Not Even Scraps

The criticism of Holly Million was not about what she does "in her spare time". For a start, she was hired by the GNOME foundation in a press release filled with corporate word salad:

>We are thrilled to announce a significant milestone for the GNOME Foundation as we welcome Holly Million to our team as the new Executive Director. Holly is a multi-talented individual with a diverse background in nonprofit leadership, filmmaking, teaching, public speaking, and writing. Her commitment to empowering individuals to make a positive impact aligns perfectly with the values and goals of the GNOME Foundation.

The problem is the takeover of free software organisations that were created as organisations for hackers to coordinate and share resources by professional "nonprofit leader" grifters that are responsible for so much that is wrong with charities and other non-profit organisations today. There's a reason that nobody really contributes to charities anymore: bring up charities in conversation and if you have anything like my experience, most people will say something along the lines of "I don't give money to charity because most of it never gets to the people it is meant to go to, it gets tied up in bureaucracy and corruption".

The best example of a free software organisation that has been taken over by grifters is the Mozilla Foundation, which has gone from being about software development to being about "outreach" towards "marginalised communities" and "uplifting" people or whatever.

The fact that a professional nonprofit grifter was hired by the GNOME foundation is bad enough. But as Lunduke observed in his piece:

>She also appears to sell "Spiritual Herbs" and offers virtual shaman services which people can purchase via Venmo. Which, interestingly, is a sentence that makes my left eye twitch.

Not, in fact, just something she does "in her spare time". This isn't a matter of someone being picked on for having weird views or beliefs. Nobody would care if this woman just had kooky views. She's a symptom of everything wrong with free software organisations today: they've been taken over by people that are as different to hackers as it is possible to be. Hackers traditionally have valued things like *intelligence* and *rational thinking*. If you posted something about "shamanic energy healing" and "spiritual herbs" then it wouldn't even occur to most hackers that could be serious: you'd either be a parody of some kind, or far more likely a spam bot trying to sell herbal supplements.