Red Hat pulls Free Software Foundation funding over Richard Stallman's return:
The chorus of disapproval over Richard M Stallman, founder and former president of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), rejoining the organisation has intensified as Linux giant Red Hat confirmed it was pulling funding.
Stallman announced he had returned to the FSF's Board of Directors last weekend – news that has not gone down well with all in the community and Red Hat is the latest to register its dismay.
CTO Chris Wright tweeted overnight: "I am really outraged by FSF's decision to reinstate RMS. At a moment in time where diversity and inclusion awareness is growing, this is a step backwards."
Describing itself as "appalled" at the return of Stallman to the FSF board of directors "considering the circumstances of Richard Stallman's original resignation in 2019," Red Hat said it decided to act.
"We are immediately suspending all Red Hat funding of the FSF and any FSF-hosted events. In addition, many Red Hat contributors have told us they no longer plan to participate in FSF-led or backed events, and we stand behind them," said Red Hat.
[...] Red Hat's step marks an escalation in the war of words over Stallman's return. As both a long-time donor and contributor of code, the IBM-owned company's action might well give the FSF pause for thought in a way that thousands of outraged tweets might not.
FSF president Geoffrey Knauth stated his intention yesterday "to resign as an FSF officer, director, and voting member as soon as there is a clear path for new leadership."
Red Hat statement about Richard Stallman's return to the Free Software Foundation board
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 28 2021, @02:09PM (10 children)
This is an own goal entirely of their own making. It’s been obvious for years that the FSF isn’t doing much, if anything, useful. As an example, check out the FSF annual “call to action -10 projects that need assistance.” Totally ineffective. Or their call to have Windows 7 made open source. They’re a joke.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 28 2021, @08:54PM (6 children)
Whether the borderline libelous smear articles about what RMS said about Minsky were predictable or not, the fact that so many corporate media organizations were willing to write blatant lies about what he actually said calls everything else into question. When your movement to remove him from the FSF starts with such blatant lies, the whole thing is suspect.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 28 2021, @09:19PM (5 children)
This has nothing to do with Minsky or Epstein. Stallman has been a huge asshole for decades, hasn’t done anything useful in ages (hence is salary as the head was $0 - he doesn’t actually do anything of note, it’s all for show), and people were happy that they wouldn’t have t put up with his pompous bs any more - and then the FSF screwed it up by bringing him back.
His “jerb” was PR, and he was a liability. Still is. As for other potential libellous statements, there’s plenty of evidence that he’s a fat smelly arrogant incel. And he can’t sue for damages because his reputation has sucked since before the toe-jam-eating video.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 28 2021, @09:59PM (4 children)
Yes, it does. This started over that, there were numerous smear articles about it, and the letter in opposition to Stallman mentions it as one of the key claims against him, among other total nonsense like his support of gender neutral terminology. That discredits their little movement to anyone with a brain.
To pretend that his comments about Minsky have nothing to do with this is laughable and disingenuous. If this is about RMS being ineffective in promoting Free Software, the people trying to get him removed from the FSF are far less effective than even him. In fact, many of them promote "open source" (a corporate-friendly approach that does not necessarily respect or demand user freedoms) over Free Software (which deals in ethics and demands freedoms for users).
And anyone bringing up nonsense like "fat smelly arrogant incel" shows that this is just about their hatred for Stallman as a person, and little else. Stop feigning concern over his effectiveness.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 28 2021, @11:39PM (3 children)
Is Stallman fat? Yes
Is he smelly? Yes
Is he arrogant? Hell yes
Is he an incel? Yes
Has he done anything noteworthy this century? Nope, unless you count destroying the FSF .
A lazy bum. End of story. Truth hurts, doesn’t it? And NONE of this has anything to do with Minsky or Epstein. These were all pre-existing conditions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 29 2021, @12:04AM
Have you inhaled his stench lately? Kept close track of his sexual history?
What skeletons are you hiding in your closet?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 29 2021, @12:13AM (1 child)
It's not him doing that, but the people smearing him with absolute lies. If someone endlessly defames your character, takes what you say out of context, and outright lies about what you said, the issue is with them, not you. You're blaming the victim.
All of these "open source" morons and their useful idiots are advancing the cause of Free Software even less than you claim Stallman does. These people are not honest actors, and will gladly scour any and all of your words to look for something to take out of context to use as an excuse to remove you from a position of influence. We should stop viewing them as honest actors. So, even if Stallman is absolutely incompetent, he is still far better than these unethical idiots trying to get him removed again.
Then you obviously can't read, because the letter in opposition to Stallman directly mentions those things as very key points against him.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 30 2021, @10:58PM
This whole mess was decades in the making. Not everyone is willing to overlook his decades of abusive arrogant behaviour, his misogyny, his attempts to cancel transfolk, etc. For me it was his totally tasteless statement about Steve Jobs death that made me re-examine his place in the world. He’s an asshole who hasn’t done anything of note this century, and it would be best if he were to just go away rather than be an embarrassment and a distraction.
