Alexandre, Making our community more welcoming is indeed a process. And some steps will just be symbolic. But I don't believe removing RMS from (perceived) leadership positions in the GNU project and from the FSF is just symbolic. And even for a symbolic step it is a powerful one. It shows we don't tolerate harassment in our project. And I do hope it doesn't end with that step. We also have to decide whether we still want to be associated with the FSF. Hopefully the FSF takes their responsibility and replaces the whole board to show we can start with a clean slate.
One issue is that as long as GCC is associated with RMS and the FSF others who could help us won't because the FSF is that toxic now: https://www.outreachy.org/blog/2021-03-23/fsf-participation-barred/ And they are far from the only Free Software project who has said something similar. We are not talking about some single recent incident, but about decades of problematic behavior. At the last face-to-face GNU Tools Cauldron, everybody I talked to about it had some story about being harassed by RMS, had witnessed such harassment or heard from or knew someone who had been. For years people have tried to help him see how his actions and words might hurt others, even if they are completely logically correct to himself. And obviously that is sometimes hard, nobody is perfect, but hopefully we get a little better every time. But this never happened. And it really needs to stop. RMS actively undermines those who try to make our community a little bit more welcoming. Violating anti-harassment policies of conferences. Even those from the FSF by claiming to be above those policies because of his leadership position or using his position to tell staff they cannot enforce such policies against others. Because he is against enforcing any anti-harassment policy some GNU mailinglist is currently being used to organize a doxing campaign (publishing photos, address and calls to report to the local police station to get her house raided and arrested) for simply saying the same things we are discussing here now. I witnessed something similar recently when we had setup the mailinglist to discuss improving governance of the GNU project. When a female GNU (GCC) volunteer spoke up she got attacked and harassed. We told the harassers that was totally unacceptable and blocked them from sending more emails to the list. RMS arranged for those people to get unblocked to continue their hate campaign on the public GNU list so they could "defend him and the GNU project". That was followed by a torrent of hate to the list making any discussion impossible and making women feel like they were specifically targeted. He still hasn't learned that his words and actions are dog whistles for misogynists, transphobics and racists. This really has to stop. You link to a parody of a request of tens of Free Software foundation projects and thousands of Free Software hackers who are calling for the removal of the entire Board of the Free Software Foundation and for Richard M. Stallman to be removed from all leadership positions, including the GNU Project. For similar reasons that people here are now calling for RMS to be removed from the GCC steering committee. The real letter is here: https://rms-open-letter.github.io/ Sometimes satire is a way to deal with difficult problems, but I don't think that is appropriate here and I hope people take these issues seriously, because I think they are. Mark
