Only in fighting from the nerds mate they do my head in the guy in the video is a fine example of why the Free software movement has stagnated , if you dont like RMS then dont use his software or listen to what he has but there is almost zero respect at times in the Free Software Movement, I tend to be in the open source camp now and stay away from associating with free software movement as they are the toxic side of software now and all they do is moan moan moan and this video is a fine example of that.

No. Pretty much all tech spaces are dominated by tech bro culture, including snarky gatekeeping, condescending elitism, and hostile egoism. You're going to have to tolerate it for now and find the other people who are also only tolerating these spaces. Then you can connect with them and leave the frat club.

Of course there are, take a look at distro community rules for instance. The thing is with open lists is unlike companies the prevailing culture is visible.

You don't need friends or associates to learn FOSS when you have the internet.Then you can ignore the politics and the people. Humans who make good coders tend to be neuro-divergent in ways others may find difficult. I've used FOSS since 1999 and the only users I encountered in meatspace were by accident. You only need personal motivation and sound internet search skills. Any humans can be interacted with in forums etc where one can keep discussion on-topic. You do not need personal interaction to become as comfortable as you choose to be. The best way to interact with people is from a distance so that's exactly what I do. You don't need to be part of any "scene" to learn about software.

Only fighting when RMS is the topic

So basically he denied them the endorsement because they did not adhere to the principles all the way and you are holding this against him? Weird. It's exactly what I would expect him to do. Maybe there should be some kind of scale of endorsement, to encourage moving towards full openness and freedom but if there wasn't such scaled endorsement at the time and the verdict could only be binary I don't see how it could be different than it was. FSF should give tiered endorsements, like 0-tier (analogous to ring 0) would be at the top - completely free and open-source, and lower 1-4 tiers for systems that are mostly free/open but with some caveats, like the proprietary firmware you've described.

​@@vaakdemandante8772 The FSF endorses plenty of hardware that can optionally use blobs but refused to endorse this one, that's the hypocrisy.

@@eepykami There isn't one.

Lmao what? It wasn't foss because you could run literally anything you want?

@@vaakdemandante8772 The principle is owning your hardware. If that's the case, there's no possible way anyone can effectively keep you from using it "wrong". It's a contradiction to not endorse something just for the *possibility* of loading firmware. There's no OS that will stop you from running proprietary code. Should the FSF not endorse Linux, because it lets you run wine+corel painter or whatever?

And Debian is not considered a free distro

@@superslime16th only if you use the nonfree and contrib repositories ;)

@@raspberry1440kb The Free Software Foundation doesn't consider any Debian free software because they offer those alternative non-free ISOs in their website. If you so much as have a link to an external piece of non-free software -- which you don't even host yourself -- in your website, then according to the FSF, your software is not free software.

@@QuotePilgrim FSF is extremely harsh with their policy, but I think its important that they do this to stick to their core value

Why don't debian consider it to be free?

That's what drives me up a wall. Freedom 0 of the FSF is "The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose", and yet you're basically told to go off a cliff if you need to run something the cult doesn't approve of.

@@NCommander Freedom to zealots is always "free to do as I tell you to".

@@NCommander "die Revolution frisst ihre eigenen Kinder", = "the revolution eats its own children", a German idiom borrowed from the events of any major revolution, such as the French or Russian, etc. In my opinion, this is long overdue in the free software revolution. You shouldn't have a racist, a rape advocate (or an abuse trivializer), or a euthanasia advocate as a team member these days[1]. Especially not as a leader and role model in a management or representing position. "Free" in the sense of software can by no means ignore the "freedom" of people in terms of their dignity. But this is exactly what RMS does, which makes him a particularly bad hypocrite. Do him a favor and send him to his well-deserved retirement. Because that obviously has to be what he wants and what he's been trying to draw attention to for years through his "silent" cries for help (those disgusting views). Of course, retirement should be preceded by a number of proper investigations in various areas. It's not uncommon for the very people who are so vocal in defending child abuse or rape as a "freedom" to have their own record on the matter. But that should be done by professionals and not by the thousands of people offering their spare time and volunteers already plagued by the presence of RMS and his "cult". Yes, exactly, the state takes on such investigative tasks ... TO PROTECT THE COMMUNITY. RMS is definitely doubly reluctant to that idea and especially as a fact;) Heads up NCommander, you are doing great work and I am glad you are out of this cesspool. Thank you for your videos and the work you invest in the preservation of hardware and showing old wonderful stuff to us, the audience ... so to say: the work you invest in us! Thanks!:) You can feel that your other videos, the ones with tech-heavy content, come from the heart. It's no different with this one. Disclaimer: This comment was sent a year into the past. A service from providers such as the makers of new Star Wars and Star Trek movies and their corresponding timeline(definitive an illness). Please do not use this service or your soul goes directly to S.! (Satan, not Stallman, my apologies:P). [1] "These days" ... sure that was also the case in the past, bad people stay bad people, independent of the spatial or temporal position and some axes of symmetry (a well-known physical principle, hehehe). The change is in the environment: increased and easier visibility in public have changed significantly. Who cared about such a crazy organ pipe from the village in the 1950s? Nobody noticed, except for the closest acquaintances, who thought the person was a hollow nut anyway.)

