muckrights-sans-merde
bonum fabula frat
### the-real-richard-stallman-is-still-not-coming-back
other pages:
=> what-muckrights-wont-tell-you-about-the-coup.html what-muckrights-wont-tell-you-about-the-coup
*originally posted:* may 2021
i originally wrote this article just short of 6 months ago, http://techrights.org/2020/11/17/real-rms/ and i got smeared for it (by the same person who put it online) about a month or two AFTER it was written. why such a long wait to say anything? i think its because the smearing was entirely opportunistic and politically motivated.
similarly, the person who smeared me for writing it told stallman, "it always disturbed me that he urged you to step down".
thats a funny thing, because LONG AFTER i did so, and LONG BEFORE he started his smear campaign, he published a few articles over the course of a year or two that explained why-- and he never mentioned that it bothered him. and he recommended i join the fsf board-- again, long after i had done that. so how much could it have disturbed him, really?
=> https://muckrights-sans-merde.neocities.org/lessons-muckrights-could-learn-from-its-own-posts-ritual-defamation.html
while i have maintained that a coup has gone on for years since 2018, muckrights has gone back and forth between cheerleading / chestbeating / denying / hiding problems, and telling people there is actually a coup.
right now, hes blaming zdnet-- and i dont blame him for that, i blame him for going back and forth and pretending that people covering the coup are doing a disservice one week, then covering the coup (i predicted him doing this) the next week, as if its only going on when he feels like talking about it (but not when he isnt covering it, or pretending it isnt important).
```
schestowitz__ > So someone is politically filtering RMS? May 01 07:54
schestowitz__ some gnu.org admins, I think May 01 07:54
```
when i say that the real stallman isnt coming back, i dont mean that he doesnt exist, or that he doesnt matter. of course thats pretty obvious from just reading the original article. but that didnt stop muckrights from making a video that zooms up and down (on his own website, you know) so you can see the title of the article, and insinuating it meant something else.
this is a guy who will shit-talk and misrepresent his own fucking blog to smear someone that spent years helping him.
but lets get to the article, with commentary:
> Many people have worked to end Richard Stallman’s career, and the good news is that he will continue fighting.
right off the bat, you can tell how anti-stallman this is, eh?
> While his career with the FSF has ended (he has no real authority left there, mostly people pretending to help him and others working against him directly), his activism continues behind the scenes, encouraging other parties to respect the freedom of users. We know this for a fact, and I take some comfort in it.
technically, stallman is back at the fsf. please note, that he claims he has no interest in being president again. im alright with that, but the whole point of my article from november was that we will never have stallman leading again the same way he did before.
ive made it very clear i dont blame him for this. the article didnt blame him for this either.
> But while he will continue to fight, much unlike the watered down new FSF, there are things the “Real Richard Stallman” would do that this one will not.
and thats still true today.
> Free Software was created to defend the freedom of every user, not to coddle monopolies or excuse actions taken against users in bad faith. It does not excuse mass surveillance, controlling users or silencing activism.
and even if the fsf is (debatably) bringing stallman back (not even as a token figurehead or mascot or some kind of narcissistic hoovering, but they really mean it-- maybe?) the gnu project has taken hold of the baton and is doing the same shit to him that the fsf was doing during the coup.
and the gnu project was already part of the coup. and censoring stallman-- on his own turf (which he founded, you know) was already part of the coup.
oliva treats an fsf coup and a gnu coup as two different things, but if its the same people who were doing this years ago and the same people doing it today, why should i care whether they wear an fsf nametag or a gnu one? i really dont. but at least the fsf is saying theyre pro-stallman again. thats progress, however small.
note that when stallman did come back, i said "id be very happy if he came back and started kicking arse and taking names-- i think hes going to come back and have some tea and check his email".
i get that some people are going to take that as a critique of stallman. as the person who actually said it, i consider it being extremely sceptical of the role he is actually being given.
> Open Source has excused and literally promoted all of these things.
that is, per the line before it: coddling monopolies, excusing mass surveillance, controlling users or silencing activism.
> And while people complained that Open Source was not promoted by Stallman, that he refused to endorse its wishy-washy corporate entryism, refusing corporate entryism was exactly what Free Software needed to do to survive. It failed.
there is no greater example of corporate entryism i know of than microsoft owning github, unless its ibm controlling gcc-- and trying to replace it with something else just like systemd tries to un-gnuify gnu.
the fsf (and gnu) are only in favour of these things. the people in favour of these horrible things have been part of the coup for a long time, and they go all the way up to the gcc steering committee and gnu.tools. but muckrights downplayed, devalued and even censored outside coverage of all of that, so they could corner the market on it later-- incredibly, that was a very novell-like move.
