Is it still opportune to collaborate with the GNOME Foundation?

Software PureOS
42

The tweet was paraphrasing. Here’s the original.

I was specifically referring to the comment I linked to:

I was fifteen, still obviously underage, and skipping gym class to hear him speak at a professional conference (that I’d snuck into). He actually pointed to me in the back and proclaimed, into the mic, “A GIRL!” causing the audience to turn and look. Mortifying. Then he proceeded to gesture toward me every time he referred to “EMACS Virgins.” (I cannot believe that he is still doing the same talk 10+ years later.) I was young and terrified of calling out someone that I’d previously idolized.

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@dcz

It is not a direct quotation, it is a sentence that someone reported (thus it is probably a paraphrasis). Here is the link: https://opensourcetogo.blogspot.com/2009/07/emailing-richard-stallman.html.

@Lliure

Yeah, he says that he doesn’t believe that his jokes would offend anyone (I would be surprised if he thought they did and still used the same jokes).

That is playing about a kid with the kid present. It can be perceived as sexism by the kid, and so he could have avoided it.

We are still talking about the “Emacs virgins joke”, definitely light years away from the violence of the smear campaign, which becomes horrible considering Stallman’s contributions to free software.

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Back on the poison injected by the GNOME Foundation into the FOSS community (I am sorry if any of you still endorses the GNOME Foundation, but no word describes better what happened, and probably you should reflect on your support – and yes, I still like GNOME as a DE)…

A few days ago the FSF officially adopted a code of ethics. Today Alexandre Oliva published a letter sent to a feminist leader in the FLOSS community (unnamed):

While I invite to read the entire text (the original letter is available here), I found this passage particularly significant:

As for the experiences and reports you got… An FSF board committee whose members AFAICT all wanted RMS out investigated reports about RMS for over two years, before and after RMS resigned, and despite all the second-hand rumors, they could never get to any concrete findings. I have independently investigated various claims and invariably came to dead ends. Given how many false reports and ad hominem attacks on Free Software he’s been targeted with, it wasn’t at all unthinkable to conclude that this was yet another character assassination attack without substance.

He, clumsy, obsessive, meltdown-prone and sometimes harsh, as our shared condition makes us, has always been an easy target for this kind of discrimination. Besides, the movement he started and leads threatens various powerful monopolies, which makes him more of a target of such attacks. It’s easy and disappointing to see how his supposed offenses don’t seem to motivate action when committed by actual celebrities who work for the corporate forces who lead and who are served by the attacks on him.

Of course none of this proves him innocent, but that’s what’s suggested by the absence of credible evidence and the exclusivity of dead-end second-hand hearsay and fabrications. In case the people you know personally who have alleged harassment by RMS would like to report it to me, my opinion may change, and if they’re willing, I may pass it on to the FSF board. But, so far, what I’ve seen has been limited to false and dehumanizing allegations to support the discrimination of a person who fights for freedom and justice untiringly, without regard for much else, and with some traits that are hard for neurotypicals to understand or like.

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My faith in GNOME dwindled considerably since the attack on Stallman. They seem to treat political correctness as more important than the software they are creating. Therefore, sooner or later, their software will become a crap.

As a side note, I like the “neurotypical” word. A perfect newspeak insult to describe mediocre and meager.

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46

As I see it, walking away from GNOME doesn’t gain us much, and I don’t see a better alternative desktop in the offing where we can go. If we stay, there is the possibility that GNOME can be convinced in the long run to rejoin the GNU project and reaffiliate with the FSF.

The decision to remove GNOME from the GNU Project and disassociate GNOME from the FSF was the decision of a small number of people in the leadership of GNOME, namely Niel McGovern (the Executive Director of GNOME and former Debian project lead) and his circle of friends. I suspect if GNOME surveyed its users, the majority don’t have an opinion whether GNOME should be part of GNU and FSF or not, but among those who do have an opinion, I suspect that the majority do want GNOME to be part of GNU and to associate with the FSF. That means that an organized campaign to get GNOME to rejoin GNU/FSF might actually work.

