On Wed, 2 Apr 2025 10:28:04 -0500 Caleb Herbert <c...@bluehome.net> wrote: > I agree that we must move beyond Richard and take the reigns. This is > already happening in GNU proper. I disagree that we should take away > the old man's honor over nit-picking the things he says. I don't > think we should blot out his name or disparage him.
The problem is much more complex I think. I think it's a byproduct of centralizing a movement toward a single individual and over-relying on the reputation of a single person. Doing that also has good aspects as for instance it works well with the media as long as the person reputation keeps being good, so you can spread the word much much faster this way, but it's also risky (live by the media reputation, die by the media reputation?). And I don't have a definite answer on which one is better because I lack a lot of the historic context. For instance, going faster might have been the only viable option in order to grow fast before we were in practice outlawed by Microsoft or software patents for instance. Also note that it's also possible to "hack" all that to get advantage of both going fast and going far. For instance a given person can talk for a collective, and it's also possible to have someone famous come in a place to make people talk instead of talking, which has also the effect of bringing local people together. This has already been done in practice for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Other_Campaign But like in my previous mail it also brings down the question of if we want to go fast or far, and what has been done has been done, so the only question we face is what to do now. This brings a question of where to spend resources (to clarify what happened, have the truth emerge, etc, or to go forward trying to fix issues that might stay for a longer term if we do nothing, and choosing is not necessarily easy as understanding what happened also helps us learning lessons, but doing so without too much infighting is complex given that people are still in conflict about all that). So I think that in any case we should take this mess as an opportunity in order to make free software stronger rather than only having to deal with all the bad aspects of it. This may also be what makes things stronger: to be able to learn from the environment and adapt, but here even if I have some historical example in mind (like the Roman empire or Linux), it's only a hypothesis and I've no proof for it (what seems to make sense is not necessarily true). Denis.
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