> Open Source does not make exceptions for its sycophants; when you cave to Open Source, you are dealing with bait-and-switch scams and shell games. Open Source pretends it is Free Software, while saying it is also something else. This “something else” is an attack on users as well as freedom. It’s much too easy to find examples of this, just say: “OK Google, violate my privacy”.
open source is not an ally to free software, it insinuates itself into free software and then tries to reprogram it to help monopolies instead of free users.
> Open Source pretends to be neutral and both Martin Luther King Jr. and Desmond Tutu have spoken about the side that neutrality takes in oppression, but either way it suffices that the neutrality of Open Source is nothing more than sheep’s clothing; Open Source joined the war on users that Microsoft declared in internal memos decades ago and they also sought to rebrand Free Software so they could redefine and control it.
it isnt neutral, but takeovers have to start somewhere.
> The tech press (which even ESR spoke disparagingly of with comments in the Halloween documents) paints this as a paranoid conspiracy theory, but even in OSI (which ESR co-founded) Microsoft has too many people in control today, and some want to literally redefine the Open Source Definition. This is not a theory.
at this point, the fsf downplays the problem of open source, but open source has been fighting against us for years and years.
> But we know this about the Real Richard Stallman. He has never supported Open Source as an alternative to Free Software. He even said that Open Source people “treat him like shit”.
now they treat us all like shit. they even treat esr like shit. they still treat stallman like shit.
> But as I was saying, Open Source does not make exceptions for sycophants. Torvalds promoted Open Source and slighted Free Software for years, pandering to corporations who don’t care about freedom. For Torvalds, and Open Source, this is just a development methodology. He has recited Open Source’s mantras for decades, but despite his lack of integrity as a person overall, there is one thing they couldn’t get Torvalds to do: make sacrifices in the way he maintained the kernel. This is his one good point, and it is the reason he had to go.
open source is nobodys friend. if open source were an ice cream flavour, it would be pralines and dick.
> It’s not really because Torvalds is an asshole. All the people who control Torvalds today are assholes; they’re bigger liars and they’re slowly destroying and co-opting the Linux kernel, just as “Linux” co-opted GNU. If you talk to them, or even watch the way they’ve treated Linus, you can tell that even if Torvalds is a scumbag, these people are corporate bullies who treat Linus like shit.
id rather date torvalds than even talk to his boss. and i cant stand either one of them.
> Open Source doesn’t love anybody, they only love when you don’t show integrity. No exceptions are made, not even for Linus; bow to Corporate or GTFO.
etc, etc, etc.
> If you matter to Open Source, it certainly doesn’t matter if you’re an asshole. Steve Ballmer is a HUGE asshole. It never mattered. The only “crime” of Ballmer’s that Microsoft cared about was him losing money. This is business, they care about results, not personality. IBM thinks we could do better in terms of a leader, but they happily and literally worked with Hitler. Obviously the right amount of money can buy a LOT of understanding.
saying these people are hypocrites is sort of unfair to (most) hypocrites.
> Torvalds has stood year after year in the way of backdoors and other bad moves for the kernel, so credit where credit is due. But this is why Torvalds is not in control anymore. And that brings us to what they’ve done to Richard Stallman.
i too, was hoping that id get to the point soon.
> For a while I referred per comments made on another article to Stallman as “rms”. Today, I will do that in the past tense.
not out of disrespect for stallman, but out of respect for rms.
> RMS was Stallman’s hacker name. Richard Stallman is, I think, when he referred to it as his “mundane name”. RMS is dead, but Stallman is still fighting.
credit where credit is due.
> We know rms is dead, because he was outspoken, did not bow to false compromise, and never stopped fighting.
hmm?
> So at least one part of rms still lives on, because Stallman is still fighting. That really is better than nothing.
this doesnt sound so disrespectful to stallman, imo. but then again, i know exactly what i meant. and to be honest, i was too pissed off to care if someone took it the wrong way.
oh sure, if someone takes it out of context, ill put it back-- but if they knew full well what i meant, i will call them on that too.
