[r3856283]

I will also point out that this is an anonymous blog post from someone who has published no way to contact them privately and has never posted to the emacs mailing list (at least from the domain of their blog).

It is a one-sided view, and I see at least one important inaccuracy. FSF and RMS were certainly not asked for their view. Given that, would it make sense for RMS or FSF to write anything about this post publicly to give it validity and attention? Very doubtful.

Given all that, I found this bit pretty amusing: "I'd be surprised if he or any of the people with any influence even read it", how would the author ever find out? lol.

It is sad that this person cares about emacs, but dropping a big dis track and walking away without even suggesting any practical solutions really does not help things. Emacs has a very few core maintainers, FSF has a small staff augmented by volunteers, this is not some faceless entity like a big corporation or government.

Update: the author has since published their email address. Good for them.

[mort96]

I'm not sure what sorts of "practical solutions" you could possibly imagine. The core problem here is that Stallman has strongly held positions he won't budge on which harms the competitiveness of Free Software, and that all of GNU is subject to his whims. Would you have been more happy if the post had ended with "GNU and the FSF must replace Stallman"? Maybe if it ended with "GNU shouldn't be under the BDFL model anymore, there should be a leadership committee"?

[Andrew_nenakhov]

Whatever Stallman views are, you can always start a new org and express your views that benefit the Free Software instead of harming them. Thus you we'll naturally outcompete the FSF and improve Free Software competitiveness.

It's not like Free Software is exclusive property of rms and FSF. Many parties can take part in the fight.

[mort96]

Okay but a major point of the post, whether you agree or not, is that Stallman's views is harming the technical merits of GNU software, making copyleft software less competitive than it should be. That's not going to change just because you start a new organization which tries to evangelize for Free Software in a better way.

[Andrew_nenakhov]

Well I agree that it is a major point of the post. An no, I don't agree with this major point, in that Stallman's views somehow harm GNU anything. Anyone who believes he can do a better job can try doing a better job. But for some reason most such critics want Stallman do a job according to their expectations. No, it is not how it works.

I also find Stallman's position on a contributor/project head positions imbalance to be perfectly reasonable. Contributor has to convince project head to do something. Project head doesn't need to do that. If a contributor is unhappy, he can fork the project, become the head himself (with all the problems that such position brings), and do a better job.

[selfhoster11]

Nothing prevents such future FSF successor organisation from forking all GNU projects and setting a different contribution policy or whatever. You won’t be able to change/upgrade the licensing terms unless you get the blessing from FSF itself, but then, Linux seems to be managing fine on GPLv2 so maybe it’s not such a big issue.