MESSAGE
| DATE | 2019-10-30 |
| FROM | Sandra Loosemore
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] Women and GNU and RMS (was Re: something else)
|
On 10/30/19 8:00 AM, Marcel wrote:
> What I also see is a list of thirty men pretending that the leader of
> the movement they volunteer for excludes women, yet I cannot find the
> name of a single woman (forgive me if I missed it) in your list. I know
> there are women participating in GNU, so the question is, were none of
> them willing to participate in your power grab?
For those of you who don't already know me, let me introduce myself:
I'm Sandra Loosemore, I am female, and I've been involved with the GNU
project since 1991, when RMS hired me to write the GLIBC manual as a FSF
employee. Nowadays I am a maintainer for GCC and Binutils and an
occasional contributor to GDB.
I haven't seen anything resembling a "power grab", so by definition I'm
not on the list as participating in one. I did previously send some
comments to the private gnu-and-fsf-at- address that was previously
announced as the place to send them, though. To paraphrase and expand
what I said there (speaking only for myself, and not attempting to be a
representative for all "women participating in GNU"):
It has bothered me for a long time that there are so few women
participating in the GNU community. I think I might be the only female
maintainer on either GCC/Binutils right now (I haven't gone through the
lists, but the others I used to know about have stepped down). The
photos of the attendees at recent Cauldrons show a group that is roughly
99% male. The steering committee is 100% male. There is something
wrong with our community that we cannot attract more women, and we need
to fix it, because a developer community that consists almost
exclusively of old white men is not sustainable.
I have never personally experienced or even witnessed any form of sexual
harassment from anyone in the GNU community, including RMS. I've also
always felt that my technical contributions have been taken seriously by
my colleagues. OTOH, it's clear to me that some women have indeed felt
threatened by RMS's behavior, been put off from participating by
offensive sexual comments and "jokes" from others in the free software
community, or felt that they were being belittled or ignored because of
their gender. It's also clear to me that a lot of men are aware of this
stuff going on and find it offensive and inappropriate too.
And then there were RMS's disgusting public comments defending sexual
exploitation of minors, which were plastered all over the news and
social media last month. The absolute worst thing the public-facing
representative of *any* organization can do is bring negative publicity
to the organization about things that are irrelevant or contrary to the
organization's mission. As a result of RMS's comments, all of a sudden
the public conversation about the GNU project was not about how good our
software is and how free software is taking over the world and
beneficial to everybody, it was about how we're an organization with an
ingrained culture of harassing and demeaning women, and that we have
such a cult of personality surrounding RMS that our policy is not to
challenge the remarks and behavior of our Fearless Leader no matter how
offensive they are -- not just to women, in this case, but to anyone who
cares about human rights. It's been a public relations disaster for the
GNU project. :-(
IMO, to regain control of our public image, I think we have to take some
explicit and public steps to disassociate the GNU project from RMS's
comments. If the CEO of a corporation made such controversial and
offensive statements, the board would likely demand his immediate
resignation as part of damage control. I think the FSF and GNU
maintainers collectively have a similar responsibility as custodians of
the GNU project, and I do think RMS needs to resign for the good of the
project. I appreciate his past technical contributions and his
promotion of the concept of "free software" to begin with, but he is not
a good public ambassador for the GNU community and has not seemed to do
much actual leadership of the project (either technical or management)
for many years now.
My perspective is that the GNU project's mission is to produce
high-quality software that is free for everyone to use, and we should
welcome contributions from anyone who wants to support that mission. We
certainly should not make affirming support for RMS's
non-free-software-related beliefs necessary for people to contribute to
the GNU project, or to take a GNU maintainer/leadership role. Nor
should there be any kind of personal loyalty oath to RMS involved in
being a GNU contributor or maintainer.
BTW, I'm not sure if this has come up before, but the "GNU" brand is not
the personal property of RMS. The trademark is owned by the Free
Software Foundation (it shows up in the search at uspto.gov as
registration #4125065). So I think it is probably ultimately the FSF's
responsibility to protect their brand and decide who they want to put in
charge of overseeing it. OTOH they rely on volunteer labor to do the
actual software development, maintenance, and release management for
each individual software package, so it's important to take
organizational decisions that strengthen the developer community rather
than weaken it.
-Sandra
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