(USSR theme plays)

free software does not apply to free thinking in your own life. You're the master of your own domain and if you don't want it data transsexual then you shouldn't be ridiculed and kicked out of a community for it. This is stupid and ridiculous and insane gestapo tactics. You lefties have gone insane and you ruin everything

He shamed Epstien’s victims that’s SIGNIFICANTLY worse than having small issues

You respect a pedophile. Says more about you than Stallman.

What I read about Stallman suggests that's putting it mildly.

I'm going to make an assumption that this question is being asked in good faith. As far as I can tell, the FSF was essentially silent during this period, and I can't find much from any of their head officers posting at the time. I did take a look through my contacts list to actually see if I could get a more definitive answer, and last people who held out were gone by '14 or '15. However, the people who just enabled RMS's attitudes and re-installed him are unchanged which is why the petition is not just for rms to be removed, but the entire board of directors. While it's less in the public spotlight, and I didn't bring it up in the video, the FSF staff actually unionized because dealing with the FSF board of directors was otherwise unmanagable. From what I can tell, a good chunk of the board was basically selected by rms, or approved by him, so the problem at this point is deeper than him.

@Voluntary Comrade Anecdotes are not data. NCommander shared his anecdotes from when he worked with the FSF and how detrimental his presence was for the people involved at the time and how that pushed people away from helping, even if they believed in FOSS. It is an anecdote, but it has its value, just as it is. We can extrapolate that if Stallman wasn't present (or during these years he was absent) the FSF did not discourage people like NCommander. This is just an extrapolation based on an anecdote. Take it as it is.

@@NCommander the FSF was silent without RMS because the FSF *is* RMS! And without him, woke capitalism will destroy free software.

I've lost about 50 subscribers, but I also gained some back. I'm still net negative, but its nowhere as bad as a backlash as I thought it would be. I just couldn't stay silent on this. As for myself, I don't use the GPL licenses anymore, primarily because I consider the GPLv3 a hot mess of a license. It's poorly written as compared to v2, and I do think the anti-tivozation clauses are a step too far. For stuff I intend as a reference implementation, I use MIT, otherwise, a weaker copyleft license.

@ People are bitching for right to repair, while bitching against anti-tivoization clauses from the same mouth. Sometimes I find all that shit ridiculous.

honestly if his channel really got hit bad from it then they weren't good people to begin with and aren't a big loss

@@polocatfan yes, if someone disagrees with you, it's because they are a bad person.

@@eusebiusthunked5259 disagreeing with someone and shutting your ears and eyes to ever being exposed to a person's viewpoint are two totally different things.

I know a lot of people basically stayed at the FSF because of their belief in free software. Even now, I generally believe in the ideals of FOSS, but the sheer toxicity lead to the point that I don't want to be involved in that world as a dev. Seeing basically the rest of the open source ecosystem rebunk the FSF for this is a refreshing (and overdue) breath of fresh air. In researching all this, I actually had learned the FSF had unionized in part due to rms. Any insights you can provide there? EDIT: just as clarification, I have no problem with the FSF staff specifically. While some of the project maintainer such as Drepper were really problematic, my problems were pretty focused around rms, and the FSF culture as a whole.

Accessibility matters :)

That sounds like quite a few RMS stories I've heard to the point that I could pretty much read it and go "yeah, that sounds like rms". There are quite a few posted in the links of things rms did while a houseguest which basically are variations of "this is a human being who doesn't give a shit about others"

Matches my personal experience of the man, having seen his behaviour towards a female member of my local Linux users group at a restaurant.

​ @NCommander I don't know a whole lot about RMS, but honestly, I would suspect he has some kind of Autism Spectrum Disorder. He has, apparently, denied this, but it would explain a lot of his behaviour. His complete lack of empathy or ability to see how his comments could hurt others, and, like in your example, his reaction to the TSA about not wanting to be touched. It would also explain some of his actions and comments towards women, etc, he may genuinely not understand that he is doing something wrong. A lot of people with autism get into trouble like that, they just don't realise that you can't say or do certain things. I'm not defending him, or his beliefs, I should stress that, but as someone with autism themselves, I do feel a certain sympathy for him. I do feel that he's not a "bad guy" he's just a weird guy who doesn't quite know how to act in society. I would agree though that running a large foundation, given his... questionable social skills, might not be the best position he could be in, especially in the modern world, given how careful you have to be to avoid getting into trouble.

@@Sepultra012 I'm autistic too. Don't armchair diagnose people with autism or any other mental disorder. You may not mind it, but it's incredibly offensive to me to be compared to RMS like that, and armchair diagnosis is both incredibly harmful and ableist in general. Autistic people do not "lack empathy". This is an ableist myth which serves to dehumanize us. I'm able to understand how people are feeling just fine, and in fact autistic people often have _stronger_ empathy than neurotypical people. Heck, my mom for years would not shut up about how I explained to her how Jessie from Toy Story 2 was feeling from being abandoned, because she wrongly thought that I felt like I was abandoned (that misconception she had, by the way, is something I understood because of empathy). I'm also perfectly capable of understanding whether I'm doing something right or wrong, nothing about autism makes it impossible or even especially difficult to understand the concept of harm. As for the stories surrounding him, they're perfectly explainable without armchair diagnosing or ableism. I would surmise that because RMS has overzealous opinions about spying and whatnot, he was making a scene at the TSA intentionally as a misguided form of protest. And as for his comments toward women, it's because we live in a sexist society and a whole lot of men are toxic like that because they've been taught that it's okay for men to act that way (i.e. toxic masculinity). It has nothing to do with his neurotype, whatever it may be.

