“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

– Sometimes attributed to Mahatma Gandhi





Summary: The rumour mill may still be humming along; but against all odds — as Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project — Stallman keeps fighting the good fight (in the face of growing resistance)

LAST week I exchanged some messages with Stallman after few people online had claimed him to be less responsive than before.

Don’t let rumours cloud judgment. As head of the GNU project (still) he remains busy and very active. Maybe he hasn’t given public talks since that one in Microsoft; but from what we can see, week after week, GNU releases are still frequent (pertinent projects), the media has left him alone and the FSF lost 3 Board members without anyone new being appointed. Lack of new appointments isn’t the problem; a problem would arise if someone improper was (improperly) appointed. Wouldn’t IBM love that?

“Lack of new appointments isn’t the problem; a problem would arise if someone improper was (improperly) appointed.”The relatively few people who signed a letter striving to remove Stallman from GNU have not given up. One of them occasionally shows up in our IRC channels. But 2.5 months down the line Stallman faces no real controversy. The dust has settled. Let’s hope that the FSF will rise as champion of Software Freedom, seeing that Debian now (belatedly) tackles the problems with systemd (second post this weekend from DPL Sam Hartman).

Attempts to ‘cancel’ Stallman have not been thoroughly successful, only partially. And that’s a big problem for the “cancellation lobby” (they wanted him to vanish) because among more and more people Stallman is now seen as a victim, a martyr. There’s sympathy. Like we said months ago, considering who’s in this lobby (and why), their whole effort may prove counter-productive. █

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