Even after persistent toppling attempts Richard Stallman remains GNU's chief

Summary: Software Freedom is under a heavy and perhaps unprecedented attack; some people out there are paid by the attackers to celebrate this attack and defame people (cheering for corporate takeover under the blanket of "Open Source"), but the founder of the Free software movement remains alive, well, and very much active

TWEETS are not a good/reliable source for reporting; but sometimes (unfortunately) people write official communications there.

"As it happens RMS shot his own foot," Bruce Perens wrote about Richard Stallman (RMS), "and no tears from me about him leaving. But 2 decades later."

Perens and Eben Moglen were seen by us as two individuals with sufficient clout to take the position of RMS at the FSF. Now we know Perens is not likely to be interested. "After years of facilitating OSI's assault on software freedom," wrote a former FSF employee about the above. "Anyway, consider this, given your stance on returning RMS to the board..."

"Don't believe the lie that the FSF rejected RMS; what we do know, for a fact (thanks to Mr. Pocock), is that the FSF actively censors messages in support of RMS."Another former FSF intern/employee then said, "we have to remember that Bruce [Perens] actually was the one who promoted Molly de Blanc for OSI and if you look at the history there... Clearly Molly is not a leader...but established credibility through the FSF. Bruce also told us not to pursue what happened with Ian Murdock."

"I was an early years FSF employee," the first one responded, "and for a number of years that after somewhat closely associated but I've been away for a few years. Now paying attention again w/the current mess. What happened with Ian Murdock?"

"We expect RMS to still be around and very much active, not only in GNU but also in other areas."Murdock, for those who don't know, is Debian's founder. Perens was an early project leader.

On went this conversation: "By "pursue" do you mean investigate? Because it sounds shady as shit."

"His [Twitter] account was [posthumously] deleted," I responded, "but police clearly abused him, while naked, to the point where he decided to hang himself..."

Apparently not everyone knew.

"Oh, god. I just looked it up. Oh, man."

We still see reactions like this one years down the line.

"We also hear about some upcoming meetings with RMS in Boston."We still keep in contact/touch with RMS and sometimes he keeps in contact with us. Sometimes FSF staff (past and present) who are loyal to RMS speak to us. They're not happy about what happened last month. Don't believe the lie that the FSF rejected RMS; what we do know, for a fact (thanks to Mr. Pocock), is that the FSF actively censors messages in support of RMS.

According to one of the above people, in a "presentation at LibrePlanet, RMS did mention something about promoting Free Software philosophies to maker spaces."

We expect RMS to still be around and very much active, not only in GNU but also in other areas. His Web site has been updated to make that point very, very clear. It happened after it had repeatedly been vandalised to state the opposite (we suspect an insider or associate with access credentials did this). We also hear about some upcoming meetings with RMS in Boston. RMS isn't 'history' or a 'has been', but some corporate agenda wants us to believe otherwise. There's a very heavy and very persistent attack on multiple fronts at the moment.

An hour ago Benjamin Henrion told us (in IRC): "Fosdem is using Github for the devrooms, they ask for a Pull Request to submit the CFPs, I will refuse in a short letter..."

It's almost as if FOSDEM (Europe) has been ‘outsourced’ to Microsoft. Create an account with Microsoft to talk or attend??? It is something we currently look into, e.g. who decided to pay FOSDEM this year and what for (e.g. keynote speakers' positions). Money is toxic in this context and it has already poisoned quite a few communities. Some people online have alleged that the FSF already takes Google money (Google is not a copyleft proponent but an 'unwilling' user of it). Others have told us about the ramifications of Stormy Peters officially defecting to Microsoft. This defection causes problems on multiple fronts. Techrights called Peters out as a threat/danger more than a decade ago. It's the same bunch as de Icaza of Mono and Friedman who's now using proprietary software (GitHub) to attack FOSS as a whole. From the inside. ⬆