On 3/23/21 9:27 PM, Jos van den Oever wrote:
Hi Carl,
Does a free internet mean that people should be mobbed for their past
opinions? On proprietary Microsoft infrastructure no less.
People's actions have consequences and accountability is not mobbing.
This has nothing to do with free vs proprietary software.
In KDE, there is CWG of which we can be proud that deals with situations like
this with respect for the people on all sides of a situation.
Society is developing more awareness of differences between people and new
rules of engagements are coming and going. As humans we muddle on. A quote
from Hacker News is fitting:
"I think it is strange that, on the one hand, the tech world has been
advocating for the rights of neurodivergent people – society should accept
that people on the autism spectrum are different and that’s OK. But at the
same time RMS has been attacked for some statements very probably stemming
from his autism that, while they may seem a bit shocking and at odds with the
mainstream, were not illegal or intentionally offensive."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26535390
Using the theory of autism to excuse his behavior has been debunked
multiple times by people describing the issue much better than I can,
but TL;DR: Using (alleged) neurodivergence as a justification for
repeated toxic behavior is wrong and harmful for people that are
actually neurodivergent. Also, not illegal does not imply ethical/not
harmful.
How can you write "RMS has always been a negative force to the Free Software
movement due to his toxic behavior." when he is the one that started Free
Software? We have Free Software because RMS thought hard about what digital
freedom means and how we can make it a reality.
Both "he helped starting something good" and "he had a severely bad
influence on it" can be true at the same time
Is it sensible of FSF to reinstate Stallman? I've no idea. But I do know that
we should not damage the FSF but support them. FSF are the stewards of the
software licenses on which KDE is built.
There are plenty of other organizations fostering the development of
Open Source Software that are worth supporting instead.
⤳Jos
On dinsdag 23 maart 2021 20:49:36 CET Carl Schwan wrote:
Cheers
Nico
Hello all,
like you probably heard already RMS was reinstatement to the
Board of Directors of the Free Software Foundation. RMS has
always been a negative force to the Free Software movement due
to his toxic behavior. There is an open letter asking for his
and the current board FSF resignation available at
https://rms-open-letter.github.io/.
It was already signed by many other Free Software contributors
from many organizations (GNOME, OSI, Apache, ...) and it would be
a good idea for some us to sign it too.
This can be done by either sending a email digitalautonomy at riseup.net
or by submitting a pull request at
https://github.com/rms-open-letter/rms-open-letter.github.io/pulls.
Regards,
Carl Schwan
https://carlschwan.eu
