The Stallman Report

Character assassination by anonymous cowards.

The Free Software movement has been completely routed. MS owns GitHub. The farmers fighting for the "right to repair" their tractors are the "front" of the "battle" for user empowerment. But sure let's beat the shit out of the dead horse that's actually a real live old man with cancer who wrote fucking Emacs, see if that helps?

More charitably, perhaps people are looking at the movement foundering and asking if the reason is that its leader has too much baggage to talk to the people with political power to move free software forward?

I am being charitable.

The uncharitable take is that the people who wrote this incredibly uncharitable and obsessive character assassination of an old dying guy are working for Microsoft et. al.

Since Stallman (and basically the whole FSF) doesn't have anything to say about cloud computing other than "don't use it" and his movement hasn't come up with a better alternative, Microsoft doesn't even think about Stallman anymore.

Yes, that's the obvious argument against this being a false flag operation: why would they bother, they already won. Is Bill Gates that petty?

So that means that it's more likely that this is just backbiting on an old, sick man. E.g.: The People's Front of Judea vs. Judean People's Front

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WboggjN_G-4

Let the old nerd die in peace with his friends.

(I'm done with this thread and this subject. Have a better one.)

It's a bit hard to do that for the people who still care about the movement when the "old nerd" is still on the board of directors.

You make an interesting point though: perhaps the FSF has made its bed and the best solution is to give up on it and rally behind another organization with similar goals. Maybe the 'net interprets Stallman as damage and routes around him.

I mean, yes, that would be an obvious alternative to bullying Stallman into resigning from the organisation that he himself created around his own ideas - why didn't it come to anyone's mind before?

But the real organization still exists and continues to behave in a decent manner, so it would foil their wicked goals.

Probably for similar reasons people would rather change leadership at, say, Mozilla than fork Firefox. Again. To create another fork nobody cares about. Again.

Politics is, often, about centralization and coordination of power. It's a lot more effective to change leadership at an organization with good ideas but questionable people than to split power and focus by forming a competing organization. The two resulting organizations may end up politically weaker than one organization (especially if they can't coordinate their efforts because the membership of one of them expects their org to boycott the other org for the reasons they split in the first place).

Jill Stein may, for example, have ideological purity over the Democrats but she'll never be President.

In any case, I hear the FSFE decided to split from working with the FSF when the FSF re-instated Stallman. I'd prefer to have an org with more direct influence over US law and policy, but I'll happily support FSFE since it's the closest thing I have to supporting free software as a concept without supporting continued discussion of age of consent on the side.

The alternative is to dare to connect a server to the internet: https://world.hey.com/dhh/dare-to-connect-a-server-to-the-in...

Even if you have to rent one from a hosting company. There are a whole lot more "server rental" companies than "native cloud" companies - there's good competition in that space without lock-in. You still have 80% of the benefits even if the server isn't in your physical building.

I think it was DHH who said it's completely incredible that these cloud companies managed to make PROGRAMMERS scared of COMPUTERS.

I don't think that was cloud companies; it was attackers and statistics like "The average time from connecting an unsecured computer to a public IP address to that machine being compromised is 20 minutes."

People who just want to write apps or services look at a list like this (https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/news/you-connect-new-comput...) and would gladly hand some or all of that off to a third-party.

Specifically an “anonymous” coward named Drew DeVault who enjoys “NSFW” drawings of prepubescent girls[0] and has creepy opinions on female teen body autonomy[1], amongst other things.

[0] = https://web.archive.org/web/20131007121950/http://www.reddit... (specifically “Kaname [Madoka] in her swimsuit”. I assume the rules regarding linking to what is legally considered drawn CSAM is rather harsh, so for those who need proof of said claims Pixiv utilizes an ID string on every URL, and the “Sauce” hyperlink will direct you to it.

[1] “I'm of the opinion that 14 year old girls should be required to have an IUD installed. Ten years of contraception that requires a visit to the doctor to remove prematurely.” - https://web.archive.org/web/20130523180641/http://www.reddit...

Those Reddit comments send shivers down the spine. What a disgraceful human being.

> Character assassination by anonymous cowards.

Character assassination involves lies. The majority of this is just "here's a collection of absolutely indefensible shit RMS said, in his own words".

Yes but it is framed incredibly disingenuously and exaggerates a lot of old, well known things.

There is nothing new in this report.

Ethical Source are attempting a hostile takeover of the FSF and now is the perfect time to release this as there is an FSF board vote happening soon.

They're not scared of computers.

They're scared of building their house on someone else's land.