> But he is no longer outspoken, and we really need him to be.
yep. and im well aware hes being silenced and censored-- which i dont blame him for. but then that was sort of the point. this has gone on for years and years-- do people expect its just going to change, because cheerleaders say so?
the corruption has made it all the way to headquarters. the coup is over they said. well... now its not. surprise, surprise...
> The things that are happening now are just as atrocious as when they were mere outspoken (and seemingly hyperbolic) warnings.
sometimes i honestly wonder if i was wrong about this or that. and i definitely get some details wrong. and some of my predictions are wrong.
but this coup thing just keeps going, because nobody is stopping it.
i mean, really-- gnome is largely responsible (theyve been doing this shit since 2008 or 2009, AT LEAST-- and the gnome foundation gets all the blame for it?)
=> https://wrongwithfreesw.neocities.org/bullshit-of-the-week.html
* 2021-04-04 "todays bsotw (also the first) is the idea that it was only / mainly 'the gnome foundation', not 'gnome' supporting the next phase of the anti-stallman coup."
more recently, this same point was debated in muckrights irc.
> It seemed hyperbolic to equate SOFTWARE with human rights. And yet today we are being showered constantly with examples of how very basic human rights (as in the Constitution or the more globally relevant UDHR) are eroded and/or threatened by technofascist gizmos that are too popular for George Orwell not to rise from the dead and yell “WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?!” Old George is coming back, folks, any day now.
alexa, are you violating my rights?
"no, because of cispa."
alexa, is cispa unconstitutional?
"no, because of cispa."
alexa, are you named after a service that monitors website traffic?
"no, thats a totally different alexa owned by amazon."
> On a regular basis I find memes that honestly and reasonably compare the destruction of riots to the destruction of the so-called “polite society” — we live in a “polite society” that uses torture and chemical warfare (albeit mostly “softer” torture and “softer” chemical warfare, but either way, methods and chemicals that are banned for being unethical and immoral) on protesters engaged in activities which are protected by the First Amendment.
so of course, these people care about your safety and your rights...
> Or at least, were protected by the First Amendment. Now that Biden is in, expect those rights to continue to erode, as they did with Trump. But then we are still talking about the world here. Those who were horrified (as was I) by the recent tear gassing and rubber bullets of protesters and journalists ought to pay closer attention to the history of how G7 protesters are treated even before 9/11. This sort of corporate tyranny is nothing new (but it is definitely still getting worse and more common).
that was in november. now we are waiting to see how the dumb shit that happened in january is going to affect future (peaceful) protests.
> And you have people saying that Trump’s actions regarding the pandemic are akin to exterminating people.
getting back to (bill) clinton vs. bush (jr), there was this whole "he lied, people died" vs. implying bills lies didnt kill anybody.
which is true, if we are talking about lying about what happened under the oval office desk. less so if we are talking about haiti... though really both fake parties love a good invasion. clinton for example, bombed iraq to distract people what was going on under his desk (or possibly, participated in a charade about what went on under his desk to distract from bombing iraq. trying to figure out the real priorities of a career professional liar is an interesting puzzle).
> While rioting is not the method of protest that I advocate (I still lean towards being outspoken, and I think most protesters actually prefer this to rioting) I am forced to cede that the people saying “‘polite society’ is worse than a riot” are not at all likely mistaken. “Polite society” is full of war crimes, engineered poverty, countless resulting deaths, and the mass murder and endless exploitation of civilians.
plus the occasional invasion of the capital building by what appeared to be the village people.
> But then many of the same people who defend rioting on a regular basis are dead-set against Richard Stallman either being outspoken against corporations engaged in mass surveillance capitalism or in favour of due process. I know I’m painting with a broad brush here, I know there are loads of exceptions. But the overlap and inconsistency is still boggling.
i wont lie, i wish id made that article shorter.
> Anyway, the methods used to put a leash on Torvalds and Assange and the methods used to put one on Stallman are too similar to ignore. It hasn’t stopped there either, because political correctness is now being wielded as a way to yoke all developers of mainstream software (whether mainstream and non-free, or mainstream and under a free license) into indentured servants of projects that have been taken over by corporate donors who then force even original authors Linus and Guido to do things the way the monopoly wanted, or get out.
this was before the gnome developers had another big coup against the gnu project.