@@diligentcircle I am not diagnosing anyone, I am simply saying he seems to meet a lot of the traditional qualities of people with autism. My intention was not to offend you, but the fact remains that much of RMS's behaviour could, and in the past has, been compared to autism/aspergers, etc. Lack of empathy *can* be a symptom of autism. I'm not saying it always it, but it *can* be. The "myth" is that all people with autism are emotionless and lack empathy, not that *noone* with autism lacks empathy. It is more common to lack empathy in people with autism. I, in actual fact, often have stronger empathy that neurotypical people too. But that's not to say that my experience (and yours) are typical of everyone. There are those with autism that do struggle to show empathy for others. The stories surrounding RMS are, indeed, explainable in other ways, and I'm not saying he definitely has autism, I have no idea. I am simply speculating as to a possible cause. I'm not going to comment too much on the "toxic masculinity" thing, because I think a lot of that is a cheap shot, and is, in many cases, sexist towards men. Very few men are "taught" that it's ok for them to act badly towards women, and there are plenty of women that act badly too. This whole SJW-Toxic masculinity thing is stirring up a lot of anti-male rhetoric that is not based in reality. Stallmans actions and words are his own, and do not reflect men in general, or society. In society, today, men are called all the names under the sun just for opening their mouth (Mansplaining, toxic masculinity, fragile white male, sealioning, etc, etc, etc), that's certainly not indicative of a sexist society.

P.S. I see the same mindset in online politics. There are those on Twitter who reject any positive change that isn't a complete and total revolution so I guess it's not an RMS exclusive attitude.

I tend to subscribe that the GPLv3 is the single most harmful thing ever done to free software. There's a reason why GPL usage has fallen year over year.

@@NCommander I very much prefer the philosophy of the BSD license because it feels like actual freedom. There's a "linux" distro called Chimera Linux that came out a few months ago that is completely non-GNU (BSD userland, musl, LLVM, etc) and the moment it is stable enough for daily use, i'm probably gonna completely move to that one.

​@@heavy0119 If your hardware can support it, you could move pver to any of the BSD of Operating Systems. I am just going to stick with Ubuntu and maybe Kali Linux in the future.

@@heavy0119 | actual freedom like the freedom to own slaves?

Yes, the FSF is a specific cult, but when I view this whole thing as a scale where you got all the bad stuff you get with proprietary on the left and FSF on the right. If we are to even achieve a balance, we need the FSF to sort of make it equal, even as culty as they are. They are the inspiration that gives us coreboot and other solutions that will be relevant when Microsoft goes full Apple with Windows. Of course I consider Stallman a weird man and I am not surprised he has all the strange opinions, but I only take a little of the Stallman spice rather than the entire jar to get what I need and I guess that is where my "respect" for him stems from, but he is also a man I am not sure I want to meet IRL. Like if you like a little chili powder in your food, you do not want to arrive to a dinner with the entire 1 pound bag of chili powder and nothing else :D

He's been doing this stuff for 40+ years though, pretty much consistently

Your comment light some wisdom into me. Thank you

Fuck what society thinks, the managers of society are always trying to control your speech and actions. The purposes of offending and being derogatory is to express yourself to test the limits to see if you're actually free to do as you please without legal repercussion being sought against you. As for the content of what someone says that will always be a contentious argument which is irrelevant when compared to the actual work and progress technology has made thus far.

It's more knowing what you're getting into. I may give a livestream on this in the future, but a lot of this is that keeping your objectivity is beyond important. I was young enough that it would have been very easy for me to basically fall into blind obedience and never escape.

that's right, open source is what normal people call software with open source "free software" is something you will hear from the deranged RMS cultists like this dude above me

No changes unfortunately.

@@NCommander well, I hope it at least hasn't gotten worse I've barely dipped my toe into the open source community so I can only imagine how you feel about it

@@dirkstrider8783I regret to inform you that FSF is not technically a part of the "Open Source" community, but rather, the "Free Software" community. /s

From Wikipedia “There are conflicting accounts of Diogenes's death. His contemporaries alleged that he held his breath until he died.” That’s our Stallman! 😂

More "diverse"

I understand the stance, but there's a line between "we don't support hardware that needs binary blobs" and well, and then you get stories like this: twitter.com/mattblaze/status/1374461429902761987 Free software, at its heart, is a social movement, not a technical one, and you don't win hearts and minds like that. Furthermore, he's a spokesperson that many of us who are in the community avoided like the plague. You can have great ideas, and you can make amazing contributions, but being a leader requires actively being able to convince people of your point of view.

​@ you can be true to a stance without being a gaping asshole about it, or being a misogynistic about it, or making the vast majority of people who interact with you want you to get out.

@@NCommander Ok that's just insane.. ranting about noise cancelling headphones? And I understand the social movement aspect of free and open source software, but it's also not possible for everyone to get access to hardware that is totally open source, with no requirement of proprietary software/firmware. I don't like people like him saying how horrible it is for people like me who have limited budgets to use the hardware that's /actually/ available to me. He can go screw off, basically.

reminds me of mental outlaws video on the topic: "its technically correct but not ok to say"

What you just typed up is why I felt RMS was a net-negative to FOSS before all his attitudes towards women/minors came to light. I can respect the ideals he made, but he's the worst possible ambassador because if you attack people for asking innocent enough questions, you alienate them and hurt your own cause. How many people at your university saw RMS, and basically decided "yeah, this is a club I want nothing to do with"?

