RMS and open letter

[Philippe Cloutier]

Greetings Bernie,

Le 2021-03-24 à 23:00, Bernie Innocenti a écrit :
> On 24/03/2021 21.19, Marco Martin wrote:
>> On Wed, Mar 24, 2021 at 2:58 PM Nate Graham <nate at kde.org> wrote:
>>> Accordingly, I feel that this letter ought to be revised to target the
>>> FSF board specifically, without so much of a focus on RMS himself or
>>> calling for blanket boycotts of the FSF (what would this even entail?).
>>> I think probably everyone could get behind that.
>>
>> Couldn't have said it better no matter how hard I had tried <3
>
> I didn't sign because I found that letter unnecessarily inflammatory.
>
> I would sign a revised version as proposed by Nate, without demanding 
> the entire FSF board to resign or step back on their decision.


For reference, the Debian project is voting about the possibility of 
signing the above.


>
> The best action we could take, individually, is canceling our FSF 
> memberships and redirect our donations to organizations which are more 
> directly beneficial to the cause of Free Software.


Exit or voice, once again. At the time you replied, exit probably seemed 
like the best choice indeed. However, with the following fresh 
announcement, the dilemma is much harder: 
https://www.fsf.org/news/update-on-work-to-improve-governance-at-the-fsf
Ironically, the FSF may be about to undergo its greatest evolution in 
decade(s).


> Like, for example... KDE :-)


That's probably not a bad thing, though with its focus on desktop 
software, KDE can't be an equivalent to the FSF. An organization more 
comparable to the FSF would be Software in the Public Interest: 
https://www.spi-inc.org/
SPI's activity is very different from the FSF, SPI has its own issues, 
and is currently not associated with KDE. However, some KDE downstreams 
and GNUstep are.

-- 
Philippe Cloutier
http://www.philippecloutier.com