"hey, some of the developers defended stallman!"
if they really want to help stallman, they can stop developing gnome. gnome hates users, it hates society, it hates everything on earth.
the pro-stallman devs can go work on mate. i would feel bad for mate, but then it is on fucking github (so are a lot of components gnome uses-- like libffi, harfbuzz, zlib1g; you wont find gnome complaining about that). if theyre really, really pro-stallman they can fork mate and use a real repo instead.
> I note with great sadness that Guido showed less integrity than Linus in this regard. It’s real sadness as although I don’t love the Linux kernel anymore, I do love Python. (And PyPy more than Python, but it is still an implementation of the Python language). Guido is a talented developer and it’s very sad to watch him not only sell out, but sell every user out.
fuck you, guido.
> As I have said many times, I do not think Stallman has sold out.
this is where you can tell im really giving him a black eye.
> I think he was sold out by others.
take that, richard!
> GNOME Guix (working together with Deb Icaza among many others) are some of the biggest traitors, but so is ESR who still has the audacity to claim to be Stallman’s “friend”.
mmhmm.
> Eric, real friends don’t stab people in the back the way you did. Perens knows it, and anybody who knows what happened knows that. You’re a shameless opportunist living in the shadow of a great man, who you created a name around your jealousy of for years and years, you’re NOT a “friend”. You are far closer to being the Cain to his Abel; a person who would slay his own brother simply for being favoured.
i have yet to be convinced otherwise.
> And all of what you call “Open Source” is made in your image, much like which president after you sold OSI directly to Microsoft?
sorry, this line was unclear about the fact that osi has been taken over by even bigger arseholes and turncoats than esr himself.
> Even ESR was ultimately ousted, the same way they did to Torvalds. And while I undoubtedly sympathise more with ESR than with the people who ousted him, it is (clearly) not very much; it’s the principle of the thing. Whatever I may think of him, the way he was ousted was wrong and ultimately bad for all of us. As with Linus and his owner Jim, the lesser of two evils was screwed over by the greater.
oh good, i clarified it.
> My beef with Open Source was not created by Richard Stallman, it was created by Open Source itself. I originally, and foolishly, bought into its vapid rhetoric years ago. “We are like Free Software but more reasonable,” they said. They have a facade of being friendly, inviting, helpful, and above all Laid Back. The GPL is like slavery, Free Software is hateful, we are nice people who don’t care what you do. Stop choosing software based on licenses and just use what works for you!
at this time id like to make a joke about wikipedia, but lets just move forward.
> What a bunch of crap. Open Source acts like Free Software is full of sacred cows (and a couple of those really are annoying) but to Open Source, every monopolistic corporation that participates in the smallest way is a sacred cow. Yet users are not. These sacred corporations can literally murder people, but Open Source advocates who catch you criticising actual human rights violations will smear you personally, and act like the Microsoft logo is a thing you can be “bigoted” against.
muckrights talked about the microsoft "haters" label a lot in 2009. as if it makes you a bad person to hate a pile of shit like microsoft.
> Open Source is one of the biggest, stupidest lies in the world. It’s not laid back, it’s not friendly, it’s not fair (it assassinates anyone whose integrity gets in its way) and it just sells Free Software out to Microsoft.
and it still does.
> As I’ve said in other articles, I made my way into — then out of — a cult as a teenager. I know how they get people who are longing for community, I know how they gradually (and abusively) nudge people into doing their bidding, I know how they try to keep people from leaving, even when anybody is allowed to leave.
im really sorry for how long this article was. its not even funny anymore. honestly, ive seen articles this long mercifully split into two parts.
> As I realised that Open Source had the same levels of bullshit and the same two-faced reality once you supported them, and that Open Source really does indoctrinate and use people, I grew disgusted with their attacks on freedom and their constant lying and apologies for companies that act in bad faith.
and im still disgusted, years later.
> It would only be a service to cults to refer to things that aren’t really like them as cults, but I know one when I see one. You may find only the disguise at first, but when the lying never stops and the double standard keep piling up, you know it’s bullshit.
i determined the other day that muckrights is NOT a cult:
=> https://muckrights-sans-merde.neocities.org/why-muckrights-is-not-a-cult.html
> If you make a list of the 20 worst things about Open Source you can think of (from a Free Software point of view) you can use that as a watchlist for what’s happening to Free Software itself.
if anybody wants to try doing that, let me know.
> And “rms” would be (and once was) outspoken about those things. I’m very sorry that rms is no longer with us. But I believe Richard Stallman is sincerely doing his possible best,
more obvious stallman-hating here.
