Hi, Deb, You shouldn't really expect anyone believe any of your far less over-the-top allegations, after you cried wolf putting your name under obviously false allegations, should you? Didn't you think ahead that you'd be ruining your reputation to the point that even any true allegations you might have would be harder to believe after that?
Furthermore, what do any of the concerns you raised here have to do with his being a member of the board of the FSF? Do you expect that, if he were to resign from the board, he'd stop leading the movement, or the GNU project, or no longer be invited to speak at conferences all around the world? Even if someone were to take your allegations against the leader of the FS movement as true based on nothing but the word from an OSI associate, there's a total disconnect between them and the associated demands and expectations. Do you see that disconnect, and how it makes the whole thing come across as about control over the FSF (and, for some, GNU), and not at all about good manners in the FS movement? Of course some people may have been misled, or not understood the political context, but you? You've been involved in FLOSS politics for so long, you did great jobs in public communication, it's just too hard to believe that you didn't perceive these blatant disconnects, the huge gap between the allegations you bring up now and those you signed-off on in the hate letter you helped draft, while knowing them to be false! Now, you probably know that I've also arranged several of RMS's tours, had him stay at my place and of several other close people several times. I have heard and witnessed some of his weirdnesses. I have watched him get angry and ask to be left alone for a bit to put himself back together, and then getting more angry when people wouldn't leave him alone. I have seen him get very upset a number of times, when he made clear what he needed, and then someone tried to fool him and hoped he wouldn't notice. I have seen him at conferences, wanting to be left alone to work, and being constantly interrupted (harassed?) by a stream of requests for pictures and autographs, to the point of his nearly losing his temper. I have witnessed his staring habit about 25 years ago, I heard from friends who advised him about it and confirmed he'd succeeded in his effort to leave it behind 15 to 20 years ago, but instead of complimenting him for the effort and the success, you still hold on to it after all these years. I've witnessed him give a pleasure card to a state minister's wife, who was lead organizer of the conference in which it happened. He had handed them out to others, of all genders, before and after. Some people find that as suspicious as having a mattress in his office. Most others find tender embraces and sleeping on a mattress perfectly normal, inoffensive human behavior. Now, you know what has never happened to me? Get a complaint from someone at any of the events I co-organized or attended, about his asking someone on a date. Not once, in 16 years of close and relatively frequent face-to-face interactions with him, and even more with others who had been in his presence. It doesn't mean he hasn't asked people on dates, just that he wasn't impolite or inappropriate at it. I have heard complaints about other matters that are a lot less important, such as how often he showered, his noisy chewing, how much embarrassment he caused by explaining what an operating system was, to the person who asked a question using the phrase "Linux operating system", and to studends to whom the person taught operating systems. I have also read about people who took, and some who pretended to take offense at him after hearing or reading about misrepresentations or inventions of things he supposedly did, and those misrepresentations and inventions be taken completely out of proportion, and then be cited over and over as true, as if he'd really done something horrible. Like interrupting someone during a speech, or saying that the conference rules that stated that a room had to be vacated for the next speech did not apply because the room was not going to be used in the next slot. Like taking issue at the term "emacs virgin", but not at Virgin Mary, that inspired the joke, that's just as gendered and just as inoffensive. Like saying he defended serial rapist Epstein when he opposed accusation inflation against Minsky who turned out to be innocent. Like when a hate letter falsely labeled him sexist, paedophile, eugenist, and transphobe, over things he wrote that required a lot of twisting and ill intent to turn into those false narratives. Like when a joint letter labeled him unsuited to lead the movement he founded and brought from the ground up. Like when people got vindictive that the FSF still wanted to listen to him, and started threatening to leave the GNU project that he never stopped leading if that wouldn't be reversed. How does it even affect GNU? the FSF never changed its support for GNU!) I believe there are some people who believe the allegations against him, and get angry at what's attributed to him, and then set out to overthrow Stallman, rather than the ugly strawman that was painted of him. I also believe some people have legitimate gripes with him, and the legitimate and true ones are even smaller than the ones you painted with the hearsay you presented, and with the twisted versions you told of a tiny collection of true stories. It still find myself wondering why, if your hearsay had any truth whatsoever in it, no such thing has ever been told me by someone to whom it happened. One hypothesis that occurs to me is that you're just doing your current job. I don't like this one, and I'd like to think you wouldn't go so low, but after you went as low as co-drafting and undersigning that hate letter full of lies and misrepresentations, I don't know what else to expect from you. Another is that people may have lied to you in the presumably few reports you got. RMS bashing as a means to distance people from his ideas is no news to me. It was practiced with the determination you'd expect of olympic athletes at the job I held for nearly two decades. Now, considering that Mr Torvalds is always accompanied by LF representatives at conferences, to avoid false accusations of sexual harassment, and that he's a lot less of a threat to the business models of the companies with the greatest capitalizations in the stock market, mostly owned by many of the richest individual centi-billionaires (sp?) in the world, whose ethics are knowingly on par with those of Epstein, who was friends with several of them... Why wouldn't RMS be a target of even more lies? That news about his return to the FSF gets negative coverage all over the sold-out tech press, highlighting the hate letter but giving no attention whatsoever to the far more popular support letter, suggests some concerted tech media campaigning (not driven by any of us, I'm sure; probably by some of the same corporate interests who've otherwise supported the hate letter). It's not just that nobody would report on a person and an organization to highlight their supposed irrelevance. Such reporting of irrelevance happened a lot to former president Lula too, while he was persecuted over false accusations, and when his persecutors were unmasked. It's that even the ugly reports about RMS that started around mid Sept 2019 would unanimously associate him with Free Software, when we all know that the press, left to its own devices, will report him as father of Open Source, even after he asks reporters and editors promise they won't do that to him. Would you dare claim with a straight face that it's a coincidence? With all of this taken together, including so many other known-false allegations, even some undersigned by you, it's not unreasonable to expect that RMS could also be a target of false allegations of sexual misconduct. He's generally not accompanied during conferences, so it's not hard at all for someone to be paid to report something that never happened, or to invent or exaggerate or twist a story and pass it on. And you know what? That's quite in line with such things never being reported at conferences that I attend with him. It wouldn't be just one person's word against his: I'd be there, witnessing the attempt, and contradicting the false report. -- Alexandre Oliva, happy hacker https://FSFLA.org/blogs/lxo/ Free Software Activist GNU Toolchain Engineer Vim, Vi, Voltei pro Emacs -- GNUlius Caesar _______________________________________________ libreplanet-discuss mailing list libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss