https://stallman-report.org/

Carmen Bianca BAKKER

The Stallman report

Comprehensive report detailing Richard Stallman's political program in defense of sexual violence, allegations of misconduct, and the misconduct of the Free Software Foundation

The Stallman report (stallman-report.org)

The thing that frustrates me about this is that the #FreeSoftware community wastes so much fucking time on #Stallman. So much time and effort is wasted on the eccentricities of one man, even though anyone with a gram of sense can see that this man is unfit to lead the social movement for our digital liberation.

And we are so utterly beholden to him. So much of our language and framing is Stallmanesque, sometimes undeservedly. My biggest pet hate is the narrative that 'you, the user, will be free if you use Free Software'. No you won't, especially not if you are not technically inclined. We are freed together as a community, not as individuals. The system of collaboration and the sharing of our digital infrastructure makes this thing liberating for all of us, not my ability to patch better Esperanto support into glibc.

And it's not like this movement needs a single leader, or that there aren't already extremely talented and dedicated leader figures in our community.

And it's not like there aren't problems with our community that aren't related to Stallman. There are so many people (men…) who make this community less lovely than it is.

But instead of lifting up other voices, or addressing other toxicity, we're stuck endlessly dealing with this one eccentric man.

Carmen Bianca BAKKER

Harping a little more on one point—some people (Reddit commentors, who am I kidding) will often retort that 'Stallman was right', and that he and the FSF are the only ones with the right zeal and conviction in the struggle for software freedom and opposition to non-free software.

And it's bullshit. There are _so many people and organisations_ who are every bit as dedicated to the project of software freedom. This movement has so long outgrown this one weird man, but if we are to believe his cult of personality, software freedom dies with him.

gondolyr

@carmenbianca Free Software is important but it can't be tied to Stallman. I can list System76 (https://blog.system76.com/post/software-freedom-day-at-system76), the Software Freedom Conservatory (https://sfconservancy.org/), NLnet (https://nlnet.nl/), and even the FSFE (https://fsfe.org/news/2021/news-20210324-01.en.html) as some organizations that are doing more for software freedom.

The FSFE is run independently from the FSF btw. (https://fsfe.org/about/fsfnetwork.en.html)

Michael Potter

@carmenbianca At this point, Stallman should probably step down for the good of the community. The controversy is harming the FSF's reputation, and they do have key roles in the community, such as litigating GPL violations.

The GNU Public License is ingenious in how it protects software from Capitalistic encroachment, and I'm sure proprietary vendors would be only too happy if people were put off from using GPL offerings.

Michael T. Bacon, Ph.D.

@carmenbianca

Yeah, the technolibertarianism of the shitty billionaires is totally rooted in OSS culture of the 90s. And a lot of the service-oriented tech companies (Facebook and Google in particular) are enthusiastic participants in open source movements and have huge amounts of their actual functional code released under very permissive licenses.

Stallman's not just a creepy old shit, his politics are woefully unfit for the 21st century.

Carmen Bianca BAKKER

good god, i'm getting _e-mails_ from troglodytes for this stupid toot i wrote. 'bla bla bla the report's author is a terrible person here's something he wrote ages ago bla bla bla this somehow invalidates everything'.

fuck off, i don't care, i didn't ask to be e-mailed, people change, i thought gamergate made some good points ten years ago, and now i'm a gay communist.

Carmen Bianca BAKKER

of course, it's not lost on me that 'we shouldn't cancel #stallman for unrelated stuff he wrote; that's all just a convenient excuse to get rid of The Only Man Who Can Save #FreeSoftware' is like their main argument, but the card says moops, and now suddenly it's convenient to tone police.

these people don't believe anything.

and it should be absolutely unambiguously abundantly clear that 'stallman wrote some weird shit 30 years ago' is NOT the thing at issue here. it is stallman's BEHAVIOUR and ACTIONS that have sabotaged our movement, hurt real-world people, created a culture that is unwelcoming, and cultivated a cult of his personality. none of which he has attempted to set right, none of which he has apologised for, and most of which he continues to do.