I actively looked into this, and I'm coming up with not much. If someone can prove me wrong, I'll edit this post, since the FSF's website doesn't make it very easy to look through for an individuals contributors but I couldn't find anything recent. I do fully admit I might have missed something. He doesn't even seem to be active with GNU emacs development. That being said, there's accusations he actually stole emacs from James Gosling. It's recorded as part of the Computer History Museum oral history (www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/dhrcxw/james_gosling_on_how_richard_stallman_stole_his/), but the linked reddit thread goes through the main parts. The tl;dr version is Gosling was looking for someone to take over, rms took his code, replaced the copyright notices to make GNU emacs, some major UNIX vendors shipped it, and basically Stallman got off scott free because you can't sue a homeless man. His work and contributions to GCC seem more straightforward and verifiable, but even then, he hasn't been involved since the GCC 2.x rewrite since the original GCC design was too inflexible to create a retargetable compiler. www.softpanorama.org/People/Stallman/history_of_gcc_development.shtml The last verified work I can find is his authorship on the GPLv3, but even there, I can't tell how much he actually wrote, vs. just providing the ideals for.

@@NCommander He didn't do much. And his campaigns are mostly useless. Saying "stop using Windows" is not an actionable campaign. Also, most of his predictions actually failed, if you look closer at them.

@@LouigiVerona I think Windows 11 is more effective at that.

Windows 11 is fine. It basically is just rebadged 10.

A person can contribute while not being in a leadership position. Plenty of people do. I made large contributions and overhauls to numerous projects while not being a leader in said projects. However, when you're the head of an organization, that entire organization takes on the traits of that person, and that's why rms being forced out was a good thing. Furthermore, if you're going to going to drive other people out, then genius is useless because you're causing more harm than good, no matter how smart you are.

@@radio.computer Funny you should make that comparison; after corresponding with him for a while some years back, I concluded that he was basically a communist in his philosophy (you will share, or else).

@@radio.computer Yeah... I like the BSD license as it's pretty much "just tell the world you used our stuff" but GPL3 gives me hives. All stick and no carrot.

@Roy McBatty That's literally what Enron was and it spawned dozens of studies into why employees took horrible positions that hurt people, and it always stemmed back to the cult of personality that organizations built around their leaders. Humans are tribal. We tend to mimic our leaders.

As an autistic woman, please don't defend people like RMS or describe his character flaws as "idiosyncrasies". Giving space to people that are abusive negatively affects both women, autistics, and folks that are idiosyncratic.

im interested, post the link

@@jonathanhipkey2425 All my attempts to do so have failed so far. I tried posting an explanation of how to find the article online, but the comment was also removed. Not sure that even this one will go through

@@jonathanhipkey2425 Hint: the critique is published under my name.

Just a question, are you the same Louigi Verona that writes music? I really enjoy what you do.

@@RobertHalvarsson Yes, sir. Thank you very much for the kind words :)

I had never expected to make a video powered by sheer rage, but here it is. I'm already getting ratio-ed for it, but what can you do?

@@NCommander i would just like to say, ur NOT getting ratio'd. u stood up for what u believe on a controversial topic and the like to dislike ratio shows the majority of ur audience agrees with u. ur channel will shed some subscribers, but unless the dislikes far outweigh the likes, this video will be remembered as a defining and positive moment in ur channel's history

@@liquefactor it was getting ratioed when it first went up, but the percentage is holding at about 75%. I have lost a number of subs thus far, and this is not even peak hours for my channel. So we'll see how far it goes.

@@NCommander ah. i came in when it was 95/30ish, so it's looked abt that way to me the whole time. good luck. i bet u'll weather the storm just fine

@@NCommander Seems to be holding steady. I think that's a fair barometer, and roughly parallels the general mentality around free software -- I've noticed that around a quarter are true believers rather than practical users.

Thank you very kindly for these words. Unfortunately, I did get a lot of hate mail and more over this; people are more interested in attacking me while defending RMS, which I reported to KZfaq (and autodeletes the comment since its my channel). The amount of dislikes shows what's really going on. I do think a lot of people think one good thing can outweigh all the bad, or can't deal with the fact that their idols are trash. You can see this a lot when controversy happens with any famous figure, and even seemingly intelligent people can't see a more nuanced view. That being said, the FSF's cult like behavior is actually worse than I described. Not long after I posted this, a few people came forward on the experiences with a more "modern" FSF, and how they had to unionize to make working with RMS even slightly bearable. Matt Blaze (@mattblaze) has full threads relating to it, and I spent a lot of time digging through the FSF's tax returns, to the point that I sorta think they brought him back to raise donations from the controversy. It's ... not pretty. That being said, seeing someone write something like this on a video where I've been harassed and worse is always uplifting so thank you.

