The apocryphal Charles de Gaulle quote that applies here is "graveyards are full of indispensable men".
RMS is one man, the FSF is an organization that is supposed to have aims that are bigger and larger reaching than one single person, which is why it's an org in the first place. If the FSF cannot get by without RMS now, they will not survive RMS himself in the long run.
> This sounds like RMS almost torpedoed his own board seat by announcing it on his own.
Again, RMS is really bad at this stuff. I genuinely have no idea why anyone wants to keep him. Especially having met him personally, he seems unpleasant to deal with on a constant basis.
> I think compared with the totality of the evidence, the history of FSF, The importance of knowledge, and the betterment for the group as a whole, bringing RMS was the right decision.
I'd argue that you are probably overweighting the early history of the FSF. In my professional lifetime it has been a complete non-entity, and all I've ever seen RMS do publicly is get into slap fights over "GNU/Linux" and create drama out of thin air. What has that org been doing for 20 years other than slowly lose ground to Apache and CNCF?
Mostly I'll grant the GNU Project and the GPL and associated philosophical underpinning. Whether you favor copyleft or not, it has almost certainly been useful to have that basis for FOSS--given that the permissive licenses were mostly about pragmatism. Having said that, one of my lawyer friends has pondered whether the FSF's focus on licensing as the primary software freedom tool hasn't led to some of the licensing debates going on today.
That's all well and good, but it is completely orthogonal to whether or not he should be on the FSF board. The GPL was an important contribution he made to the community ... 30 years ago. The FSF has been fighting for the GPL over more permissive licenses for a while, and losing badly. Maybe it was a doomed fight from the get go, but it is certainly clear that he has not been successful.
Obviously without him the FSF and GNU as we know it would not exist, but leadership is all about what you will do in the future, not what you did in the past. So the question is, why is he indispensable to the FSF today?
He's not. And I'm not convinced the FSF as a whole is needed, certainly not with the current leadership.
I was mostly responding to "I'd argue that you are probably overweighting the early history of the FSF." I'm just saying there were some important things in that early history but I agree much less since.
The apocryphal Charles de Gaulle quote that applies here is "graveyards are full of indispensable men".
RMS is one man, the FSF is an organization that is supposed to have aims that are bigger and larger reaching than one single person, which is why it's an org in the first place. If the FSF cannot get by without RMS now, they will not survive RMS himself in the long run.
> This sounds like RMS almost torpedoed his own board seat by announcing it on his own.
Again, RMS is really bad at this stuff. I genuinely have no idea why anyone wants to keep him. Especially having met him personally, he seems unpleasant to deal with on a constant basis.
> I think compared with the totality of the evidence, the history of FSF, The importance of knowledge, and the betterment for the group as a whole, bringing RMS was the right decision.
I'd argue that you are probably overweighting the early history of the FSF. In my professional lifetime it has been a complete non-entity, and all I've ever seen RMS do publicly is get into slap fights over "GNU/Linux" and create drama out of thin air. What has that org been doing for 20 years other than slowly lose ground to Apache and CNCF?