Okay. This is the excuse, not the reason right? As in, the real reason is the FSF is generally incompatible with the way in which most of these companies and organizations want to make money, and blaming Stallman is the current easy out?
How is the FSF fundamentally incompatible with how the FSF Europe, the Tor project, the Software Freedom Conservancy, ... want to make money? IMHO there's too many people who have worked a lot and deeply for Free Software goals against him to explain it as an attempt to make Free Software weaker.
If I'm being cynic, if you are a large company wanting the FSF to be less relevant, you should probably encourage them to let RMS alienate more people. To quote a recent HN comment of mine: "RMS came to speak at my university. He probably did more damage to general student perception of anything associated with the FSF than industry-ass-kissing professors did in the 3 years prior in that one day", and my impression is that the FSF is worse off to achieve its stated goals with him at the helm.
>if you are a large company wanting the FSF to be less relevant, you should probably encourage them to let RMS alienate more people.
Perhaps they want to steer the direction of the free software movement to be more corporate friendly, i.e. get people to write software for free but none of that pesky copyleft stuff. More directly, there is an optional "or any later version" in the GPL, so if they can get the FSF to make the next version of the GPL more corporate friendly that also includes a lot of existing software (although I don't know how popular this clause is in practice).
Can you direct me to the thread in which you detail what Stallman did to damage "student perception of anything associated with the FSF" at your university?
I have seen Stallman speak at various universities over the years, and I have witnessed the same speech and its intrinsic message fall flat on its face at, say, Stanford, whilst receiving a rapturous response from students at Berkeley just a week later.
The prevailing student culture has much to do with how well a message is received, particularly in these politically charged and volatile times when people so easily get distracted from the message by the messenger himself, or even third-party reports regarding the messenger's past.
It's a marathon, not a sprint; I'll bet the pure Streisand effect of more people even simply knowing who RMS is could likely outweigh any of this short run "alienation."
The GPL is not “incredibly corporation hostile”, it's a verbose legalese for “tit for tat”. You got that libre software for free? Fair enough, just give back what you added to it.
> This is the excuse, not the reason right? As in, the real reason is the FSF is generally incompatible with the way in which most of these companies and organizations want to make money, and blaming Stallman is the current easy out?
Yes, that's why plenty of nonprofits orgs and their leadership have also complained about the same things, and why an FSF board member resigned over it. All the complaints about Stallman are false-flag objections by people with a covert agenda of making money undermining software freedom.
That's much more likely than that Stallman, like so many other prominent figures in a number of fields, is genuinely being impacted by society’s reduced tolerance when it comes to broad subject of sexual harassment.
I'm not saying all those people are lying or false-flagging, I'm saying there exist quite a few other parties that perhaps don't care much about harassment but would like to see his ideas suppressed, and might find this convenient and play it up.
What I absolutely will not do is presume guilt based on what might be something of a metaphorical lynch mob. I expect and require something that looks like due process, and so I'm continuing to watch how this public conversation goes.
