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#+title: Support Richard M. Stallman
#+date: <2021-07-14>
Finally I found some time to write about this.
In LibrePlanet 2021 in late March, Richard Stallman announced in his talk that he was returning to the Board of Directors of the Free Software Foundation. This was after he was forced to resign by a smear campaign in September 2019.
It was great news! It was a relief and like some kind of belated justice for him.
The events took a dark turn soon after. An "open letter" labelling Stallman many things he is not gained support from a group of established people in the "open source" community, and organisations in the same community, including Creative Commons, Mozilla, The Tor Project and Framasoft. The letter called for the removal of Stallman from his life's work, and cited defamatory materials as evidence.
Other organisations also joined in, including Software Freedom Conservancy, Free Software Foundation Europe and Electronic Frontier Foundation and published letters condemning the imaginary crimes committed by Stallman and issued sanctions against him and the FSF.
These groups and people refused to engage in discussions and some outright censored disagreements on this matter.
It was a religious inquisition, a lynch mob, and a textbook case of ritual defamation. It damaged the free software movement and harmed the Free Software Foundation. The management team resigned, leaving the organisation in a bad shape, which was likely capitalised by opportunists in the GCC Steering Committee to remove Stallman, and remove the copyright assignment requirement from the project without community consultation, which further set a precedence and other GNU projects were planning on a similar move. The dilution of copyright will make GPL enforcement harder for these projects.
I condemn the defamatory attacks and [[https://rms-support-letter.github.io/][support Richard M. Stallman]] and I hope you join me. Please see also https://stallmansupport.org.
P.S. Alexandre Oliva wrote [[http://www.fsfla.org/ikiwiki/blogs/lxo/2021-03-28-pursuing-justice-and-freedom.en.html][a very insightful piece on the drama]].
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