> and also that it is more than most people would do in your situation. Most people, including myself, would have given up a lot sooner.
i think it took obama 6 months.
> “Until he was hanged, rms was a public advocate of freedom. Now the real fight and the real advocacy is done quietly, safely.”Richard Stallman should not be less outspoken, he should be more outspoken now than ever before.
> But he won’t be, and this is why–
tea and emails!
> People are human. You can’t always get a human to part with their values. That’s a strength (yes, in some instances it is a shame). I do not think that Richard Stallman has sacrificed his values.
more awful things...
> Nor do I think he has stopped trying. That’s to his credit.
wtf, man?
> As I said, most of us would have given up after the 20+ years of abuse and slander he’s withstood. I’m not saying he’s perfect, fuck knows he’s loaded with faults as we all are. But he is undoubtedly a good person, and the hate of many (with the added weight of the corporate sycophant tech press even ESR used to condemn) is strong.
im a big fan of the halloween documents, of course.
> A lot of people in Stallman’s situation would act like more of a martyr. While Stallman acknowledges and is (of course) unhappy about the abuse he has received, the vast majority of time is spent fighting and (until recently) advocating.
unfortunately, he keeps trying to "work with" people who want his job to be sitting and looking pretty and telling people that its okay to compromise more and more until theres no real difference between gnu and windows.
> Until he was hanged, rms was a public advocate of freedom. Now the real fight and the real advocacy is done quietly, safely.
im not saying anything there that muckrights hasnt said themselves.
> I’ve made it clear that in his situation, I don’t think most of us could do better, not after fighting openly and withstanding regular slander for as long as he has.
trying to be as fair as possible here.
> He’s got a right to be tired and he said that he would fight as long as he lives, and he’s still keeping that promise.
this wasnt sarcastic, btw.
> But there will be no more substantial advocacy (public advocacy at least) from Richard Stallman, because that outspokenness died when rms did.
and this is the point. and its still true. and there hasnt been "substantial advocacy" since he returned. theyre just using him to help with fundraising, imo.
those that arent trying to kick him out.
> Free Software advocates are under literal surveillance, not just from the NSA and GCHQ, but from Microsoft. Not only this, but 20 years ago Microsoft (read the Halloween documents) said they wanted to closely monitor Free Software developers and poach the best ones for themselves.
and gnome has helped with that sort of poaching considerably. so has red hat.
> Now they’ve got Guido, I don’t know if Miguel de Icaza really counts as "the best", but remember we are talking about Microsoft standards of quality here.
sigh, microsoft python. not even the first one.
> Of course you can cause a lot more trouble with mass surveillance than just poaching the best developers. The point is, rms the Real Richard Stallman would never be quiet or accept false compromise around Microsoft GitHub. He was openly against GitHub even before it was owned by Microsoft, and for much smaller reasons.
now that the fsf coup is over (lies, lies, lies?) i suppose the fsf will stop promoting github now. (probably not though).
> RMS has shown more accurate foresight than nearly any other technologist when it comes to freedom and civil liberties, but he is not without a few blind spots. I think one of them is that he squandered an opportunity to consider the full implications of what Lawrence Lessig proposed to the FSF board when he was there. To me that was always the FSF’s greatest drawback.
and its why i left the fsf as a member, too.
> While Oliva says that copyright has “nothing to do with free software”,
oliva asked me to fix this, he says i misquoted him-- thats why im mentioning it now. however, i will also note that my biggest gripe about oliva right now is his rampage of "x has nothing to do with y" and i think hes made a number of factual errors along these lines.
im not saying we dont all make mistakes, just that if you catch oliva saying x and y are totally different, think about what x and y have in common and ask yourself if hes got a good reason to downplay those relationships as if they dont exist.
geeks like oliva and myself are pedantic, but im not sure this one isnt free (as in beer) pr training creating a frankenstein.
"frankenstein was the doctor, not the monster!"
yep, and they had nothing to do with each other, either.
> I said the DMCA was a perfect example of how wrong that is and this was before Joe “RIAA” Biden came back into politics, ensuring that the next few years will not just try to fuck us harder with patents (THANKS GNOME! Assholes…) but that copyright will be standing beside patents and waiting for another turn.
there was definitely something peculiar and/or rotten in that exchange. but since i dont have a copy of it, ill just have to say "it was something like that". and im pretty sure of it, too.
