Re: Richard Stallman should be reinstated to President of the FSF

[faiflabs]

As much as I would like an organisation headed by rms, the closest you're
going to get is to be more like him-- not through parroting everything he
says, but by learning what you can and applying it with your own logic and
thinking.

Parroting has already been done and the cost is that it falls short when
new problems for free software arise-- if he doesn't address those then
they tend to go unaddressed. The alternative is better, because while it's
more error-prone it's also more like building a Distributed Stallman
cluster. Overall it should be far superior to an automated tape recorder.

This is my advice to everyone who wants him to be president again. The
organisation doesn't even fit him anymore. The FSF was founded on the GNU
Manifesto; today everything is so corporate, monopolies are relied on so
heavily, it makes rms seem almost like a legend or myth. Though he is of
course, quite real.

Important arguments have been relabeled petty arguments, and petty
arguments have been relabeled important. I don't blame him for sticking to
the old talking points, but a lot needs to be said that just won't be-- as
if it never happened, or doesn't matter. I'm grateful for the Support
website and its contributors.

If in the course of being like rms you find you are suffering the same
persecution, then a Distributed Stallman would be ideal for solving that
problem as well. I don't think this other business, of oaths, solves as
many problems as it has created. Policy is as flimsy substitute for
wisdom.

Granted, even I thought things could be SLIGHTLY less top-down and
rms-centric. But not to the point where it fell apart, or put him in a
corner.

Free software without rms is like the theory of relativity without
Einstein. It still works-- if you understand it-- unless you throw it
away, or try to subtract Einstein from it.