Re: Should we take steps to reduce russian access to Free Software?

[Jean Louis]

Thanks Valentino, I agree to everything what you said here.
That should be lesson for FSF representatives as well.

Let us be friends for reasons that we have in common to love
free software. 

Other politics but free software we better to put on side and
discuss individually on other Internet places, as it is not
related to free software.

It would divide us, while we are friends and we are friends
with free software regardless of our ethnicity or country of
origin and regardless of our individual political views.


* Valentino Giudice <valentino.giudice96@gmail.com> [2022-03-01 07:59]:
> > There is NO conflict between software freedom and making political
> > statements!
> Absolutely correct.
> 
> > It is perfectly sensible for anyone, including FSF or individual
> > projects or developers, to make a strong public statement condemning
> > acts of war and stating explicitly that we do not support the use of our
> > software by the Russian military, even though their use is legal.
> 
> Absolutely not correct, and this kind of thing is, in my view, the
> biggest issue in free software organizations: the fact that such
> organizations lose their focus and are used by their boards
> effectively as personal blogs.
> 
> Individuals have the right to make any statement they wish. Stallman
> can talk about his favourite food, on his own blog, and that has
> nothing to do with the GNu project. People who happen to be on the FSF
> board (including Geoffrey Knauth) are well within their right to state
> their opinion on what the best movie of all time is. On their own
> personal blog.
> 
> But the FSF has a raison d'être, a very specific mission and ideology
> and a reason why people support it. If one supports the FSF, they do
> so because they want to support the free software ideology and the GNU
> project. They could have any opinion on any unrelated topic.
> 
> The mere fact that something doesn't contradict software freedom
> doesn't mean it should be FSF's job to talk about it. For that to be
> the case, the topic must be related to software freedom and FSF's
> opinion must follow from their mission.
> 
> Otherwise, it would mean the FSF is no longer a tool at the disposal
> of its mission, but rather a tool at the disposal of whomever happens
> to be in the organization. We have seen this happen multiple times
> with multiple free software organizations and it's never not ugly.
> 
> People that disagree on most topics (and any two given people will,
> provided they think with their brain, given the amount of opinions you
> could have about anything) should be able to work together on the
> topics they do agree on: that is why organizations exist.
> 
> If the FSF starts doing this sort of thing, supporting it in good
> faith becomes impossible *even if the opinions they express are 100%
> right* because an organization is not merely a group of people and the
> mission should play a stronger role than who happens to be on the
> board at any given time. If an organization is treated as a tool to
> express any opinion at all on any topic, it's of no substance and if
> the FSF started doing so now, that would be a betrayal of anyone who
> has supported it thus far: we don't know their opinion about this war
> and we shouldn't care, because that's separate from what the FSF
> should be doing: support software freedom and the GNU project.
> 
> > Acknowledging that we don't have the power to stop the use of software
> > and don't support discriminatory licensing, we are still totally free to
> > make statements and requests about the use of software!
> 
> Yes, you can do that as an individual and every person in the FSF can
> do so as an individual too, but only speaking for themselves.

-- 
Jean

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