Correct, he allegedly had a pattern of poor behaviour towards women spanning decades, and a habit of ignoring codes of conduct at conferences. His questionable views on some topics (particularly around the age of consent and people with down’s syndrome) and his strange decision to defend a convicted sex offender were also problems.
That is essentially my point. I do not agree with RMS on a good many things and believe he was removed as President with good reason. Despite the respect I have for his four decades of service, my initial reaction to his re-appointment was “that is not a wise decision, they need to rethink it”, and if the open letter had just called for him to stand down from the FSF board, then I would have signed it without delay.
However, I was on the receiving end of an online mob myself in 2019 when I created a free software fork. I know how traumatic the experience is, and I cannot in good conscience be a part of doing that to another human being.
That said, I think it’s clear RMS’s position is now basically untenable because of this public outcry and he needs to do the right thing for the FSF. There’s nothing stopping him from holding talks and campaigning for the cause in future, and if he’s not in a leadership position then people might be reassured that he will be held accountable for any future bad behaviour.
I agree with this. The “communities” feature in Element is a bit janky, and there’s no nice way to export invite links. It is definitely geared towards smaller private group chats on single channels.
As I learned the hard way running a free software project on that platform, it is very time-consuming to moderate public channels. You have to keep on top of “known bad” name servers (which you can block with server ACLs if you maintain a JSON file yourself), and also joining self-help groups is a sensible thing to do because the matrix.org admins understandably struggle to keep on top of moderating so many new accounts on the most popular homeserver.
If you go to the Fedora download page you can download “Fedora Media Writer”. It works with ISO images for other distros too, and I’ve found it to be a really good free software alternative to balenaEtcher :)
If you’re not using Windows or macOS, you can find it on Flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.fedoraproject.MediaWriter
I think Edge is probably helpful to people running GNU/Linux on their corporate laptops, or Windows users trying it for the first time. Hopefully they will switch to Firefox relatively quickly, but annoying there are a lot of sites nowadays that don’t work properly on non-Chromium browsers. :(
I think a line was crossed when people started lobbying their employers and FLOSS projects to boycott and defund the FSF over this. It started as people registering their disapproval at RMS being in a leadership position again, but demanding the entire board stand down was always going to be provocative, and the language used in these condemnation statements is a bit over-the-top. This was always inevitably going to be divisive.
The FSF is a volunteer-run non-profit with a democratic governance process and grievance procedure. It would’ve been nice to see those avenues pursued before leading lights across the FLOSS world took stronger action. I am also disappointed that some of the signatories don’t understand that you can’t remove toxicity and online abuse from a community by yourself being toxic and abusive online.
I believe the FSF plans to respond now by increasing transparency around appointments to the board. One board member has now resigned, and the current President has announced he will resign once reforms are in place. I’m guessing that’s not going to be enough, so either RMS needs to step down again, or if they decide to hold firm on this decision then the FSF needs to make it clear what exactly RMS’s role is going to be and which checks/balances will be in place.
tbh I would love to see an open letter that calls for a moratorium on open letters. Sadly I think it would cause more drama than it resolved! lol :D
We just have to wait for this to play out, unfortunately. Judging by the back-handed statement from the FSF board that was published on Twitter earlier today, I doubt this will all end pleasantly.