| He hasn't said anything, and moreover the FSF was awfully secretive about the fact that he was rejoining: https://twitter.com/fsf/status/1374399897558917128 It is certainly possible that between 2019 and now that he is no longer "unwilling to change his mind." (I think that's more important than whether he "repented"/"atoned"; I'm not looking for a YouTube apology video, I'm looking for an effective leader.) But a) given that complaints about his leadership approach had been around for decades, it's a priori unlikely that anything changed in the last year and a half without further information, b) his announcement didn't say anything about reflecting on why he stepped down, he just said he's back and isn't planning on stepping down again, and c) he's continued leading the GNU Project, which the FSF provides organizational stewardship for, everything points to nothing having changed. We don't know why the FSF put him back on the board - we don't know if the board asked or he asked. We don't know whether they took any of the above into account. We don't know what his role on the board is. The only statement the FSF made is that one tweet. (And, in any case, being a member of the FSF board is a leadership role.) There's a lot of concern apart from the text of the open letter about the FSF's secrecy. For instance, see this statement from the EFF https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/statement-re-election-... and this one from KDE https://ev.kde.org/2021/03/24/on-the-reappointment-of-rms-fs... . I agree that the open letter doesn't go into full detail about why the authors of the letter believe that no meaningful change has happened, but I think they are justified in believing it. |