Diplomacy and Communication Strategies Matter to Software Freedom (Who Talks for You?)
THE GNU Project was announced 40 years ago in a very polite and courteous message from Richard M. Stallman, back then at MIT (well before Bill Gates et al hijacked it). Stallman had experienced frustrating interactions with 1980s era technology companies, seeing they would always deny access to the source code (even just to study it to make improvements) if it was against their profit interests. They wanted a monopoly on everything, conflating it with solid business interest. Nowadays we know companies can benefit from sharing or collaboration (cooperation) with third parties, lessening the cost of maintaining/developing some products/services. To Stallman, however, this was a matter of users' (and developers' -- they're also users!) freedom.
Sadly we've been seeing attacks on the character, not the message, of Stallman. Instead of coders and geeks running the projects we're seeing submissive corporate tools being put in charge. The GNOME Foundation has just appointment its very own 'Zemlin'. They know how to talk (marketing), but they cannot code or understand technical issues/projects. It makes them ripe or convenient for exploitation/manipulation by large sponsors such as Google and IBM. After leaving IBM the CEO or Red Hat is promoting Mono/.NET and Mark Shuttleworth does too (to Shuttleworth's credit, he is definitely technical, albeit greedy and opportunistic).
What a skillful person. He put on a suit and opened a GitHub (Microsoft, proprietary) account.. with nothing in it.
We need to get back to the 80s era in terms of communication and representation. We need to get people suitably qualified in technology to speak for us, preferably people who also did some coding in the past. Our communities are currently being abused, oppressed and sometimes enslaved (unpaid volunteers) by charlatans and frauds who are mostly skilled imposters. Bullying old men with cancer (who can code) and bullying women (with a Computer Science degree) is no way to promote one's message, especially when that message is inherently pro-Microsoft and anti-Free software.
We need to get back to a technology sector that's run by and for geeks, not by suits for shareholders (who are only charmed by buzzwords like "Hey Hi", "clown computing", and "smart"). █