[josephg]

Thanks; this is an insightful perspective and I appreciate the thoughtful reply.

My question then is this: would the FSF be more or less effective in their political goals with someone else at the helm?

My worry is that RMS’s prickliness and generally poor social skills harm the free software movement more than they help it. Every story about RMS from people who actually interact with him seems to be really cringe inducing. And that’s not what I want from a leader. And I don’t see how abandoning respectability outside the software/political arena helps them campaign for their goals.

What they need to do is to set out a clear vision for the future, make useful code and inspire young engineers to carry the flame. Reading comments here shows me that some people find RMS inspiring, which is good. And maybe the FSF doesn’t have anyone better suited for the job. But in any case, the FSF as it stands now isn’t an organisation I’ll ever want to be involved with.

[Aloha]

Often the visionary is the wrong person to carry the vision beyond some point.

I know people who are serial doers of things - be it starting a business, an organization, a whatever, but are lousy at running and shepherding their creations, if they're lucky, they're aware of these limitations, if not, well... I think RMS is in the not category - and while he can and should continue as the spiritual leader of the movement, he probably should not be the one doing the day to day leader for the future, beyond that, what of succession planning, the man is 68.

Most of the complaints I've seen about RMS are.. well.. pretty normal among geeky people, he's socially clueless, applies logic instead of empathy, etc. He has no doubt, said many problematic things but the paucity of actual harms from these things is notable.

In short, I agree with the sentiments here, FSF needs an effective leader, and whatever annoying/clueless things RMS has said, isn't really relevant to that discussion.

[jfengel]

I don't think his behavior towards women should be so easily dismissed as "not actual harms".

That behavior makes women uncomfortable. I suspect he feels like "I made an offer, you said no, and it's done." It doesn't work that way. The best analogy I can draw is if a stranger came up to you before a meeting and asked you to give him your watch. That's going to feel uncomfortable and weird, for the rest of the day and longer.

Even if neurodivergence makes it difficult to discover that for himself, it's surely been explained to him. That means he knows he's making people uncomfortable and doing it anyway.

That is relevant to the discussion. He's driving off half the potential population of people to work on things. That half is under-represented -- and part of the reason they're under-represented is that the community keeps making excuses for people who behave like that. Then they wonder why nobody has ever explained women to them -- and why women keep being upset.

The "problematic" things seem to me like the least of it. He's rude to people whose help he needs -- not just women, but to women in a way that's specific to women in addition to all of the other ones. That's exactly the opposite of what a leader does. Leaders get people to work together, especially when the worker are volunteering.