The Stallman wars
So, 2021 isn't bad enough yet, but don't despair, people are working to fix that:
Welcome to the Stallman wars
Team Cancel: https://rms-open-letter.github.io/ (repo)
Team Support: https://rms-support-letter.github.io/ (repo)
Current Final stats are:
Team Cancel: 3019 signers from 1415 individual commit authors Team Support: 6853 signers from 5418 individual commit authors
Git shortlog (Top 10):
rms_cancel.git (Last update: 2021-08-16 00:11:15 (UTC))
1230 Neil McGovern
251 Joan Touzet
99 Elana Hashman
73 Molly de Blanc
36 Shauna
19 Juke
18 Stefano Zacchiroli
17 Alexey Mirages
16 Devin Halladay
14 Nader Jafari
rms_support.git (Last update: 2021-09-29 07:14:39 (UTC))
1821 shenlebantongying
1585 nukeop
1560 Ivanq
1057 Victor
880 Job Bautista
123 nekonee
101 Victor Gridnevsky
41 Patrick Spek
25 Borys Kabakov
17 KIM Taeyeob
(data as of 2021-10-01)
Technical info:
Signers are counted from their "Signed / Individuals" sections. Commits are counted with git shortlog -s.
Team Cancel also has organizational signatures with Mozilla, Suse and X.Org being among the notable signatories.
The 16 original signers of the Cancel petition are added in their count.
Neil McGovern, Juke and shenlebantongying need .mailmap support as they have committed with different names.
Further reading:
- An introductory Ars Technica article in case you wonder what this is all about.
- Debian vote mailing-list: March 2021, April 2021
- NYT Magazine on the history of cancel culture
- Ed Santos' commentary and analysis
12.04.2021 Statements from the accused
18.04.2021 Debian General Resolution
The Debian General Resolution (GR) vote of the developers has concluded to not issue a public statement at all, see https://www.debian.org/vote/2021/vote_002#outcome for the results.
It is better to keep quiet and seem ignorant than to speak up and remove all doubt.
See Quote Investigator for the many people that rephrased these words over the centuries. They still need to be recalled more often as too many people in the FLOSS community have forgotten about that wisdom...
01.10.2021 Final stats
It seems enough dust has settled on this unfortunate episode of mob activity now. Hence I stopped the cronjob that updated the stats above regularly. Team Support has kept adding signature all the time while Team Cancel gave up very soon after the FSF decided to stand with Mr. Stallman. So this battle was decided within two months. The stamina of the accused and determined support from some dissenting web devs trumped the orchestrated outrage of well known community figures and their publicity power this time. But history teaches us that does not mean the war is over. There will a the next opportunity to call for arms. And people will call. Unfortunately.
01.11.2024 Team Cancel is opening a new round; Team Support responds with exposing the author of "The Stallman report"
I hate to be right. Three years later than the above:
An anonymous member of team Cancel has published https://stallman-report.org/ [local pdf mirror, 504kB] to "justify our unqualified condemnation of Richard Stallman". It contains a detailed collection of quotes that are used to allege supporting (sexual) misconduct. The demand is again that Mr. Stallman "step[s] down from all positions at the FSF and the GNU project". Addressing him: "the scope and extent of your misconduct disqualifies you from formal positions of power within our community indefinitely".
Team Support has not issues a rebuttal (yet?) but has instead identified the anonymous author as Drew "sircmpwn" DeVault, a gifted software developer, but also a vocal and controversial figure in the Open Source / Free Software space. Ironically quite similar to Richard "rms" Stallman. Their piece is published at https://dmpwn.info/ [local pdf mirror, 929kB]. They also allege a proximity of Mr. DeVault to questionable "Lolita" anime preferences and societal positions to disqualify him.
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Jonathan on :
So Neil McGovern has clicked the “merge PR” button a load more times than anyone else. What use is this figure?
Daniel Lange on :
This is just data.
I'll come up with analysis once this is all over. I will not fuel either side. I much prefer peace over war.
shenlebantongying on :
My name is not "slb Prime", I update my GitHub profile. Will it show a different name "shenlebantongying"
Can you update it?
Daniel Lange on :
Sure, done. I extended the
.mailmapsupport to both repos now. Thanks for the nudge!shenlebantongying on :
Since this page got cited and can be searched via Google, I just want to inject some of my person opinion for a moment for random visitors or future internet historian:
It's not coincident that the top a few people on
) .
rms_support.gitare all nobodies. Due to high political rightness pressure, one with big titles just cannot easily involve in such an affair. In contrast, we really have nothing to lose for this political issue (My professional doesn't relate to IT at allSomeone just has to do it to resist the impact of the open letter. I wouldn't say the support letter is our contribution, since if we don't do it, someone else would do it.
History is interesting. It forces people to react passively, and at the same time people also push the history forward. Yes, in my view, we are just a few random internet people who accidentally involved by the wheel of a series of events.
Who would have thought Epstein's crime would make us friends?
Some of our signers think we win this little battle. However, I personally think we just don't lose, rather than win. RMS got removed or not, the community is already divided which may require years to heal. However, I also think the overall outcome of this event is positive, since the message of free software movement passed to the whole earth (as the support letter translated to 32 languages). This might be the biggest "advertisement" campaign for FSF/GNU in many years. A lot of people realized that free software movement need them, and they can do things to improve it. Besides, many outsiders for the first time heard the word "Free/Libra Software".
2021-03-31
Timo Kinnunen on :
Well, this is the first I heard of RMS being back at FSF. I'm a bit disappointed that during the years no figure emerged who could revolutionize and elevate free software the way RMS revolutionized proprietary software.
I'll read RMS's statement before forming an opinion. My hope is that he took advantage of his two-year absence as an opportunity to learn and self-critique to become a better person, and that this will be reflected in his statement.
But, seeing terms like "mob activity", "orchestrated outrage" or "Team Cancel", which focus on the consequences of one's actions, and nary a word on the actions that led to those consequences doesn't give me much reason to be hopeful.