Recently, Richard Stallman decided to step down after considerable pressure, from the Free Software Foundation and has been under fire for retaining his position as head of GNU. There are several maintainers, including Andreas Enge, Carlos O'Donell, Mark Wielaard and Ludovic Courtes who are aggressively organizing maintainers with the goal of removing Richard from GNU and deposing him from his position as the controlling authority. It is a very ugly power grab and these individuals need to be broadly censored for their activities.

The incident that triggered this current controversy involved a private mailing list conversation where Stallman defended an old friend of his, Marvin Minsky, who died in January 2016. Richard, while expressing compassion for the victim, defended Minsky by questioning if Minsky assaulted anyone, let alone sexually assaulted Virginia Giuffre. Aside from Richard's emotional attachment to his friend, he made the sound logical defense of Minsky arguing that while Giuffre was a victim of manipulation by Epstein, that any sexual relations between Giuffre and Minsky, as inappropriate as it might have been, would not constitute assault as RMS understand assault.

The accusation quoted is a clear example of inflation. The reference reports the claim that Minsky had sex with one of Epsteins harem. (See https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/9/20798900/marvin-minsky-jeffrey-epstein-sex-trafficking-island-court-records-unsealed.) Lets presume that was true (I see no reason to disbelieve it). The word assaulting presumes that he applied force or violence, in some unspecified way, but the article itself says no such thing. Only that they had sex. We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing. Assuming she was being coerced by Epstein, he would have had every reason to tell her to conceal that from most of his associates. Ive concluded from various examples of accusation inflation that it is absolutely wrong to use the term sexual assault in an accusation. Whatever conduct you want to criticize, you should describe it with a specific term that avoids moral vagueness about the nature of the criticism.

Stallman is making a grammatical and syntactical argument. He makes no points here that can be reasonably disputed. If Minsky had sex with Giuffre, who would at that time been under age, coerced or not, she would have presented herself as willing to Minsky and that no violence was used by Minsky. That is the Espstein crime. He manipulated young women into a life of prostitution, and the girls were intimidated by him and brainwashed. RMS did not defend statuary rape, Epstein's behaviors, nor did he defend the broader issue of the abuse of young women, or the patriarchal social structure. He simply, as he is often wont to do, complained about what he perceives as a misuse of language in order to misinform as to the facts of a matter. This argument is nearly identical to the argument against the term "Intellectual Property" and "Open Source". For the reasons he outlined, he has taken a dislike to the term "Sexual Assault" and for good reason in that it is a hot button term designed to push aside reason and to inflame passions. In essence, Stallman is objecting to a lynch mob mentality disparaging a personal and deceased friend.

Chief among the lynch mob is one of the most greedy, power hungry, and self-aggrandizing villains in the GNU universe, Ludovic Courtes. Ludovic will say just about anything, and do just about anything, in order to take over the GNU project, and this controversy gave him an exploitable hot button argument to suspend rational thinking and rush to remove Richard Stallman as the head of the GNU project. Ludovic is a French volunteer who is a maintainer of GUIX. Previously he tried to walk away with the GNU trademark by changing his GUIX project to the name GNU. That failed. Now he is working on a new scheme to take over GNU, and that scheme involves generating hatred and lynch mobs to punish people he disagrees with. His goal is to expand GNU to be proactive in a number of radical social positions, including affirmative action towards women within GNU and internal support for other areas. There is no end to where it stops. Eventually, his social justice agenda for GNU, and his attempt to democratize the GNU leadership will just destroy the organization and its position of the standard bearer for Free Software.

These are the same forces that years ago would have folded GNU into the Open Source movement, and such an organization could never had held out to create the GPL3 and stayed on message about the importance of code and hardware access to our digital systems. GNU could all but be guaranteed to do inconvenient things in order maintain that we have a free software base that is unowned by cooperate and government organizations. GNU alone has been able to protect open discourse, empowerment of the individual and democracy through its code base. It takes a militant organization to resist the economic and political forced designed to destroy individual political liberty, and these threats come from the left and the right (and the center).

GNU was established over 3 decades ago in order to combat the critical and specific threats that a digital society can impose on individuals and society as a whole. It was established to focus on a series of ideas and political positions that were debated over several years, and which eventually distilled into what the GNU project, and Richard Stallman calls the Four Freedoms (not to be confused with the Fantastic Four). This is the social contract between GNU, the public at large, and the end user. This is the purpose of GNU and it is plainly stated on the FSF website and the GNU Website. It is repeated by Richard Stallman at nearly every reception and speech. In order to learn what is the GNU Social Contract listen to it here:

GNU and the FSF have always faced popular rebellion. All kinds of people, often for selfish purposes and often believing in the righteousness of their cause, have organized efforts against GNU. GNU is not a democratically run organization. GNU is a political organization based on volunteers operating of their own free will and directed by Richard Stallman. The GPL and its ancillary licenses are the social contract between its users and the governance. The internal governance and mechanism for comment, input and deliberation are outlined on the website, and it outlines much of how the GNU leadership is appointed, and its channels of relationships with developers. GNU maintainers, contributors, and coders are not responsible for steering the governance or political direction of GNU. They are not the target of the GNU movement. GNU is not a hackers organization in this sense. It is not controlled or created for the benefit of maintainers or hackers. It is controlled and created for the benefit of the public, under the guidance of Richard Stallman who has effectively communicated these goals.

