Hoping to not have to say this again.

Until now, I have had no time nor interest to say anything public at all about Richard M. Stallman (RMS) separation from the Free Software Foundation. I intend to continue to do so, with the only exception of the short note below. It is the slightly cleaned up version of a comment I made on somebody’s Facebook wall, which I paste here only because, should I need to make the same point in the future, I can just paste a link to this post, rather than typing everything again.

I just read an acknowledgment that, when people first meet Free Software ideas, “The equation user == programmer creates a first layer of confusion…” in a post published TWO DAYS ago???

Heck, this is something I have been saying for 15 years at least!

Seriously, the real problem in this whole story is that we had to wait for someone from the outside, who knows absolutely nothing about Free Software and maybe was not even born when the movement started, to attack Stallman (rightly or not, it’s a whole other issue I will not go into) for something that has nothing to do with Free Software …

to solve (hopefully) a decades-long problem, which would exist even if Stallman were the nicest guy in the world: his and FSF’s way of promoting Free Software is counterproductive with 99% of humanity. Therefore it makes RMS and the FSF enemies of their own official goals since, at least, when the person who in 2019 asked to sack Stallman on Medium was at most in primary school.

Me, I confess I have the feeling that many of the more or less historical Free Software advocates who have signed against Stallman look like they did so thinking “this demand to cancel Stallman has no merit of its own, but if we do not grab this opportunity to change language now, Free Software will remain irrelevant for OTHER 30 years”.

For much more on this position of mine, read this, and all the links in there.