> For people not directly taxed by the DMCA, international trade agreements like CAFTA, NAFTA, ACTA (failed) and TPP/TTIP (failed) along with the “EEE-Eww…” have worked to establish a global system of censorship and corporate theft that makes WIPO look like Elmo’s World.
muckrights has covered some of those, at least.
> But copyright has nothing to do with Free Software. If that’s true, then neither do patents. .oO Que porra é essa?
i want to say it was either copyright or drm. but i suspect he will deny both, and it was just as ridiculous as that. it was definitely a wtf moment, and not a position he ever justified.
either way, you should know im only bringing it up now because it happened to be in this article. i wrote over 100 articles for muckrights, i didnt know this point was in this one.
> Rather I think that Free Culture advocates actually know more about copyright than Stallman and Oliva combined (and even that is plenty more than nothing, I’m sure) and Free Software is weaker against copyright threats because of this.
sad but true. note that a few months ago, oliva was saying that copyright (hmm...) had nothing to do with silicon either. and this wasnt in an exchange with me, only with tom. and i found a law that makes olivas claim extremely dubious, if not utterly wrong.
but tom had already called him on it, and i still dont know what the point of that was, but its funny that he definitely "didnt" say that copyright has nothing to do with free software. ill be honest, i apologised for misquoting him (this is the article the misquote is allegedly from) but im pretty sceptical now. im not certain i didnt misquote him... though i am (increasingly) sceptical about his claim that i did.
regardless, watch for his "x has nothing to do with y" routine. i realise people conflate things all the time, but i already said (to him, during one of our conversations) that hes making more of the distinctions than is reasonable (he seldom justifies it, imo) which can be just as silly as conflating two different things.
> Free Culture advocates, in turn, are often weak on Free Software. Stallman noticed this and it’s plain to see. But I have long noticed that Free Software advocates who support Free Culture are often stronger Stallman supporters and stronger Free Software supporters compared to the average, at least. They tend to be more informed and are often more passionate. This is what Free Software has squandered, because there are more people who care about the right to remix than the right to control their software, and they are ultimately twin rights (even if most Free Software advocates and Free Culture advocates haven’t noticed).
except for david revoy. what a fucking disappointment. heck, i dont even know if the above line is true anymore. (it probably is).
> Stallman also truly underestimated Microsoft. Somewhere along the line, his necessary tools for converting software into Free Software became the hammer to every corporate nail, and Microsoft has often been treated as “just another nail” to be hammered with the GPL if possible. This is tragic, and its shortsightedness has led to the FSF’s downfall. Never giving up is one thing, but Free Software has wrapped itself in a warm blanket of hubris while the fortress comes down.
no shit.
> Today, Richard Stallman promotes software attainable only by dealing with the corporate surveillance put in place by Microsoft. His address to LibrePlanet was a watered down appeal to promote EXACTLY what the FSF has focused on of late-- tools like Jami and BigBlueButton, both of which are controlled by Microsoft.
this contains an error about jami. they appear to be using gitlab now-- i presume i had some good reason to think otherwise, perhaps they even moved, though whether i was right at one point or simply mistaken, the part about jami is worth correcting.
its also worth noting that since this article was written, i have found more parts of the gnu project that moved to github:
=> https://wrongwithfreesw.neocities.org/gnu-watch.html
dont let ron borrow credit for gnu watch. that isnt his research, i spent days and days (and days) on that, he only tried to share credit to undermine and contradict what it said. ron tries to share credit for anything he hosts, if he feels like it-- regardless of whether he had any input or even agreed with it when it was posted.
> One person said the video was “scripted” which I find too horrible and un-Stallman-like to contemplate.
that was ron who said that, incidentally. but i saw the video, and hes not wrong about how it looked, imo.
> Though I don’t deny it sounds more like a script than the man himself. As holographic Whitney Houston told fans about "some of the songs 'I did'" following her death, that video seems to betray an outside interest. Of course the differences between the new FSF and the old are sometimes subtle, even slightly plausible.
this was written before stallman joined the board again.
> If GNOME has taken the fall for patents, then the FSF has taken the fall for GitHub, and some might say that Free Software has little choice if all the real alternatives to Zoom and Teams are developed on Github, what is the FSF supposed to do?
except for jami, i guess.
> For starters, they could point out how incredibly bleak it is that ALL ALTERNATIVES involve dealing with the same company that pushes (and builds continuing revenue from) the same software patents that harm Free Software.
except for jami, i guess.
