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On March 22 (local time), the Free Software Foundation (FSF) reinstated Richard Stallman, who left the FSF Chairman and the Board of Directors in 2019.
Stallman has contributed considerably to free software, such as the development of Emacs, GCC, and GPL (GNU Public License), but sometimes caused controversy, saying that he is biased toward one side in terms of thought.
Even when the FSF left the FSF in 2019, while the Me Too movement was heavily criticized for discriminatory remarks and actions against women, MIT CSAIL founder Marvin Minsky defended Minsky for reports that she had sexual relations with a minor by recruiting funder and sex offender Jeffrey Abstein. It started with expressing opinions.
Stallman directly announced the return of the FSF at the FSF Online event. Until now, the FSF has not officially announced Stallman’s return, but Stallman’s name is already posted on the board member introduction page.
Red Hat, a leading open source software company that showed distrust, said that Stallman was stunned when it learned of FSF’s return, and decided to immediately cancel all FSF-related funding. On this day, the FSF suggested improvement measures such as making the board member election process transparent and adding a representative by selecting FSF employees to the board of directors, but there is an opinion that Stallman’s return is unchanged and is a meaningful promise.
Like Red Hat, the CEO of SUSE, a major Linux distribution, tweeted that he was disappointed with the FSF’s decision and was adamant against all female contempt and prejudice. In addition, the Document Foundation, which introduced LibreOffice, an open source office suite, announced that it would stop participating in the FSF advisory committee and activities related to FSF. I am trying to decide.
Even in the free software industry, there seem to be a lot of people who don’t want Stallman’s return. In the case of advanced GCC developer Nathan Sidwell, it can be said that Stallman is the most conscious of the existence, but in response to this commotion, he requested that Stall only be removed from the GCC Steering Committee. He said that Stallman’s last contribution was during the 2003 SCO and Linux source code copying debate, and already expressed the view that Stallman was not a member of the GCC development.
It is said that there are many members of the FSF who do not want to return only to Stall. Among them, Kat Walsh has expressed his resignation, and John Sullivan, who served as FSF Managing Director, also resigned.
Stallman expressed his return through the streaming that started the incident, and said that some people will not be pleased or disappointed with his return. Related information can be found here.
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