The current effort to depose Richard Stallman from his life's work is a lynch mob. Their hysterical libel had Stallman homeless for a few weeks, and caused him to resign from the Free Software Foundation. Stallman has been a tireless frontman for digital rights for decades. He has never been off message, and he has encouraged individuals from all walks of life to strive for their individual digital freedom, without exception, and without consideration of their race, nationality, gender, religion, family situation or personal political orientations. Outside of GNU he has advocate to other causes outside of GNU, many of which I strongly disagree with, dabbling in left wing politics, foreign policy, and nearly anything of interest that might pass under his nose. His approach to all these issues have been separately included on his personal website. Occasionally a snippet of his leanings ends up in a comment of code or documentation, but nothing of anything ever substantial. In one case, he objected to the government's attempt to reduce information available to pregnant women considering abortions with a comment about the abort function in a manual. It was a position largely supported by coders and users of GNU software and went largely unnoticed for decades before the comment was removed. Those of us who would have objected to the position barely noticed it. But in the hands of Stallman's lynch mod opponents, it has become cause of celebre. But the truth is, Stallman has professionally firewalled his individual political positions from the political intent of GNU. GNU has been fully focused on Digital Rights, enough so that members of the larger Linux Kernel and GNU Desktop communities have been made to feel uncomfortable with GPL3's ground breaking provision against DRM and Software as a Service provisions that were designed to prevent the very kind of human rights abuses that affect national politics in social media today. It is not the job of GNU or the FSF to win popularity contests, or to promote commercial opportunities, especially if such activities erode individual freedoms as it affects digital systems, electronic surveillance, copyright and wiretapping.

Maintainers for GNU projects have organized against GNU and fully intend to remove their projects from the parent organization's control, and to to walk away with the GNU trademarks and infrastructure. This has been openly repeated on the GNU mailing list, gnu.misc.discuss which has been copied into the NYLXS archives so that discussions can be examined without moderation. Some of the moderators for the list are supporters of the break away, and moderation on the list has been problematic. The objective has been to create a shadow government for the GNU project and to create a wedge between GNU and the FSF, in the hopes to get FSF support in replacing the GNU mission with their own. The guilty parties in this affair include:

• Ludovic Courtes - Born 1980 and from Inria at Bordeaux France
• Andreas Enge - Research Director
  Head of research team Lfant
  INRIA BordeauxSud-Ouest & IMB
  200, avenue de la Vieille Tour
  33405 Talence cedex
  France
  
• Carlos O'Donell - Canadian-born Red Hat employee. Team lead at Red Hat for the GNU C Library (APIs for string, memory, threading, math, ISO C, POSIX, BSD, Linux, etc); supporting Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the many-layered products and stacks above the core runtimes that use these APIs and ABIs.
• Mark Wielaard - Another Red Hat engineer from the Netherlands, born in 1973. A proponent of FLOSS and a developer of Java software
• Andy Wingo - Honestly, Andy is a social warrior nutcase with a passion for ideas like "keep opensource free". He is repressive in his treatment of others and is cruel in punishing those who violate his his views on social justice. When he isn't doing that he works with Guile. He is a young man from the Carolinas by way of Namibia and maybe Spain.. who can keep up..

Stallman has chimed in that he does not want to ban these participants of the GNU project. This is unfortunate. Ludovic Courtes has particularly been involved the the RMS smear campaign and needs to be removed from all GNU projects. Furthermore, Ludovic has run into the issue of trying to steal the GNU moniker for GUIX previously. According to the gnu-misc-discuss mailing list, he tried to check GUIX into Savanah as the GNU operating system. That was corrected. In the wake of the misrepresentation of Stallman's comments on Epstein, Ludovic used the moment to kick Stallman and GNU and to bully him out of the FSF. His blog post on the GUIX website which he wrote accused Stallman of discrimination against undescribed groups of people. He wrote in the petition:

Yet, we must also acknowledge that Stallman's behavior over the years has undermined a core value of the GNU project: the empowerment of all computer users. GNU is not fulfilling its mission when the behavior of its leader alienates a large part of those we want to reach out to.

