There was the spat of drama in 2016, and the view of "always in the middle of drama" is IMO confirmation bias since then (the financial trouble in 2020, then Leah's return to libreboot in 2021.)
Today's drama is part of larger culture wars going on in the community:
- The pro-RMS vs anti-RMS thing going on since RMS's removal from the FSF in 2019, much amplified by his reinstatement in 2021 (the latter of which lead to most of the FSF staff walking out). Is RMS still fit to lead the FSF? Has the FSF lost its way?
- The thing about whether or not "the FSF's/RMS's RYF and FSDG policies regarding firmware and microcode are misguided and harmful".
libreboot got pulled in to that when in November 2022 it merged osboot, adopting osboot's firmware/microcode policies, which are at odds with the FSF's policies. So then some folks "forked" https://libreboot.org as https://libreboot.at and claim to be the "true" libreboot. I put "forked" in quotes because there wasn't any new libreboot development going on there; it was just a snapshot of the pre-osboot-merge libreboot releases. Then, more recently, the libreboot.at folks decided to resume development of an FSF-friendly coreboot distribution as "GNU Boot".
So yeah, I guess you can say this drama is Leah's fault in that she has taken a clear stance against the FSF's firmware/microcode polices, but so have a lot of other folks in the community.
The FSF lost its way at least 10 years ago, though probably longer. The whole tech landscape has shifted while they still focus on the distinction between firmware stored on a wifi card nand vs being loaded on initialisation. No one but RMS can work out how this makes a difference.
Their non budging stance on issues that hardly make sense or are logically inconsistent, meanwhile society is rapidly shifting to a constant mandatory surveillance state.
At this point the FSF is just a Richard Stallman fan club. So kicking him out would scrap their last bit of relevance.
I suspect the culture wars are largely a psyop by corporate interests who perceive the FSF and other user-freedom advocacy groups as obstructions to their attempts at controlling the population.
I mean, yes, but it was brought to a crest then. It went from a bunch of folks in the community separately saying "yeah, he's kinda problematic..." to a bunch of folks standing together and saying "he's problematic!"
So of course it had been going on a while if more than 3000 people were "suddenly" willing to sign the open letter against him.
Today's drama is part of larger culture wars going on in the community:
- The pro-RMS vs anti-RMS thing going on since RMS's removal from the FSF in 2019, much amplified by his reinstatement in 2021 (the latter of which lead to most of the FSF staff walking out). Is RMS still fit to lead the FSF? Has the FSF lost its way?
- The thing about whether or not "the FSF's/RMS's RYF and FSDG policies regarding firmware and microcode are misguided and harmful".
libreboot got pulled in to that when in November 2022 it merged osboot, adopting osboot's firmware/microcode policies, which are at odds with the FSF's policies. So then some folks "forked" https://libreboot.org as https://libreboot.at and claim to be the "true" libreboot. I put "forked" in quotes because there wasn't any new libreboot development going on there; it was just a snapshot of the pre-osboot-merge libreboot releases. Then, more recently, the libreboot.at folks decided to resume development of an FSF-friendly coreboot distribution as "GNU Boot".
So yeah, I guess you can say this drama is Leah's fault in that she has taken a clear stance against the FSF's firmware/microcode polices, but so have a lot of other folks in the community.