Let me do a Jedi hand wave and say “This is not the spokesman you are looking for.”
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Monday March 29 2021, @01:38AM (2 children)
Well, it should be easy enough to determine whether RMS is a positive or negative influence.
They've had a year without RMS. What did they achieve during that year? How does it compare to what they achieved during the previous year with RMS?
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 01 2021, @08:18PM (1 child)
A better question is what have they achieved, period?
Take a look at Zoom. Nobody heard of it a year ago, but now it’s a verb - “I’ll zoom you.”
There were plenty of pre-existing free/libre alternatives. Why didn’t one of them fill the void that Zoom, Teams, and FaceTime did?
It can’t be because zoom came with any OS by default. People had to download it. And they did, enabling hundreds of millions of new users and businesses to survive the pandemic, and maintain contact with friends and family during lockdown.
So why did free/libre software turn into such a massive fail in this area, given its head start? Could it be because a for-profit company can better support its users and that their programmers can work full time on it, and that support isn’t just a “RTFM”?
Zooms success is an example of how free is sometimes just too damn expensive. And neither the GPL nor the FSF has ever proposed a viable alternative that fixes this, which should be considered as Bug Zero of open source in general.
(Score: 2) by boltronics on Saturday April 03 2021, @05:12PM
There's multiple issues at play here.
First off, video conferencing is a hard problem to solve. Companies like Google and Zoom would have many servers to support their operations. Stand-alone free software solutions, by contrast, would need to work directly peer-to-peer to avoid costs and achieve the maximum amount of user freedom.
The problem with this is that most people don't have a public IP for their computers, but are behind an IPv4 NAT. In many cases, they may even have a double NAT, where even the router they connect to doesn't have a public IP address. It can be challenging to identify what kind of firewall/NAT solution two people might be using, and even harder to figure out how to punch holes in the other person's NAT to send through a direct audio/video stream. Sometimes it can be done by relying on an external TURN server, but this won't always work and requires the assistance of an external service anyway.
By contrast, Google and Zoom can both afford public servers in many regions for the purposes of proxying through video calls when direct connections are not possible. Their users typically don't care about free software, so they don't have to deal with these kinds of problems.
It should be noted that Jitsi Meet [jitsi.org] is one notable exception of a free software project that works well as servers are apparently sponsored by 8x8. It uses WebRTC so doesn't require any specific software to be installed. I don't know how Zoom compares feature-wise, but I expect it's comparable. The FSF also provides Jitsi Meet hosting services to its associate members.
Why did Zoom take off where Jitsi Meet did not? I'd wager part of it was due to having a bigger marketing budget. I believe Zoom also allows people to change their background (similar to a green screen background effect but without the green screen) which might have also enticed a number of people early on, and then other people flocked to the service because it's what most people already had.
This is similar to how my company uses Google Meet, since they already use Google for calendaring and Meet integrates with that, so is the path of least resistance. Furthermore, it's possible that Jitsi Meet may always play some small level of catch-up because there's the possibility of the question "which server should we use?", and most people don't care about free software and don't want to think at all, and make it harder on everyone else.
I'm vegan, and many times I've been to a lunch at work or with a group of people at a restaurant that does not cater to vegans. They have to customize a non-vegan dish just so I have something to eat - a very inconvenient and unpleasant situation - yet it always happens. When it comes to groups of people, the majority who have different values will always get their way, even if it means that gaining a trivial convenience to them would cause a big inconvenience to someone else.
It's basically the same thing with video conferencing - Aaron Maxwell (a great Python instructor and motivator) did a bunch of Zoom meetings recently discussing Python techniques which I would have been interested in attending had I been available, but I'd have to use that proprietary software if I wanted to join in - even though (AFAIK) Jitsi Meet could have been used just as easily. People who participated would now be more likely to use Zoom for future meetings because that's the software they have now gotten used to.
Was Aaron just lazy, and didn't want to spend a few minutes setting up Jitsi Meet over Zoom (which he was presumably already familiar with)? Maybe, maybe not, since there's also the marketing to consider (and I'm sure he did!). How many people would skip the video calls because they were hosted on a service people are not familiar with? Compare that against how many people would skip the calls because they were hosted on a proprietary service? Many people that typically prefer free software still put their income ahead, and make decisions accordingly.
I'm sure there are many other factors I haven't even considered. Basically, to ensure a "win", a free software solution would need to be technically superior in the vast majority of aspects to its competition (requires significant funding), be very early to market, and have a huge marketing budget. Even then, someone like Google or Facebook could steal it away if they provide tight integration with their services which already have huge user bases.
Expectations need to be kept in check. FSF's approach that focuses on educating people on the dangers of proprietary software is likely the best thing they can reasonably do.
As for the RedHat news, I bet RedHat (now, IBM) has been looking for an excuse to cancel their FSF donations. The FSF's message goes against many of their business practices. I imagine IBM would secretly be happy if the FSF went away, so pulling their funding and speaking out against them helps IBM twofold. IBM's move is related to ethics, but not in the way they have publicly announced.
It's GNU/Linux dammit!