​@@NCommander I hadn't noticed the like-to-dislike ratio until you pointed it out; it's disheartening, but at the same time, I also find it encouraging, because as awful as this situation is and as appallingly as some people have treated you over this video, it still shows that there's at least a very large minority who agree with us, even if they aren't the majority, and the fact that this minority is definitely much larger than it was in the past is a sign of hope that those of us who see RMS for who he really is may soon outnumber those who worship him blindly. And even if it feels like you're not doing good, that change can't happen without people like you who are willing to speak out against his and the FSF's unacceptable behaviors. I'm sure that of the thousands of people who've watched this video, some of them went away with a more nuanced view RMS and the SFS, or at least were set on the path toward accepting that their hero maybe isn't who they thought he was. You had the courage to use your influence to help bring about a change in the community that I desperately hope to see, and I am beyond grateful for that! DistroTube is another KZfaqr who's called RMS out for some of his behaviors, and while he's still a fan of RMS, he does at least acknowledge that he's no saint, and does more harm than good by representing the community. It's going to be a long and hard road, but as more voices join the choir, I think there's hope that this community might come to its senses. Thanks again for lending your voice to this cause.

@@NCommander Not only Stallman is trash, the FSF is also kind of trash as a organization. Apache software foundation is much better. And the GNU suite of software is horrendous in terms of user interface, and that comes from an engineer that doesn't care much about it, for me to say than an UX is that bad, it must be really, really bad. Nowadays I just stay far away from anything GNU.

And that's fine! You shouldn't need to agree 100% with someone to treat them fairly and not slander their character.

Yea, I heard he once said 'im hungry'. (just in case, this is satire)

@@jkr9594 Seriously? What a degenerate and dangerous individual! Tbh I remember that in the summer of 1994 I heard some awful things about him. That's when I knew I'd never contribute to Free Software.

The man is too extreme, that's never a good thing

@@MrRafu83 So JFK was wrong about that?

who we hear the most are always the confident minorities with extreme views and takes on things

Hopefully, you follow it out the window.

You're the type of person I was trying to reach with this because unless you're actively involved, it's pretty easy to know of Stallman, and not the rest of the crap that follows. It's not like most discussions open "Richard Stallman, father of the FOSS movement who enables toxicity ..." I legitimately debated very hard if this was even an appropiate venue, but my channel is an extension of myself and my views, and given my own personal experiences and times with the FSF, that pushed me into posting a video. (I had already denounced rms and posted at length on the Twitters)

​@Rahmi Acar UNIX was available under a shared source license before Stallman ever got involved. BSD was under the four-clause BSD license before teh FSF was incorporated. Linux was never a FSF project. I fully admit the GPL was a good idea, but one good idea doesn't make someone immune to criticism, or saying its their time to get off the pot.

@Rahmi Acar I never said that I don't know who RMS is, just that I hadn't really cared about the news, since they are in the periphery of my interests. That being said, someone can be an integral part of the development of something important and at the same time an incredibly awful person who has been a harasser and a hindrance to the same movement he helped create, and he deserves to be judged and treated accordingly, such as denying him the leadership of an important organization.

@@TheJFGB93 Butning question to all of the disciples of rms, how many of you still use ReiserFS?

@@goyslop-consumer Elaborate.

You weren't by chance the person who made Arch or Gentoo/Hurd, were you?

@@NCommander hahaha absolutely not, I'm more like a learning developer. And a fellow retro software enthusiast, my only work that reached into the public is an unity game 🤣

Link , Screenshots or gtfo

Did he give you the good old "Hurd is not an educational project, it is a very complex and sophisticated piece of code" bullshit? Cause there are some EXAMPLES of that in the mailing list I tell ya. That kernel will maybe work by 2055 if development resumes.

@@theharbingerofconflation no, it was more like "we don't need os fragmentation, gtfo" xD

Free software is already more than convenient, we're just making excuses.

@@iskamag There are many good open hardware drivers, but for complex hardware like dedicated graphics chips it's still a long ways off. It is not a matter of convenience keeping me away from full free software adoption. My hardware simply does not work properly with free drivers. Simple as that.

Yes, there's also the matter of degrees of freedom. It's not binary. I'd prefer to use GNU/Linux instead of Windows, (Ubuntu derivates) but it's 50/50 due to work. More Windows or Mac users with Gimp, Libre Office and Firefox is also a good thing. Heck, if most Linux distros are deemed worthless and unfree, because folks like to be able to use video drivers, it's like the ideology is designed for an a select few only. That's not fun computing.

I don't know why or how, but this managed to get a chuck on just how absurd this comment is on this video, so thanks.

Any kind especially or all equally? Please clarify.

*pets Cookie Blocker extension*

As I'm a European, you're now legally obliged to offer me options on what types of cookie you'll give me. I'll take some chocolate and hazelnut ones please, with extra tracking sprinkles.

I appreciate that. This wasn't easy for me to go through, or make, and honestly, I've been bracing for the amount of hatedom this video is going to generate, but someone had to come forward. I know others have posted their stories, but well, I wanted to try and architulate it from the top.

Honestly, I wish I could say I *was* surprised, but that would be a lie.

The only good thing he did recently, like last decade (so not GPL 3 then which was good) is advocacy and promotion and funding for fully libre software compatible laptops, leading to RYF Thinkpads with no proprietary firmware. Even then though it seems to be mostly for Stallman's ego and the hardware itself isn't free edit: and even the thinkpad ec isn't libre yet and plans to replace it have been let to rot, only libre fully pc to do is to get an Asus arm chromebook that can be completely libre

hello fellow new australian

You don't get to decide that, start your own movement then. And while you're at it, stop using free and open source software, because you wouldn't have it at all, if not for his stubbornness.

@@highlyillegalpigeon what are you on about? Im just saying I don't really care whether he's a nice person or not, as long as he gets the job done.