> You build GNU IceCat, Jami or BigBlueButton, Microsoft’s stocks go up and then they fight even harder against your freedom with patents and surveillance. Not to mention that they continue to use GitHub to co-opt and steer key projects like Python.
i dont know if people have any idea how much of the gnu project uses python. its ridiculous, and im saying that as someone who loves the language. they use loads of perl, too.
and thats alright, if it can work with pypy. but if it relies on cpython, thats a fucking shame. one more way microsoft has gotten its clutches on gnu.
ron downplays this, but back in the old days of muckrights he was serious about the various and numerous ways that microsoft insinuated itself into the gnu/linux codebases. now its just rah, rah, rah, stallmans back!
cool, so when is he going to extricate gnu from all this?
he cant, its too late for gnu. and too many gnu devs are traitors:
=> https://wrongwithfreesw.neocities.org/a-forced-community-is-like-a-forced-marriage.html a-forced-community-is-like-a-forced-marriage
=> https://wrongwithfreesw.neocities.org/fraud-as-in-fraudulent---the-gnu-ass-end-ly.html fraud-as-in-fraudulent---the-gnu-ass-end-ly
=> https://wrongwithfreesw.neocities.org/what-is-mike-gerwitz-so-excited-about.html what-is-mike-gerwitz-so-excited-about
=> https://muckrights-sans-merde.neocities.org/what-muckrights-wont-tell-you-about-the-coup.html what-muckrights-wont-tell-you-about-the-coup
=> https://wrongwithfreesw.neocities.org/demoting-oliva-slightly.html demoting-oliva-slightly
> RMS would never, ever stand for this. But Richard Stallman does.
dont ask me why, im curious too. i would say "corruption" as i have for years, but its still a bit of a mystery.
> I can’t be any clearer that I understand why he would at his age and at this level of concerted and corporate effort to betray him and his supporters decide to choose his battles.
but ron will smear me for this anyway, because hes a dick.
> You could even argue that he has always warned us about relying on the "Cloud" (which is what GitHub is one of the more horrific examples of very easily the most horrific for Free Software development) and specifically about GitHub, so why would he need to lead a campaign against the more recent and more horrible effects of doing so?
mmhmm.
> Instead, I argue that rms is gone. But I also said that he isn’t coming back. And here is why...
part of it at least.
> Stallman is an old man. He is still fighting, and that’s inspiring. He has fought for his entire career, which is inspiring as well. The fact that Free Software exists at all, we owe to this man and (obviously) many others, everybody knows that. Nobody has ever fought as much for Free Software as Stallman; not ESR, certainly not Linus, not Perens, Lessig, de Raadt, Eich, Guido, Roio, not even Oliva (who wouldn’t deny this is true for a moment). Though I deeply admire the practically absurd lengths that Lessig has gone to (along with his friend, Aaron Swartz) in the name of freedom.
ill stand by this.
> Old men do generally soften as fighters. The exceptions are few, and I still think this has more to do with machinations than age because that's where the actual evidence points. But age is most certainly a factor. We are up against time itself, as Stallman is mortal.
other people (on the pro-stallman side) have at least danced around this if not made the same point, since hes joined the board again.
> But whether it is due to his fight getting softer, or being stifled or both, this trend is only going to continue.
and imo it has.
> And if we do not lend our support to this cause, and be the outspoken advocates against the destruction and co-opting of free software that rms was, then it will not make rms fight much harder. I am confident he is fighting as hard as he can right now and that is not the mark of a sellout.
ron, on the other hand...
> Obviously the best way to honour the (continuing) legacy of rms is to join Richard Stallman in fighting for the freedom of all users, not just the freedom granted by a Free Software license alone, but the freedom granted by a Free Software license with people defending everything that license stands for.
you could even go back and read what muckrights was like in 2008 and 2009, because back then it admitted real problems, and proposed real solutions, and the fsf even joined people in proposing boycotts (and it didnt matter if software designed to create lock-in was under a free license, in 2009-- they knew the score).
> That’s exactly what the FSF has abandoned, and why the FSF is no longer fighting for anyone. They aren’t fighting for users anymore, they are (not unlike Creative Commons, which always had this problem to a saddening degree)
oh yes-- and FUCK YOU, creative commons...
since writing this article, creative commons-- which WOULD HAVE NEVER FUCKING EXISTED without stallman (because lessig flat out said-- in admiration-- that he was stealing stallmans idea after he founded it) decided to stab him in the back.
i will never give a fucking cent to those pieces of shit. theyre all fucking scum. if stallman hadnt personally told me about the benefits of by-sa 4.0 and i hadnt pushed to get cc0 onto the compatibility list (im not saying it had any real effect, but its there now) id probably just move towards 2-clause (or 0 clause) bsd for writing. but i went with by-sa for this, mostly to fuck with ron.
