(cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21522265)

A group of people including Drew DeVault are trying to cancel RMS again, basing their claims on ancient misinterpreted quotes. Stallman may be controversial, but these activists are just acid for the entire Free Software movement.

  • kixik@lemmy.ml
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    2 months ago

    This banning culture of hate is ridiculous, you can disagree with someone, or even just ideas, but procuring “canceling” and “banning” to everything we don’t agree is crazy. This mono culture of hate really saddens me. But perhaps you’re right on your appreciation.

    Some of these periodical rebirths of the debate about RMS, what are really looking for is discredit on the Free software, which is not the same as open source software. Drew is one of those, if I’m not mistaken because his blog is prolific, who believe free software has no hope, and the total triumph of open source, which in practice is correct, but ethically I’m not so sure. We should be aware of what’s behind all these attacks, and I believe it’s naive to think these attacks are just about RMS. Free software is ethical in the sense of the freedoms it seeks for the users, but that has no place on enterprises and corporations, open source has enjoyed a different fate because it’s not as strict on respecting those freedoms, which under enterprises and corporations are believed to be too restrictive and against their interests. And here we are over and over attacking the organizations (yes, the FSF is attacked not only because RMS is part of it, it was founded by him as well) and people defending those principles, because in the end our minds tend to disqualify everything way too easily, made easy with this banning culture of hate. I’ve read about how useless it is the FSF, and also about how useless it is the copyleft, and these recurrent intend to discredit the one who started all that of course discredits what came from him, one way or another. I wish I’m wrong on this, and that there was no pun intended towards free software…

    The original post was most probably included into the wrong community for sure BTW, this is an open source community, so looking to empathize about free software stuff in here is not going to happen, even less for RMS.