Relevant Links:
Open Letter Requesting RMS's Dimissal and Resignation of FSF's Board of Directors: https://github.com/rms-open-letter/rms-open-letter.github.io

Incidents with RMS at MIT: https://selamjie.medium.com/remove-richard-stallman-appendix-a-a7e41e784f88

VICE Article about RMS and Epstein: https://www.vice.com/en/article/9ke3ke/famed-computer-scientist-richard-stallman-described-epstein-victims-as-entirely-willing

Emails sent by RMS about Epstein to MIT (was cause for his original removal): https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6405929-09132019142056-0001.html?embed=true&responsive=false&sidebar=false

MIT Report about Sexism In The Lab in the 80s: https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~lazowska/mit/

Interesting Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro and Overview
02:00 - RMS Return Announcement
03:00 - Monentization Note and PSA
03:35 - RMS Overview
04:40 - RMS's Contraversal Statements
05:55 - Why People Are Upset
06:58 - Damage Caused by RMS and Similar Figures
09:35 - My time with FSF Savannah
13:00 - View of the FSF while Contributing to HURD
14:30 - 'Ethical' Linux vs. Reality
16:30 - Ideology Tops All
18:30 - The FSF's Regressive Point of View
19:24 - Looking into RMS's Mindset (ft. OLPC)
20:36 - Submit or GTFO
23:00 - Closing Thoughts

On Monday, the Free Software Foundation quietly announced the return of Richard M. Stallman to the board of directors. While originally seen as the father of the Free and Open Source movement, Stallman (also known as rms) has had a long history of conversial comments and creating toxic and hostile work environments. This includes victim blaming, sexism, and advocating that minors are not harmed by adult relationships. RMS was finally released from MIT and FSF in 2019 (for many far later than should be), but was reinstated with no fanfare.

As a major insult to injury, this was done directly after LibrePlanet, a conference held to celebrate free software hosted by the FSF, and no one in LibrePlanet was told in advance of this. This prevented anyone from pulling out or otherwise announcing their displeasure at rms's return. RMS has been a major source of toxicity, and myself and many others have signed an open letter asking for RMS to be dismissed, and for the entire FSF's board of directors to resign. As of writing, there has been no response to this.

As someone who has both experienced RMS taking dump on projects, and a lot of the mentality that goes on within the FSF and their projects, I've warned people for years that getting invovled with the FSF or rms is a horrid idea, but I never really spoke up or went into details about it. However, I've decided to break my silence on this because I can't in good conscious let yet another toxic figure with no remorse step back into a leadership role unchallenged, so this is basically my experiences with the FSF as a volunteer on Savannah, and my view on how many FSF projects work from my time at both Hurd and Canonical, and how the FSF operates as both a church and cult who shuns those who can't or won't conform in an attempt to help explain how we got here.

#FSF #RMS #PublicDisgrace