[nomination]for Fellowship Council renewal and activism
Carsten Agger
agger at modspil.dk
Sun May 19 15:19:55 UTC 2019
On 5/13/19 11:57 AM, Christian Imhorst wrote:
> Hi,
>
>
> I support FSFE and not FSF - among other things - because of Stallman.
> No question RMS did much good for the Free Software movement. After
> all, he founded it and he is one of the reasons why Free Software even
> exists. But I don't think he should stay any longer the figurehead of
> the Free Software movement. Seems the longer he has any say, the
> longer he will poison the well. He hurts his mission with statements
> about sexual abuse, dehumanizing disabled people and denigrating women.
>
I'm not entirely sure what you mean, except that I know RMS has been
criticized for his "Saint Ignucius" stick. I also don't agree on his
position of preferred pronouns for transgender people.
One should note, however, that Stallman is a child of the decade he was
born in and also seems to be quite rigid in his points of view, to the
point where one might suspect a mild degree of autism. If the latter
were to be the case, your comment - and the comments of all of those
people who seemingly like to denigrate, ridicule and bully Stallman on
Reddit - could be construed as ableist.
I have no illusions as to Stallman being any sort of perfect person, yet
I want to note that /not //only/ did he found the Free Software Movement
and contribute s mzignificantly to it through the creation of the GNU
project, he continues to spend all his time travelling the world and
advocating software freedom - and not only that, he still occasionally
comes up with important new contributions.
The most recent example I can think of is this article from The Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/03/facebook-abusing-data-law-privacy-big-tech-surveillance
in which he advocates ending the abusive surveillance by the tech giants
by introducing a very simple law: No system is allowed to record data
that are not necessary for its /primary/ purpose.
Such a law could be implemented in the EU and could be enforced with
mandatory, unenforced inspections and draconian, GDPR-style fines. That
would be the end of Google's and Facebook's surveillance, since it would
simply become illegal.
I currently believe that such regulations are the /only/ possible way of
defeating the surveillance regime. Stopping NSA surveillance might be a
good thing, but it's rather immaterial, because the governments are
likely to gain access to the tech giants' data troves anyway, as they
have in China. I'd /love/ to see the FSFE adopt such a proposal and see
it through the EU Parliament.
And while Stallman is still capable of coming up with this kind of thing
I honestly don't think we should ostracize him from the movement. I've
supported the FSF before, and while I currently am supporting the FSFE
and continue to do so, I might easily support the FSF again if I e.g.
had more money.
Best
Carsten
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.fsfe.org/pipermail/discussion/attachments/20190519/0a6ac202/attachment.html>
More information about the Discussion
mailing list