On the other hand, many of the companies that contribute code to GNOME (IBM/Red Hat, SUSE, Canonical and Google) doesn’t particularly care for the FSF, and Richard Stallman in particular. I know that Google is openly hostile to the copyleft, and actively works to undermine it. For example, Google does not show users the software licenses off apps in the Google Play Store, so people see the word “free” and think that zero price is the same as free software.

However, I think that IBM/Red Hat, SUSE and Canonical mostly don’t want to be associated with a organization which has been linked with public controversies concerning sexism and the consent of minors. The decision of the GNOME Foundation to withdraw from the GNU project in 2019 wasn’t based on technical or philosophical differences with the FSF and its goals, but simply because people at GNOME didn’t want to be associated with Richard Stallman’s controversial comments on those subjects. At least that was the publicly stated reason.

Personally, I think that those businesses also don’t really care that much about promoting the goals of the FSF and the FSF has always been reluctant to associate itself too closely with any business interest, so the companies that contribute to GNOME didn’t see any compelling reason for the project to remain in GNU and be associated with the FSF. Another factor is that Richard Stallman has a tendency to get into pointless fights about minutia and alienate people, when he shouldn’t, so he doesn’t have many friends who will stick up for him at places like Red Hat and SUSE.

At the end of the day, GNOME is still the desktop environment most closely associated with the GNU project. Yes, GNUstep+Window Maker are officially part of GNU, but that isn’t a toolkit and desktop environment that many people want to use, so GNOME is still the best choice for most people who care about free software and there are some projects like GIMP, Gnumeric and Gnucash which are part of GNU.

The best strategy in my opinion is to organize a petition of GNOME users asking GNOME to rejoin the GNU project. Since Purism publicly associates itself with the FSF, it is good idea for the company to keep contributing to GNOME, so that it can gain more influence inside of GNOME, and hopefully get someone on the GNOME Foundation’s board. Purism is gaining influence inside of GNOME, since it is paying developers to work on the code. It is hard to estimate how much, but I am subscribed to the GNOME translators email list, and a lot of the announcements for new projects to translate are coming from Purism employees.

Then, in a couple years when the controversy over Stallman has died down, make a formal motion to the GNOME board to rejoin the GNU project and reestablish ties with the FSF. If there is resistance on the board, then organize a poll to survey GNOME users to find out how they feel about it, and use the results of that poll to pressure the board.

It is helpful to know the history in order to understand GNOME’s stance.

In the 1980s there was a proliferation of UNIX variants, and little collaboration and standardization, so it was hard for programmers to write software for UNIX compared to software for Windows and Apple’s System. When AT&T, SUN, Xenix and BSD announced that they would be merging their UNIX variants to create System V Release 4.0 in 1988, the response of the rest of the UNIX companies (Digital, HP, IBM, Apollo, Hitachi, Fujitsu, etc.) was to create the non-profit Open Software Foundation (OSF), which released a common graphical widget toolkit called Motif in 1989 and the Common Desktop Environment (CDE) in 1993 based on Motif. There were very high licensing fees for Motif and CDE, but all the companies in the OSF, which later was called the Open Group could use this software and they rapidly became the standard for UNIX programming in the 1990s.

Qt from Quasar Technologies (later called Trolltech) was first released in 1995 as a replacement replacement for the X Toolkit and Motif, but it had a dual license that said that could be used for zero cost by free/open source software, but proprietary software had to pay a licensing fee to use it. The KDE project was started in 1996 based on Qt in order to replace the CDE, but the FSF criticized KDE, because it was based on the non-free Qt.

Two Mexican students at UNAM university then started GNOME in 1997 based on the free GTK+ toolkit used in GIMP, in order to create a fully free desktop, and they started it under the auspices of the FSF’s GNU project, which helped it attract a lot of volunteers to GNOME.

Originally, GNOME was the desktop for people who cared about free software and most of its developers were from the Americas, and KDE was the desktop for people who just wanted the best software and most of its developers were from Northern Europe.

