Women and GNU and RMS (was Re: something else)

[Sandra Loosemore]

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@ 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