Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF

Posted Sep 19, 2019 7:44 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF by coriordan
Parent article: Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF

So here's the thing - he picked up on what's mere strangeness and what's unacceptable behaviour back in the 1970s and 1980s when he was in his 20s and 30s. This is normal - most people get stuck to some degree on "what the world was like when I was young" as they get older. However, social norms, especially on the differential treatment of men and women, have changed in the last 20 years to a considerable degree (so 2000 to 2020 period).

The trouble is that RMS has remained the figurehead for the FSF, while no longer picking up on the modern difference between strange and unacceptable. That's an issue for the FSF - ideally, and with 20/20 hindsight (i.e. no blame attaches here, I don't have the context for why this didn't happen), he'd have found a new FSF director in the early 2000s to take on the figurehead role (speaking for the FSF, putting out press releases, going to conferences on behalf of the FSF etc), and been able to move to an "emeritus" role, where he can do the prophecy part of his role, but is no longer the face of the FSF.

And it's the prophecy part of his role that he's good at, and that really plays to his strengths; take a course, extrapolate it, remove the bits that are implausible, and say "if we do not fix things, this is the bad place we end up in". Had he moved across to just doing that in the early 2000s, this would be a non-issue; he'd still be weird by social standards, but he would not also be the FSF's face to the world.