Kicking off the GNU Assembly

The parent comment said explicitly "If you annoy too many people around you with your behaviour", and at this point it's clear that too many people are annoyed, as witnessed by the success of the "open letter" calling for his resignation.

The GNU Assembly is an attempt to provide a future for GNU projects, mostly by those people who don't want or cannot sign an open letter urging to refuse to contribute to projects related to the FSF.

> Do you evaluate a work place or a team you work with based on what thoughts your co-workers hold outside work?

I do indeed allow my opinion of someone to change based on things they say/do outside of the immediate contexts I know them. If I found out they have a side business scamming old people by calling them and pretending something is wrong with the computer, if they said they enjoyed groping people on crowded public transport, if they liked punching strangers in the back of the head to knock them over for laughs, if they were irrationally aggressive to staff who have no control over store/restaurant policies... then yes, I would change my opinion and my interactions with them.

And in case you want to hand-wave about "thoughts": spoken or written thoughts are very much actions, and we all treat them as such. If your parent told you they wished you'd never been born, you wouldn't dismiss it as "well it's just a thought".

Suppose I join a group with regular game nights and after a while one person insists on taking off their clothes, they've been told not to multiple times and keeps doing it no matter how uncomfortable it makes other people. People complain but the person says, "Me and my pals started this gaming group and there's no rule against nudity". Sooner or later we'll stop punishing ourselves hanging out with this person and make a separate gaming group. If it was an online gaming group it would have a "no nudity" code of conduct so that if that person or someone like them joined, the expectations are clear and ignorance can't be claimed as an excuse. That person probably wouldn't join (they'd probably find it a bit humiliating) but none of us have to put up with someone being persistently and unrepentantly naked in our face just because we play the same games^.

^ Or both believe in free software, or are both straight, or have literally any other thing in common.

The group, in particular its founders, is by and large the same group who have been doing development (largely of toolchain projects) for a very long time indeed: many of the members date back to Cygnus times. Just glancing at the current membership list we see dangerous radicals like Carlos O'Donell (major glibc maintainer), Jeff Law (the guy who ran RH's tools team for fifteen years and Cygnus before then and has contributed almost 6000 GCC commits by this point), Tom Tromey (probably the most important committer GDB has right now and active in the project since 1996), Mark Wielaard (decades of work on classpath, the late lamented gcj, also lots of commits to toolchain projects and oh yes elfutils though that is not GNU), all the Guile maintainers for the last decade or so, the only active maintainer for GNU HURD (also involved for decades)... the list goes on and on and includes a significant percentage of the people who do the actual work on major GNU projects and have done so for a very long time. This is not an insurgency. This is the people who more or less wrote many of the systems that are a core part of GNU saying "enough!"

They see what is plainly obvious by this point: the FSF is in a sudden death spiral, haemorrhaging supporters, patrons, funding, and as I understand it all its staff, all its management and half its board, all that in under a month. Some parts of GNU are extremely valuable, but if those parts stay shackled to a dying whale there is a danger they might get pulled down with it: so it's best to be ready to cut loose if the FSF cannot right itself. The people who spent decades of their lives on it do not like the idea of being pulled down with the whale. I am not remotely surprised.

(This is an overstatement, really: the FSF is not a whale. The legal and organizational jobs the FSF provides to GNU projects can largely be provided by a dozen other similar organizations now, most of which do a much better job at that sort of thing than the famously delay-prone FSF. The only worrisome part is the FSF's stewardship of the GPL and the 'or any later version' clauses. That probably can't be taken away from them, and honestly given that the FSF seems to have come out into the open as an explicit personality cult I'm not sure I trust a major license in its hands any more. Far smarter people than me are thinking about this, and something will surely get done.)

-- N., associate FSF member for a decade, no longer. For me the tipping point was the unilateral removal by RMS of the moderator of the (fairly obscure) GNU list that was explicitly set up by a bunch of toolchain people (again) to discuss potential governance improvements, and his replacement with a stunningly incapable moderator who proceeded to (as far as anyone can tell) invite onto the list a lot of people for the explicitly-stated reason that they would support RMS, and then do no actual moderation as those people destroyed the discussion. Many of these suddenly-appearing people had never done anything with the core GNU projects as far as I can tell and had names I do not recognize despite decades of hanging out on many GNU development lists. Some of them expressed confusion about where all these messages were coming from and may have been subscribed without their consent by someone inside FSF infrastructure (perhaps the same moderator). Others of these new people proceeded to troll, attack and outright doxx people (!!) for the sin of trying to improve FSF governance. Only when this eventually turned into attacking people for the crime of being GNU contributors while female was anything done, and even then only after much protest, and what was done was insultingly minimal. I will not link to the discussion because it frankly turned my stomach and gave me nightmares. But nobody should support an organization that does this to *its own contributors*. We can do better than this -- we must -- but we cannot do it from inside a personality cult.