Re: The anti-GNU defamatory group of Ludovic Courtès - Re: assessment of the GNU Assembly project

[Andreas R.]

Hi Jacob,

> There seem to be two
> different people both named Andreas here, 

This is correct. Unfortunately, even though Jean-Louis is a very spirited
defender of GNU, I feel his zeal sometimes gets in the way of reading
comprehension. It happened before, and correcting him on the matter
proved fruitless.

> one of whom is mildly critical of
> this "GNU Assembly" group 

I am very critical of the Assembly, and on points of fault I actually agree
with Jean-Louis (and Alfred), but in my assessment I tried to draw a line
between which transgressions are technical, and which transgressions would
be actionable.

"Actionable" here means involving lawyers and courts and all sorts of
last-resort nastiness to enforce compliance.

In my opinion there are three reasons for the GNU project to try and
avoid getting entangled:

- It costs time and money, and this needs to be weighed against the
potential gains. Forcing GNU maintainers to drop out of the project
is not something resources should be spent on lightly, in my 
opinion.

- As misguided as I feel they are, they are people and volunteers. They
should be able to disagree and voice that disagreement, even if that
disagreement proves provocative to some level. A strict line between
words and actions should be maintained when assessing the actual
damage they are doing to the GNU project and not just a gut feeling
that they are "wrong" overall.

- At the end of 2019 discussion about governance fell apart because it
became clear the then gnu.tools people had no roadmap for governance
other than getting rid of rms. Now, some 20 months later, they still
do not. The Assembly's actions and public visibility seems to hinge on 
controversies surrounding rms. Since these controversies are mostly
sorted by now, taking legal action would provide them with another
controversy to raise their profile again, as it would play to their
"rms - tyrant" narrative.

On that last point, I'd like to stand by my recommendations: that
further action only be undertaken if they start to undermine the
integrity of the GNU project by (for now) adding new projects or by 
changing the definition of software freedom. In these cases it would be
clear to every observer that a tiny minority is trying to force 
their will on the GNU project, so they couldn't use any publicity
to positively raise their profile. The rest of their provocations
should simply be countered by discussion and publications, where
and when possible.

> > [...]
> >  the Glibc abortion joke
> 
> Is that the "Future Change Warning" in the node for the abort() function in
> the manual?  I had always taken that as ridiculing government censorship.

As far as I can tell it's existence was a fairly petty peeve of O'Donnel, but 
was 
defensible since it could be interpreted as political outside of free 
software politics.

In my opinion that defense was negated by his employer butting in, unasked,
on the FSF board governance, stating they should replace their board for no 
free software related reason.

        cheers,
        Andreas