The underlined emphasis is from the original petition. Subsequent communications from this group on gnu.misc.discuss and other forums make it clear that Ludovic is reinforcing the accusation that Stallman has discriminated against women in GNU. This was followed up by a lynch mob mentality on the mailing list, with false claims that Stallman is a pedophile, that he supports statutory rape, that he makes women uncomfortable at meetings, all of which is not only provably lies, but they are a blatant hostile attempt to take over the GNU project and make it like an Open Source project. What most upsets us at NYLXS, however, is the adaption of a policy by a few maintainers for censorship of speech and thought. What they are insisting on is removing Stallman's independent right to free speech and thought in his own blogs, webpages, private email correspondence. It is fundamentally wrong and a threat to everyones freedom. Ludovic doesn't think his is a bad actor, but neither did Mussolini.

Since then, this group misappropriated the GNU trademark, a second time for Ludovic, and created a new domain, gnu.tools, to use as a location to organize on-line opposition to Richard Stallman and the GNU leadership. This amounts to an unprecedented attack on the core GNU mission and its organization. What has now happened is that a number of maintainers how come to believe that since they write a healthy part of the code base that GNU supports, that they deserve ownership of the organization as a whole. It is a nasty dog fight and it is based on greed and a fundamental disagreement on the GNU mission and who the GNU stakeholders are.

GNU and its software are not playthings for the coding and hacking public. It is an organization devoted to the publics right to free expression and for individuals to participate in their culture and heritage. It was organized by hackers, because hackers were the first group of people to be negatively affected by digital and legal controls of digital systems. But it was a farsighted initiative, not focused on specific software projects, but on a goal of universal suffrage and emancipation with regard to digital communications. Stallman has been spot-on about this from the very start, and the most important work for GNU has been the spin off of the FSF and the creation of rock-solid copyleft licenses, such as the GPL.

Stallman's unrelenting emphasis on software freedom has upset many people over the decades. Efforts to de-radicalize GNU's message has spawned conflict within the hacker community, especially, OSI and the Open Source movement, The Gnome Foundation and even Linus Tovalds and the Linux Foundation. Linus was especially irritated by the effort to move the Linux kernel to the GPL3 and had choice words about the FSF at the time. In truth though, Moglin and Stallman were a decade ahead of the curve and failure to adopt the GPL3 broadly has had very negative consequences for the public that suffers under a surveillance blanket today. But this radical emphasis within GNU has always been job number one for the GNU leadership, even when that meant losing coding talent and Software projects. The broader hacking community could never be trusted with the GNU mission, something we have come to learn repeatedly over time. The hacker community sells out to broader interests every time. And the reason of this is that the interest of the hacker community is not lined up with the public interest on key matters of essential political consequences.

Intellectually, this is the crux of the cause for dissent. It is assumed by some maintainers that GNU is their own personal country club and that they are the stakeholders. And they aren't. If GNU is a plaything for some weathly, upper middle class Ivy Leaguers and their cohorts to provide free software for themselves, then it is a total waste and not worth the time and effort that anyone puts into it.

The purpose of GNU is to encourage and provide universal emanicpation of all of us. Therefore, we are ALL stakeholders. There is no democracy in a GNU run by maintainers' popular opinions. It is a tyrany of a subclass of GNU stakeholders. It is not what Richard has promoted. It is not even sustainable. It is laughable that a few folks think that libelous attacks are justified because without Richard, the elegance of a functional init system based on Guile will enlighten the world!

Maintainers aren't stakeholders. They are not even GNU supporters, although some might be. GNU stakeholders are the public at large. It is anyone who has participated in the use and development of GNU Software as a political act. It is anyone who has downloaded a GNU project and help put it in the hands of an otherwise disenfranchised end user, to show them that it is possible to use such software to take control of their own future. GNU's stakeholders include anyone who used a GNU license to assure that their software is protected by strong copyleft freedoms. It is your mother, your brother, your cousin, your neighbor, your coworker. Everyone is a GNU stakeholder. That protection and goal is being attacked by a select few maintainers.

But it doesn't matter. Even if every maintainer signed up to this repressive action, to reorient GNU from its outreach by providing a platform of emancipation and freedom to the public, into a private repository of code for a select few maintainers, it would do nothing to change the moral equation with regard to governance. Maintainers can not be trusted to run GNU. We have seen this over and over again, and we are see it now.

These coders don't reach into local schools to put Free Software in the hands of children in the deep ghettos of NYC, and Baltimore, and St Louis. They don't get Free Software into the hands of chidren in Nigeria, and Bangladesh. They don't promote the principles of Four Freedoms that are needed to assure individual freedom in the digital age. Maintainers serve a purpose, and have a say, but they do not have a veto to interpret the public interest; Not in GNU, and not in our broader lives. If this gang of thieves manage to get control of GNU, then we see no longer any point to the project as a whole and we would drop support for GNU and the FSF.

• New Summer FSI Educational Projects Announced. See above

NYLXS April Journal Release
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