A sad week for open source, I guess.
I know the pain of watching your cult go mainstream. I remember when it happened with The Cult, specifically when they released Love. They were so great before they became popular.
In the early 90s, at least, M Stallman held revivalist styled speaking events at USENIX conferences (where did the silly idea he invent POSIX or the c pre processor come from? He re-implemented some because he didn't like the license terms. cpp was written by k&r). In these events, he implored everybody to join the movement, extolled the virtues of free software, and if you couldn't do that, financially support the cause.
I was a PFY, and went back advocating we should give the Manson doppelganger some money, if for no other reason than to make sure he and his family didn't show up at our conferences. There is no denying that financial support was very much a priority for the FSF, most of the whinging in these threads is just crying because your hero became news [ Interestingly, the song 5:15 does have some other similarity ].
Whether M Stallman morally should resign is entirely missing the point. He has become a signficant liability to not just the FSF, but even the wider Open Source movement. I don't know or care what RedHat et. al. think, but they clearly have their image to preserve. Thanks to its association with M Stallman, the FSF is becoming a stinking albatross; and to petulantly insist that you are in the right when all else disagree is not the salient feature of a Greek Myth, the common good is. This is not serving the common good.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