When Trolltech saw all the criticism from the FSF and the movement to promote GTK+ and GNOME instead of Qt and KDE, in 1998 it granted the KDE’s foundation a perpetual BSD-style license to Qt. Then in 1999, Trolltech released Qt under a dual license with a commercial license for proprietary software and the Q Public License (QPL) for FOSS projects. The QPL, however, was incompatible with the GPL, which generated a lot of criticism. Finally in September 2000, Trolltech released the Qt Free Edition 2.2 under both the QPL and GPL 2.0 licenses. There were still some fears about what would happen if Trolltech was ever bought or merged, so in 2004, Trolltech promised that if the Qt Free Edition ever stopped being released, then it would be released to the world under the BSD license. Starting in Jan. 2009, Qt 4.5 and later offered the option using the LGPL 2.1 license. Starting in 2014, Qt 5.4 and later added the option of using the LGPL 3.0 license.There are still some fears that the Qt Company may not release future versions of Qt under the LGPL, but since 2000, there hasn’t been much difference between KDT and GNOME in terms of licensing.

However, the fact that development of Qt has been controlled one company (Quasar/Trolltech 1994-2008, Nokia 2008-2011, Digia 2011-2014 and Qt Company since 2014) has made the other Linux companies nervous about becoming dependent upon Qt. Red Hat and SUSE (and later Canonical and Google) invested in the development of GTK and GNOME, and have generally promoted it over Qt/KDE.

KDE has stayed closer to its roots as an organization run by volunteers with very little corporate support. KDE has become the Linux enthusiast’s desktop, whereas GNOME has become the desktop for almost all the Linux companies and for people who want clean design without many confusing option in the graphical interface. Because many people haven’t agreed with GNOME’s design decisions over the years, a number of alternative desktop environments have been created based on the GTK, such as Budgie (for Solus), Cinnamon (for Mint), MATE (fork of GNOME 2), Xfce, Pantheon (for Elementary OS), Sugar (for OLPC), Phosh (for Librem 5) and LXDE, plus a number of defunct environments: Unity (for Ubuntu), Access Linux Platform (successor of Palm OS), GPE Palmtop Environment and ROX Desktop.

GNOME started out as the freer alternative KDE, but over time the project’s focus has changed as GNOME became the desktop with the most corporate support and the largest number of users. In August 2000, the GNOME Foundation was created, and GNOME became increasingly independent of the FSF. It has never followed the GNU coding guidelines and always been developed independently, so it was mostly an affiliation in spirit with the FSF.

There are still GNOME users and developers who want GTK/GNOME to retain the project’s original vision as the freer toolkit and desktop which is associated with the FSF. However, rejoining GNU and reaffiliating with the FSF is mostly to make a statement about its principals, since GNOME has always been a project that made its own decisions about its development and I don’t expect that to change.

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@Dwaff

I get what you mean, but if the GNOME Foundation truly believed in political correctness they wouldn’t initiate a smear campaign based on “second-hand hearsay and fabrications”. Maybe GNOME Foundation’s main problem is its leaders, their refusal to be held accountable and their lack of political correctness?

@amosbatto

As always, your excursions into the nuances of things are precious.

For technical and historical reasons GNOME (or at least GTK) is still the right landscape to work with for a company like Purism, but also for developers who endorse the FSF’s principles and need a graphical user interface for their apps. But after such smear campaign I think that we can mark a stronger distance than we did in the past between the GNOME Foundation and the GNOME community, because as you correctly pointed out the two things are not the same.

If GNOME had just left the GNU project there would be nothing scandalous to talk about, as I had written in my opening post. But what happened is that “Neil McGovern and his circle of friends” decided that leaving the GNU project was not enough; they needed to attack its leader using fabrications and invite to boycott the projects he started. While other corporations might have “just” signed that letter, Neil McGovern is the person who administrates letter’s repository. That is really a very big difference.

Someone consciously collected false accusations and filled an entire letter with them; we don’t know who that was, but the likelihood that it was Neil McGovern himself is not small. Imagine the same smear campaign happened with Purism and Todd Weaver instead of the FSF and Stallman. The more we enable harassment and false accusations the more likely it will be that in the long term others will end up getting harassed too.

