FREE software requires free speech or begets free speech (vice versa, too). The relationship between those two things goes beyond the word "free", which is often elucidated further just to clarify that "free software" isn't "freeware" or "shareware". It's not about price but about freedom. "Think about free speech, not free beer..."

"In the Free software community, people who never coded and hardly contributed anything meaningful have spectacularly been promoted to (or parachuted into) the very top roles."Last night Daniel Pocock published an article about the classification of words and occasional extension of words (to mean things they did not originally mean). He focused on the word "abuse". Pocock, an Australian, is a natural English speaker, unlike the people who run the FSFE. He's an Internet communications expert/specialist in the technical sense (things like WebRTC) and he is also a reasonably good speaker, who knows how to communicate difficult subjects and illuminate controversial issues, ethical dilemmas, conflict of interest and so on.

The way we see it, It's Pocock having a skill or an edge in conveying important issues that makes him a scapegoat or a convenient target for corporate 'cancel culture'. They'd rather have in charge people too weak to speak out against infiltration, bribes, misuse of funds, and even worse things. We covered this before. Incidentally, we recently became aware of a sort of silent 'cancel culture' happening inside the Free software community. Prominent members and longtime contributors to the movement are being targeted for literal deletion (e.g. from Wikipedia). Some people would rather reshape the history and the fabric of our community in a way more convenient to corporate power, leaving in powerful positions rather powerless individuals who allow corporations to fill the vacuum. See the OSI and Linux Foundation for instance. In the case of the EPO, people who barely understand patents (notably Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos) have somehow been shoehorned into the very top position of Europe's largest patent office. In the Free software community, people who never coded and hardly contributed anything meaningful have spectacularly been promoted to (or parachuted into) the very top roles. It is a recipe for disaster. Except to those looking to undermine the mission statement. ⬆