I made my peace with it quite a long time ago, but it's why I no longer advocate for FOSS, nor do I actively recommend anyone use Linux. A lot of the Linux stuff I do on my channel is more potboiler and me letting off steam because I don't need to do a lot of research on a topic I know so well. (I think the last two Linux videos I've done were 'Project X is running very late, let me do something easy to cover').

Thank you kindly for your words. There's a fairly active rms blind worship, and I knew I was going to be stepping in it with this video, but ignoring a problem doesn't make it go away. As to my Canonical experiences are a bit harder to put into words. I may do that at a later point, but there's a lot of history that I would need to

RMS isn't problematic, the angry zombie mob of extremists fanatics part of the cult of the cancel culture is.

I could put up with the toe fungus eating. Not so much the attacks on women, comments made, and the everything else. Weird and quirk is fine. Explaining to someone why an action isn't ok and they change and learn is OK. Having someone take actions that harm others over and over is where things get bad, This is especially on top of not actually helping get people in to the FSF, and just made it harder and harder,

@@NCommander honestly I would childishly giggle at RMS when that was the most scandalous thing I knew about him, but still respected him. He was kind of a hero to me growing up. This saddens and disappoints me, much like it would if Patrick Stewart turned out to be a secret racist or something. Which will never happen because Captain Picard rocks, but you get what I mean, it would suck targ targsticles.

I get very uneasy feelings when I watch things like old Achievement Hunter videos because of Ryan Haywood which sucks because those things got me through a lot of dark times.

what

You're being conveniently unspecific. Also, I know that you worry about people being able to see your beard shadow when you look into the mirror. You will never be a woman.

@@GC-qe8vc but it has the luxury to alienate all those its pioneers alienate with their abrasive and condescending attitudes that they refuse to address after decades? ok. it's not about having "woke PR", just not being an asshole and being open to changing your tone when it has a long history of actively pushing people away from the movement. i looked up to rms when i was a teen and he is who got me interested in the FS movement, and i appreciate all he's done, but he obviously alienates many people from the movement. the ideal outcome would be for him to address his behavior and legitimately listen to the criticism and be open to growing, but unfortunately he's shown he is not willing to do that.

honestly I don't agree with with everything but bro the part that hit home is that you said your depressed I really enjoy your content and even though I don't agree with all your points fuck anyone harassing or you or making you depressed for your viewpoint really bro fuck 'em and don't take the video down! Like I said, it's you view and if someone makes you feel bad about it well they are just not intelligent enough to prove you wrong with fact!

I've worked in free and open source software for over 20 years, and I use Windows to do it. I actively use MSYS and MingW on a daily basis. In a world dominated by the attitudes you describe in this video, it has not been an easy path to walk over the years. I can see the heartfelt emotion as you talk about your experiences and views on the subject, and it is something I personally identify with. I spent so long trying to contribute in open source communities only to be ostracised for being "too liberal" in my views on software development and operating systems. I honestly don't care if something is proprietary or not so long as I can get the job done and it allows me to share my efforts with as many people as possible. The fact of the matter is that the people involved in most open source projects are not my target audience, it is the end user that doesn't understand any of that. It is about collaboration and community. It took me a long time to realise all of this, and even longer to create a community of my own that creates free software without the toxicity. I try to lead by example, but I still often have to deal with this toxic attitude from people who come in and try to force their views on us. It isn't fair on me or my community, and I've had to take a very hard line approach where I simply say that people are free to hold their own opinions, but they are *not* entitled to force those on others. I refuse to use the GNU GPL due to the restrictive and infectious nature of the license, and license my code as ZLIB or MIT these days, with any non-code generally being CC-BY. I think taking this video down would just be giving in to a vocal minority (and yes, it is a minority when you consider the bulk of any audience outside of strictly free software). They're not worth compromising your own principles for. I've met many people like you over the years and unfortunately too many of them get scared off by this toxic attitude in free and open source software, and I absolutely hate it. It is a waste of good talent to drive people away for no good reason, and even worse to suppress their opinion when you're not being forced to share it. That being said, I know the mental toll it takes to deal with the hate. I've lived it. I can't speak for you or whether you should keep the video up or take it down, that's a decision only you can make. What I want you to know is: you're not alone. Focus on the positive feedback you've been getting on this video, because those are the people that matter. Most people who share this opinion are probably just as scared to comment because of the negative attention they'd get as a result from that vocal minority, but what you're doing is speaking for those who can't. At the end of the day, that's the best way to give back to the world and what I feel is the epitome of advocating for freedom.

@@qreeves Part of why this video has stayed up is because it is, for the most part, the only real dissenting voice left about RMS; most of the other ones that were up were attacked and trashed.That being said, I'm not convinced it's a vocal minority; I feel very much like its a vocal majority in FOSS communities these days ...

I've found this video five months later and it was very interesting, an eye opener for sure. It's your call on whether you want to deal with these people but in the meantime I have to thank you for making it and also taking the time to correct the record. Transparency is king.

