In Support of Richard Stallman

I know I've not much of a voice but I want the people who read my posts to know what position I'm on the Stallman case. I'm sure I'll get a lot of pushback but I want to take a stance for Richard Stallman and all the great work he's done to free/libre software.

A few days ago an anonymous "Stallman report" apeared on the internet. This is what I want to talk about.

Maybe Stallman is an odd and strange character, socially awkward and has *a lot* of views and ideas that I also don't share. The simplest thing would be for him to simply remain silent on the topic of "sex". But the self-proclaimed and anonymous accusers bring nothing new in their "Report" except to regurgitate well-known statements that have been out for a long time. It's just another campaign to remove Stallman (and others from the board who probably don't share the views of the accusers) with malicious intent from the FSF and GNU Project boards.

The malicious intention behind this smear campaign, in my opinion, is the desire to distort free software and the movement around it according to their own conceptions. I can imagine what kind of distortions that would be, but I take a strong stance against it.

In my opinion, the supporters of the campaign want to replace free software with some kind of "Ethical Source" software and its licenses. I strictly reject that. They split and separate the members of the free software movement into different camps for political reasons. And lets not forget that the "Ethical Source" movement are a very small, but very loud and vocal group.

The campaign against Stallman and the other board members has only one purpose: to take over or destroy the leadership of the FSF and the GNU Project in order to promote the "Ethical Source" ideology. Stallman's mistakes serve only as a pretext. The goals of the "Stallman Report" can be easily derived from the "Recommendations" section on their page.

I want free software to remain free and reject the restrictions that "Ethical Source" licenses impose on software. The GPL should not disappear or be changed. The four freedoms are all that's needed. And Richard Stallman is the one we have to thank for this. His work and devotion to free the source code are undisputed and his changes to society are a big part of our lives.

Here is everything about the defamation campaign against Richard Stallman in much better words:

In Support of Richard Stallman (www)

A Lunduke video on the report (youtube)

This is just written, to make my position clear to my readers.

*EDIT (2023-10-18 17:00)*

It seems that Drew Devault is one of the authors behind the "Stallman Report" as Lunduke points out in a second video on the case:

*Anonymous* Author Behind Stallman-Report.org Hit Piece Unmasked (youtube)

All in all - Have fun!

-fab-

PS: I wrote this post in german and translated it with "ollama" and the llama3.1:8b LLM with the "ellama" Emacs package.

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