This show has a counter point show hpr3316 :: FSF and RMS on election of Richard Stallman

Warning This show contains information that may not be suitable for all. Listener discretion is advised.

Recently Richard M. Stallman, announced that he has rejoined the Free Software Foundation’s board of directors. An open letter on github called for him to be removed again, and for the FSF’s entire board to resign.

When he resigned in 2019, Bradley M. Kuhn (from the Free as in Freedom podcast) wrote an article titled "On Recent Controversial Events" about the issue. I am submitting that article here under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. The post contains many links and is available in the shownotes for this show. Some examples are included at the end of the blog post, and listener discretion is advised.

On Recent Controversial Events

Tuesday 15 October 2019 by Bradley M. Kuhn

The last 33 days have been unprecedentedly difficult for the software freedom community and for me personally. Folks have been emailing, phoning, texting, tagging me on social media (— the last of which has been funny, because all my social media accounts are placeholder accounts). But, just about everyone has urged me to comment on the serious issues that the software freedom community now faces. Until now, I have stayed silent regarding all these current topics: from Richard M. Stallman (RMS)’s public statements, to his resignation from the Free Software Foundation (FSF), to the Epstein scandal and its connection to MIT. I’ve also avoided generally commenting on software freedom organizational governance during this period. I did this for good reason, which is explained below. However, in this blog post, I now share my primary comments on the matters that seem to currently be of the utmost attention of the Open Source and Free Software communities.

I have been silent the last month because, until two days ago, I was an at-large member of FSF’s Board of Directors, and a Voting Member of the FSF. As a member of FSF’s two leadership bodies, I was abiding by a reasonable request from the FSF management and my duty to the organization. Specifically, the FSF asked that all communication during the crisis come directly from FSF officers and not from at-large directors and/or Voting Members. Furthermore, the FSF management asked all Directors and Voting Members to remain silent on this entire matter — even on issues only tangentially related to the current situation, and even when speaking in our own capacity (e.g., on our own blogs like this one). The FSF is an important organization, and I take any request from the FSF seriously — so I abided fully with their request.

The situation was further complicated because folks at my employer, Software Freedom Conservancy (where I also serve on the Board of Directors) had strong opinions about this matter as well. Fortunately, the FSF and Conservancy both had already created clear protocols for what I should do if ever there was a disagreement or divergence of views between Conservancy and FSF. I therefore was recused fully from the planning, drafting, and timing of Conservancy’s statement on this matter. I thank my colleagues at the Conservancy for working so caref