@@DaVince21 Hey, me too! Three days after you did, it seems :D @NCommander Thanks for leaving this up. Between the video and the comments section I'm getting some insight into what RMS and the FSF are actually like inside and that working with them can be stressful or even traumatic. It's... Idunno, I guess "morbidly interesting?" to learn about more ground-level problems than just the /very/ poorly discussed Epstein comments. Being someone with pretty nasty anxiety and social issues myself, prevalent toxicity helps make it basically impossible for me to even try to contribute to projects. The asinine idea that there's some magical coding meritocracy is simply not true. What really happens is "merit" gets defined (consciously or otherwise) as "being like us" and the stated ideal of it ("we don't care who or what you are as long as you can get the job done") seems a bit empty when the job, as others have stated, really isn't even getting done at least some of the time. We're never going to have a good world to live in without people like you speaking and being heard. It's endlessly baffling to me that so many people try to make things worse for others (or prevent others from gaining anything) and seemingly so few are interested in making anything better (for anyone!). I hope things improve for you and I'm saddened to see you're getting abused for daring to speak out against an idol. Hopefully the change in subscriber population will at least increase the proportion unafflicted by sycophancy :3

Weren't public my ass. They were on the fucking MIT mailing list.

Most of the negative responses I've seen are very similar to those who tried to defend Trump, or those who try to justify QAnon. I've really not seen anyone post a remotely good argument on why RMS coming back is a good thing.

I've yet to really hear any positive story about rms interactions, or working with the FSF. I know his base is very much defending them, but I can look at the RMS open letter, and the names on it, and almost all of them are people who actively work in tech (a lot of names I directly recognized). Most of the support seems to come from people who think RMS's ideas top who he is as a person and have never worked or experienced him.

@@NCommander I have to say, your dislike count ratio looks sus, like there was a targeted bot attack. Unless it's changed since I last checked 10 hours ago.

Hey .. I know you :?

"I'll go full free and open everything when RMS starts paying my bills, mortgages and feeds me, my family and my dog." - I'm sorry, but you're either immature or truly insane if that's how you frame what free (not neccessarly open source) software (what RMS and FSF stand for) is or should do. You might want to check what free speech is, what ownership of something you buy is, what a slippery slope is, what modern slavery is, what GPL and linux brought to the world, including all the free (as in no cost) software that you use and have used before and websites that you visited and that offer some useful service and that are free, because Linux and GNU and GPL have a major contribution in that. What you're saying is basically that an overworked warehouse employee at Crapazon (sic) who has to pee in a bottle to save a bit of extra time for more work, shouldn't support unions and laws that give basic human rights in workplaces, until the senator that supports those laws doesn't personally pay that employee's bills, mortgages and feeds him, his family and his dog, instead of miniscule pay that Bezos gives him. Just how wrong is that ? RMS and FSF fight for a basic right, something that does directly benefit you. You going free (possibly also opensource) software is for you own good, and the good of the community, you're not doing FSF a favor. You might see it as such, but in reality, it's supporting a human right - the right to own and modify something you've bought, the right to not be spied and controlled, which proprietary software greatly allows and has done so numerous, numerous times. All in the name of convenience, which many people bought, because, as a whole, we're lazy and idiotic.

@@Winnetou17 yeah, no. This had nothing to do with any of the things you said. As I started I mainly use open source software, but should there be no open source option or the proprietary do a drastically better job than the open source alternatives, I'll gladly take out my wallet. I've been working professionally as a developer for 13 years and the roof over my head and every meal I've had had been courtesy exclusively creating proprietary software. RMS has always treated people who use (or God forbid create) proprietary software as toxic, organic waste. Which brings me to my original point: fine, I'll use exclusively foss and won't create proprietary software when RMS starts paying my bills. Until then, he's a hypocritical useless piece of garbage. He's basically an American-born communist shill. And as you can probably tell from my name, I know a thing or two about commies.

Comments like this make it all worth it. As you might notice, I'm dealing with a fairly large toxic waste dump here since /g/ actually is going out of its way to harass anyone who badmouths rms. Amusingly, the thread uses the thumbnail from this video.

@@NCommander So sorry to hear that, it is pretty much law that they have to defend it, they quite literally put a halo of glory on him in the sticky. I sincerely hope that the amount of good people will outnumber these fools.

General rule, anyone who complains about "sjw" can be completely disregarded.

@@Turai12 sjw as a derogatory term used to mean the actual crazies, instead of people even suspected of mob/polarizing behavior.

I'm no fan of modern "cancel" culture and "SJW's", but RMS has said some pretty nasty crud.

Well, my thought was, if my KZfaq channel goes down in flames, it was still worth it. Thank you kindly for your words.

Yeah. It wasn't easy for me to make the decision to speak up, but I realized that I couldn't stay silent on this.

Not really

So, let me put it like this. RMS's official role is as the representative and ambassador of free software. That is the stated mission goals of the FSF (they even put it on their tax forms). RMS himself has alienated a lot of people over the years, myself included. Basically, if you're going to represent free software to the general public, do you want someone who is going to ruthless attack anyone who might disagree with you in the slightest? It's a fact that almost all computers need at least some blobs to work. That's an unfortunate truth as is. The FSF should be striding for 100% blob free computing. However, you don't get people to help your cause by telling them that there 99% effort isn't good enough, that you're living in sin for needing a blob to use wifi, or drivers. In that regard, the FSF has failed miserably because they ruthlessly attack anyone for not following the party line entirely. It's gotten tot he point I won't use copyleft licenses because I don't like the taint the FSF left on it; I tend to use MIT much more. A lot of other comments and stories mirror my experiences, including other folks whoa ctively worked with rms. So even before taking into any of his personal comments and views, he's failed as a leader of the FOSS movement because he's alienating the people he needs to convince. I will note that much of the early FSF work actively supported commerical UNIX and similar because there was an understanding that good was not the enemy of perfect. Autoconf, GCC, and glibc all got traction because they were better than propertiary software *but* could work on this platforms. On that basis alone, he shouldn't be in a leadership role. My stance on removing him comes from everything else. If you take in account his frankly disgusting comments, active abuse of individuals, and habit of taking a shit on everything, you have someone who is actively harming FOSS far more than any commerical interest. I went through teh GNU projects, I can't find any code commits from him in the last decade (I may have missed some since the FSF site isn't the easiest to search through). I actually can't find much beyond speaking engagements beyond the work on teh GPLv3. So I need to ask the serious question: why do we want rms here? He's still free to speak at any conference that will take him. He can give all the views he wants, but why do we want him leading an organization when he's a massive deterrent the whole movement?

