improve the free software community from RMS and the board. They're often at odds with each other and it's a very difficult environment to work in.

[TheBardicDruid]

You can't expect much from a guy who refuses to a GUI or Xwindow, and brags about it. He's never had to write code or administer an actual network for a paycheck, he's always had his academia paycheck. He has no idea what it's like to work in an environment where a temper tantrum would get you fired, he's completely out of touch with the real world.

[nineh]

>I will not go into details
The details are where he's exonerated, for example he had a mattress in his office because he was living in his office, the sordid implication being he was poor. His statements on Minsky weren't public statements but they were leaked and then instrumentalized to deflect from multiple administrators and researchers having personal and financial relationships with Epstein (this includes the head of Media lab who had accepted money from Epstein privately and on behalf of the Media Lab). RMS statements were predicated on Minsky not being aware of what's going on, which while unprovable nobody is alleging the contrary.

If someone can explain how a guy from Media Lab with no connection to Epstein was the only guy that took a fall when Epstein's connections to Media Lab hit the press I'm all ears.

The rest is anecdotal or political opinions which I don't necessarily disagree with, but frontloading the sketchy allegations shouldn't be used as a rhetorical tactic to make them more compelling.

[gbraadnl]

Totally agree on the unpopular opinion: the FSF is like dealing with a cult.

[justinoleary]

Ironic how close minded the open source godfather is 😂

[keithedwards]

Don't worry I'm sure your channel will survive. I found this video very informative and I think that it really touched my thought process back in the late 90s and early 2000s that the GPL and FSF was very cult driven. Back then I preferred the BSD license over the GPL because it gave both the original developer and the modifying developer the most freedom using the open source code even though the original developer may never see the modifying code. Now a days I think the Linux kernel might not have seen the wide adoption that it has seen without being licensed under the GPLv2 license. Anyways, I really enjoy your videos and can't wait for the next one.

[stormx]

It's telling that RMSs defenders in this comment section do not get into the specifics, preferring to mount some general complaint about "cancel culture" or "SJWs" or whatever. Tribalism over principles.

[vnldces]

17:15 screw ideologies, just apply basic logic: you tell people (and here I mean regular people with just a small interest in trying out something new, knowing nothing about this whole "open source") to try this new OS that doesn't even connect to the wifi, or doesn't load any graphics past the kernel messages bcs of missing driver. That's just plain stupid, how do you want to get more users when 80% of them don't even manage to start a working system? And asking them to manually enable something is pointless too, from their perspective, disabling some parts of the system for some ideological reasons is just plain nonsense.

[LouigiVerona]

Many people also don't question his extreme radical vision for free software. Some years ago I dug deep into his essays and wrote a critique. It turns out there are a lot of falsehoods in his essays, including misrepresentation of news, problems with proprietary software and all that. This got a bit of attention, mostly negative comments from free software supporters who thought I was defending software companies - which I wasn't.

I know YT will likely block my comment if I post a link to my site with the critique, but if anyone is interested, maybe comment here and I'll respond with the link - and maybe this won't get blocked...

[NCommander]

So, it's a few months later, and I've been debating if I want to take this video down or not. Honestly, I don't feel like I did a great job covering this, and I accidentally misframed RMS's statements on the MIT mailing list (he was not defending Epstein per say, but one of Epstein's friends). This entire episode has been rather depressing to say the least, and I've been actively harassed and more. However, I still stand by my comments relating to my experiences with FSF, Savannah, and rms basically taking a giant dump on everything.

I'm undecided, long term, what to do about this ...

[oasntet]

I avoid hero worship as much as possible so I have generally ignored anything RMS has done that isn't coding. I'm curious what the 'meritocracy' cult thinks he has accomplished, from a technical standpoint, in the last 25 years. He built some useful tools back in the 90s, but then what?