> only fighting for the use of certain licenses. Any way you can work around the license to limit the ability for users to have control of their computing — the FSF will do VERY little to stop you, or even condemn what you’re doing. They will even promote you!
```
MinceR even RMS doesn't have the same cultural values that RMS had
when he kicked this thing off Jan 08 16:03
MinceR he would have started a campaign against systemd if he did Jan 08 16:04
```
Essentially, if we do not pick up the fight that rms fought during his lifetime, then Stallman will not be able to either.
But if we do pick up that fight, as we certainly ought to, then Stallman will not need to. At this point in the game, he will let us do that part for him.
Unless someone has plans to make him immortal, now is as good a time as any to pick up where rms left off.
As for Richard Stallman, he is still an ally, he has not sold out (at least I am 99% certain he hasn’t) but he does not fight like he used to. He chooses his battles, and very key problems are not fought anymore.
The FSF tells him to promote GitHub, and he does. They give him a platform, as long he says exactly what they’re saying already.
That’s not rms. It’s just what’s left of Richard Stallman.
But make no mistake he may have been forced out of full time public activism to being something a little closer to being a politician...
(I’m sorry, having watched the video that’s what I must conclude).
He is still on our side. He INVENTED our side. And the more you learn about the layers and layers of the history of computing from the time Stallman became active onwards, the more evidence you find that this is even understated by his supporters. Because until they do extensive research, even many of them don’t know just how true it is.
That honour isn’t going anywhere. Recognition is often fickle, awards are frequently given to the wrong individuals, but honour is immortal.
Richard Stallman was and still is one of the great minds and great human beings of the 20th and 21st centuries.
But "rms" will be missed, much more sorely if we do not take up his mantle. We know Stallman Was Right, but the battles that need to be fought continue to present themselves. If we do not meet those challenges with the passion and integrity that the FSF has put aside forever, we will lose. Open Source may have “won” for the time being, though users are still becoming less free for such a cynical corporate victory.
Open Source "wins" by taking whatever side looks like it’s winning. It’s what allows people like Bryan Lunduke to smirk and slander rms, [note for 2021 edition: http://techrights.org/2009/05/05/linux-sucks-fud/] then go work for Purism and have a friendly interview with Stallman, then later start attacking Free Software (using all of Open Source’s time-tested bullshit) again. [2021: lunduke has taken a pro-rms position during the gnome/gnome foundation letter coup, but he still a schmuck with an angle and he will never give up the smirking.]
Free Software wins differently, by staying vigilant about what we are actually fighting for, and making sure all of its reasonable compromises are reasonable and not simply giving in to a hostile corporate takeover of what is supposed to be activism.
Long live rms, long live Richard Stallman and happy hacking.
nota bene: of course, after i wrote this, stallman was reinstated to the fsf board. and all hell broke loose. and ever since then, its been like pulling teeth to get anybody to admit that anything is wrong. which is exactly the state of the fsf before stallman was ousted. stallman never changed the world by pretending everything was alright. neither will muckrights, and neither will the fsf.
but if thats not good enough for if-by-ron, then he can eat his own blog post:
"In a very recent interview, Richard Stallman explained that he tends to look at the lurking dangers rather than savour too much the victories. Resting on one’s laurels is unwise if the saying 'only the paranoid survive' holds true." http://techrights.org/2009/08/31/boycott-novell-as-negative/
the real ron isnt coming back either, because ron was never real. he was just a persona of a person pretending to give a shit about your freedom. he clearly cared more about it in 2009 than in 2021.
why would anybody try so hard, for so long, to convince people to stand up for freedom if they were anything but sincere?
thats a great question-- and you might find more clues if you work in the non-profit sector. but to be honest, ryan could explain this one to you fairly easily. im sure hes too smart (im not blaming him for this, at all) to do so.
stallman is / was / still tries to be the real thing though. and the real thing, (sadly) is too rare already. youll find no shortage of pretenders; open source practically breeds them.
=> https://muckrights-sans-merde.neocities.org