Warning: This bark deals with sexual misconduct.
It would be silly to open by saying “the authors of the anonymous Stallman Report”.
It’s an open secret who wrote the report.
But it would also be entirely pointless to name the unsurprising author, who received over it some of the most embarrassing death threats one could make without saying “gorilla warfare”.
All the report does is collate what we all have all known and said for years: RMS is a gigantic sex creep.
Whether i like the author of the report or not doesn’t change the part where we heard the creepy uncle ramble about rape and pedophilia for ages while making weird advances towards every woman in his vicinity.
Whether all the accusations made are equally strong or not, creepy uncle Richard just can’t stop being That Guy for 5 minutes.
The whole ordeal, however, brings only one thing to my mind: wanting to remove the sexual assault stan, but to salvage the FSF nonetheless, that’s weird.
The report addresses directly the staff and board of directors of the FSF: none look a day younger than me, and many participants whom i know to grow their hair only in the gray colorway skipped adding their photograph to FSF’s site.
The FSF has been irrelevant for over a decade. The last thing of note they did was releasing the AGPL-3.0, that was in 2007. The only reason they cling to relevance is due to the difficulty of relicensing projects, and of using competing strict licenses.
Free Software is over. FOSS is over.
A friend of mine put it best: the only way in which Richard Stallman is culturally relevant to young nerds is as part of the “I’d just like to interject for a moment” copypasta misattributed to our creepy uncle.
Open Source? Open Source is still relevant—but only as a form of corporate collaboration for big tech, and as a form of unpaid internship for prospective tech bros.
Every day, the term veers away from the definition put forward by the Open Source Initiative (another nonprofit that lingers in some form, yet has not done anything of note since the 2000’s—those days, seems like they’re all about embracing AI, a fitting endeavor for have-beens).
Soon, there will be little difference left between Source Available, and Open Source.
Which is fine: we no longer live in the 80’s.
Let Open Source be over too. Let it die and let kids come up with something better.
I don’t want to hear another sixty years old’s vision for the future of doing shit on the computer.