Nathan, I think you identify an important problem of gender imbalance in our community. It is quite likely that finding ways to make our community more welcoming to demographic groups that are currently less present than in the distribution in the global population could reduce this imbalance.
However, your diagnosis as to the supposed cause of the problem makes no sense to me. You said yourself that Stallman has not participated in our community for decades. Much as I know, his very hands-off influence in the SC has been mostly limited to licensing and strategic issues, e.g. the GPLv3 and Runtime Exception relicensing, to ensure copyleft defenses were in place to avoid abuse of such features as plugins. It may be very convenient to paint a boogey-man and expel it because that became fashionable. But sacrificing a goat or a lamb does not expiate our own sins, and expelling someone who hasn't even been present in the community can't be expected to make any real difference to that matter; it would rather make us seem *less* welcoming and more intolerant, and suggest other motivations for the move. Let's be real and honest, when was the last time anyone in the GCC community was called out for sexist behavior? When was there even conversation about it, and about how sexist behavior is not acceptable and not to be accepted among participants in the GCC community? What was our latest collective action to promote e.g. gender equity within the community? If we were to shift our collective blame over this very real and undesirable problem to someone who has any direct authority over the project, why not suggesting expelling e.g. the entire Steering Committee for its evident failure to address the problem? (I don't think it's a good idea, but that would be the first thing to try if we were to blame "management"/"leadership" rather than ourselves for it) What could support any rational belief that having RMS one extra level removed from our technical community would bring about anything resembling a solution to the very undesirable and unjust gender imbalance you've correctly identified? The action you propose, besides the absence of effect in making our community actually more welcoming, because he's already absent, would send the opposite of a welcoming signal to people with controversial or impopular opinions, to people at a certain spot in the neurodiversity spectrum, and to many others who oppose this sort of mob rule. How about we set out to take individual and collective actions that actually address the problem *in* our community? We don't need anyone's approval to call out sexist acts, nor to invite and train people with an interest in compiler technology, nor to maintain a welcoming atmosphere. A regime of terror to maintain a false appearance of a welcoming atmosphere won't get us there. If we undertake such actions, individually or collecetively, you might be surprised (but I won't be) that he, even absent from the community, would support these actions, which is the very opposite of the picture you paint. Our taking effective action on our own would help show what the real issues and intents are, and it would tell apart those who are really interested in solving the gender imbalance and the social injustices causing it, like you and me, from those who are abusing that flag as a trojan horse to serve nefarious purposes, as suggested and illustrated in https://ultralux97.medium.com/stallman-must-be-removed-a3061b09fb22 -- Alexandre Oliva, happy hacker https://FSFLA.org/blogs/lxo/ Free Software Activist GNU Toolchain Engineer Vim, Vi, Voltei pro Emacs -- GNUlius Caesar