Very true. But we need to stay with the GNOME community and developers, we have no need to sponsor the GNOME Foundation until something changes in its leadership. It is important to make it clear that something must substantially change in the GNOME Foundation for it to be considered again, and what they did was not OK.

If it is true, as you correctly say, that GNOME has “always been developed independently, so it was mostly an affiliation in spirit with the FSF”, other software had the same kind of spiritual affiliation with GNU, and GNOME’s independence was never so bizarre. What is really “bizarre” is the hate campaign.

We need strategy and time, but things seem to be slowly going in the right direction. :muscle:

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And RMS will continue alienating people as long as he remains in a leadership position.

I’m still reluctant to pick a side in the open-letter debate but I’m also convinced that RMS’s behavior causes more harm than good to the free software movement.

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You mean RMS will alienate a very tiny percentage of the people that thanks to him discovered that free software is a thing? We are already living in a world where RMS’s influence in the FOSS community has been reduced; look at how weak the ideals have become.

Nobody must be irreplaceable in a healthy movement. But a person with the same probity and obstinacy as RMS had been hard to find. Yet, it is still legitimate to find the idea of RMS as a leader not the best possible idea. What is not legitimate is to:

  • smear a person’s reputation on the basis of exaggerations, misrepresentations and dehumanizing allegations
  • ask to boycott “related projects” on the basis of exaggerations, misrepresentations and dehumanizing allegations
  • disguise the actual motivations behind the dehumanizing allegations
  • divide and poison the FOSS community

Richard Stallman as a leader might not be the best possible idea. Dehumanizing a person on the basis of rumors on the other hand is a very very bad idea.

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Exelent points. Sadly, GNOME fell for all of these. I still support GNOME, though, in a form of $50 yearly, in the hope that they would come to their senses. GNOME is still good software. But I’m also on a lookout for an alternative, should they start with silly ideas like restricting the purposes for which their software could be used.

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Is Richard Stallman a perfect leader? No.

But then, nobody is. He has gifts that have driven free software in a way that few others could. He is uncompromising on the four freedoms. And that’s a great thing.

Saying a leader isn’t perfect reminds me of this quote about churches (speaking of the human element).

“You’ve found the perfect church? Congratulations! As soon as you walk through the front door, you’ve ruined it.” :slight_smile:

We all bring our own gifts to our efforts, including free software. And none of us are perfect.

On the other hand, the smears of the Gnome Foundation against RMS have really soured me on them. Falsely accusing another person, and trying to destroy their life, is absolutely horrible, and I have no respect for those who do it. I understand it is the leadership that engaged in this, and not the rank-and-file. I very much agree with the idea of supporting the Gnome Community, and not the Gnome Foundation.

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That’s a lot of accusations. Could you illustrate them with sources?

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That “lot of accusations” comes from Alexandre Oliva’s letter (see “a hate letter that attempts to disguise its actual motivations by resorting to a bunch of shocking but false accusations, exaggerations and misrepresentations”, and “limited to false and dehumanizing allegations”), but we can try to find out the truth together.

First, we should start from what I wrote in a previous message:

Since it is hard for me to find what Stallman is accused of, maybe you can help finding some of the things that if true would make Stallman “a dangerous force”, as the hate letter says, to the point of justifying boycotting GNU software and the FSF.

The question is very simple: “Okay, so what did Stallman do?”

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Yes, it is clear that the GNOME Foundation leadership (board members) have abused their position.

Putting myself in their shoes for a moment: suppose I personally hate a certain individual X and I want to cause maximum harm to that person. Okay, then perhaps I will sign a letter painting that individual as a terrible person. I can do that, personally, motivated by whatever reasons I personally have. That is not exactly good but it is not abuse of power, as long as I do it as a person, just putting my own name on the hateful letter. I have the right to put my name on whatever letter I want. But if I use my position as a board member of the GNOME Foundation to make the GNOME Foundation as an organization sign such a letter, then that is abuse of my position as board member.

I think everyone who stops and thinks about the matter for a minute will agree that it is wrong for the GNOME Foundation as an organization to participate in a vicious attack against an individual person. I think people who signed the letter will also agree on this, if they think about it.