@@NCommander I am positively loving this discussion. Here's the thing though. No matter what controversial topic is being discussed, you will always have people who represent the worst aspects of any given argument. Nine times out of ten, those people who are given the most air time. Meanwhile the more moderate voices are the ones who are doing the hard work of forming consensus and ultimately driving the discussion forward. So, yes. You're right, we don't need Stallman and we also don't need Ehmke. Except we do need them as an (albeit flawed) baseline for our dialogues going forward. The question really is, how do we create a welcoming inclusive environment for all, while furthering the acceptance and adoption of free and open source software. @NCommander, it is truly a pleasure discussing this with you.

I agree with you line of thought

I don't get your commercial level attitude argument. Are you saying that because there are industry specific tools, that happen to be all in proprietary software, that is a reason to not use free software ? In case the answer is "yes", then I have to add that, while you're not wrong, you are in the wrong mindset. Yeah, for now you have to work using that proprietary software. But, if there's no free software alternative, then the general idea is to try to support the creation of one. That's why there's more people needed, but so so many seem to miss the point. Of couse there's lots of things missing on the free software department. That shouldn't be a deterrent in supporting the idea, beucase it's we, all, that benefit from it. Rather, it should be an alarm sign that we should be more involved in creating the tools and software so that everything important, everything that we need, everything that we like, has a free software alternative. The never using open source software is just the goal, and everyone should adhere to it as it sees fit. RMS did often go full into it, in order to show just how difficult it is, and how much work it is needed. To support the idea, you don't have to do the same, to limit yourself to basic software and a 11 year-old laptop. You just have to try to contribute (and that's not just by programming)

The FSF will be forced to if enough people refuse to donate to them, and choose not to allow them to parpicate as long as he is. The list of organizations demanding the FSF board to resolve are some fairly large ones in the FOSS community.

There's a big difference between Open Source and Free Software.

long life Stallman!!!

Feel free to stop by on Discord to share the pain. I sorta wanted to do a video on Hurd, but a lot of is sorta taking apart mach and all the reasons it failed.

Why should him playing devil's advocate for pedophiles and making other weird (but logically clear) arguments mean he should be kicked out of an organization that makes free software? Like if he suddenly was like "lets make GPL 4 a proprietary license" yeah, definitely kick him out. But I don't think removing someone for having bad opinions that don't necessarily conflict with the opinions of the FSF makes much sense. Why does having a few bad opinions make you a bad person?

"He wasn't 'cancelled' for using his free speech, people are just holding him accountable for what RMS said, nothing against his right to free speech" Holding him accountable by asking everyone to get him & every other FSF board member fired? Isn't this the very definition of "cancelling" someone?

Yeah that's basically what it boils down to. The FSF has freedom 0, but treats it as "You have the freedom to choose us". I still believe in free and open source software is a good thing for the world, but what the FSF demands is their way or the highway.

@@NCommander The only way to achieve complete software freedom would be to break up the FSF monopoly over GNU and give it to communities again. Whilst the FSF moans and bickers, the Open-Source movement literally doesn't care and gets on with it.

>Surely Freedom 0 literally means the freedom to choose Windows, Mac, etc., alongside GNU? And they are stopping you? Can I get some example? I know they discourage it and others may look down on you but isn't that to be expected from community that values software freedoms? If I was buying toothbrushes from company that stabs one puppy for every toothbrush sale, you probably won't be cheering me up to go and buy more toothbrushes from them. By using software from M$ or apple you are actively making the world a worse place for these people by incrementing their monopoly and approving of the huge abuse of users they're doing. Read the freedoms again. Freedom 0 is not about a choice of software (because we are talking about the program you are applying the freedom to), it's about ability to use the program as you wish, you can't do that with windows or any other non-free program. That comparison is invalid.

@@jankonecnik4026 It's the freedom to partition your hard drive and install FOSS alongside Windows.

You're welcome. I've just been flabbergasted at how many people are willing to apologize or make excuses for the FSF and rms, when behavior like his wouldn't be tolerated in any reputable place.

Low-level toxicity is good; roots out the passionless and weak.

@@MorriganMKII the "weak" might be weak in terms of emotional resistance to people being arses, but that doesn't make them not good programmers. I mean what are you to make this kinda statement, a Klingon? Qapla'!

@@DissociatedWomenIncorporated Right, yes, the weak.

@@MorriganMKII all you did was repeat yourself, this in no way backs up your assertion. If you were correct, hostile work environments would be significantly more productive and innovative than supportive ones, and yet all the data collected on that issue says the opposite. I find your viewpoint... _highly_ illogical.