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Mostly I agree with you. I want to comment specifically though

  • writing vicious, hateful letters as an individual, while being your right as freedom of expression, is not a nice thing to do - and is generally not a smart or productive thing to do
  • wouldn’t it be good if we could all focus on improving the world with free software and not writing vicious, hateful letters?
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I agree it is the morally wrong thing to do.

I also think it is unlawful (slander).

From a religious (Jewish and Christian) perspective, it breaks the commandment “Thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor” (Exodus 20:16).

It is just wrong all around.

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Apparently there are important news on this front. Neil McGovern, the (now former) executive director of the GNOME Foundation – the same guy who held the keys and ultimately git-commited the signatures to the defamatory letter against Stallman and GNU – is stepping down.

TechRights might be taking it with too much enthusiasm (nobody will pay back for the damage done), but it does ask an interesting question: “It remains to be seen if Mr. McGovern ends up at Microsoft like his predecessors Miguel de Icaza and and Stormy Peters”. Indeed.

What will be of McGovern however is one of the least important problems in today’s world. So a rather more important thing is to be seen as well: whether the honest and proactive part of the GNOME community will slowly begin to self-reflect and become aware of what happened – and maybe even initiate a dialogue with the community that they have harmed.

The signals so far are dim, but seem encouraging.

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There was a German philosopher, Karl was his given name, that once said: “praxis is the criterion of truth”

How about we leave the comments about potential Microsoft hirings to after it happens. 'cause everything before that actually happens, seems to me, in my personal opinion at best a rumor with no known public facts to support it, at worst smearing of Neil McGovern by the techrights editor.

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That might actually apply here, since moving from GNOME to Microsoft seems to have become a sort of tradition. And each of those ones who did that, did it after attacking the free software movement frontally. So at least half of the profecy is already fulfilled with McGovern. But it might very well end there.

If enough people cared about what McGovern will do in his future TechRights’ question would indeed be a malicious one. But as that’s not so much the case, more than smearing back the smearer the question sounds like a futile exercise.

The question about how awareness in the GNOME community will evolve over time is a question I do care about though.

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In my opinion: two persons going to MS, in the middle of the hundreds of people that for the last over than 20 years contributed in different forms to the GNOME project, does not constitute a “tradition”. More like an exception.

Care to link the sources to their frontal attacks? Specially of the second case, as I am unfamiliar with that one.

Way to show contempt for someone

I don’t know about you, or the techrights editor, tbh even if I were to agree with your analysis of the letter asking for RMS resignation; and the “analysis” that the person in question was a “smearer”. There is another saying: two wrongs don’t make a right

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=two+wrongs+don't+make+a+right&atb=v257-1&ia=definition

Going back to the “criteria of truth” quote above: reality will tell

If this is your central question, focusing on the GNOME community, as it is today and it’s future, then the comments/quote you made in your post about whatever/whomever will Niel McGovern future employer be seems to me unnecessary, and only distracting people from the issues that you state you want to focus on, the current GNOME community and it’s future.

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@joao.azevedo

We are agreeing more than you make it seem. I am not interested in what McGovern will do with his life, and he might well start dancing with the devil.

But saying “It remains to be seen if Mr. McGovern ends up at Microsoft” (TechRights) is light years away from smearing someone. It’s more like sarcasm and lack of trust for someone, and not even an unlikely scenario – the guy is in search of a job after all (so maybe not even sarcasm). When you say “two wrongs don’t make a right” you are comparing that sarcastic sentence (legit) with the smear campaign against RMS and GNU; and that’s a bit like comparing apples and bazookas. The sarcastic sentence does not present fabrications for facts, it simply express lack of trust for someone. The two things cannot be put together in any way.

But in any case even simple sarcasm is not my style, so I will leave that to TechRight.

For the same reason I will not indulge in polemics with who changed their path, even incorrectly so (i.e. betraying other people’s trust). So I will conclude saying that I agree with this:

I will only add to it that the news about McGovern is an important news, but not for what he will do from now on, but for what he will stop doing from now on. But, as you correctly convened, the real important factor is always the community.