Summary: Free as in free speech; but not for everyone...

In past years we learned that certain Free/Libre software developers had been banned from GNU and LibrePlanet mailing lists. To make matters worse, bans in the GNU domain (as a whole) meant that they were unable to reach pertinent people, including Richard Stallman, who pioneered and championed the movement.

"The response, which was amicable, was sent by the Campaigns Manager of the Free Software Foundation (FSF).""Mail sent by a Ukrainian advocate from shelter to libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org," we've learned, "is censored but gets private response." The Ukrainian name is redacted for privacy reasons.

The response, which was amicable, was sent by the Campaigns Manager of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). It it a day old:

Дата: 2 бер. 2022 р., 23:29 Від: gregf@fsf.org Кому: [redacted] Тема: Your question

> Hi, [redacted]: > >> Hello there! > > First of all, we hope you're safe. > >> My name is , I am the leader of the NGO "Ukrainian >> Liberation" which aims to share info and promote FOSS here in >> Ukraine in any possible way. Sorry for some terrible mistakes -- >> there's a war going on in [redacted] my country, and we haven't slept plenty of >> time, so it's kinda difficult to stay focused enough to speak good >> English. >> >> I just wanted to ask you, guys, why RMS is not speaking on >> LibrePlanet this year? It's the first time in history, if I am not >> mistaken. So I would like to know, what's going on. > > As the organizers of LibrePlanet I think we can help answer your > question directly instead of passing it onto the community > libreplanet-discuss list, which wouldn't be able to give you any > information beyond what you already know. > > LibrePlanet doesn't have a standard speaker list, and the selection > procedure is done anonymously by a committee. We usually offer the > president of the FSF a slot to speak in every year, but beyond that we > do not have any "reserved" slots. We also can't give out information > on who did or didn't submit for a talk. We apply this policy uniformly > across all of our speakers, and can't make any exceptions in order to > preserve speaker privacy. > > However, it's probably worth pointing out that if you look at past > schedules, you'll find it is not the first time that RMS didn't speak. > He didn't speak as recently as 2020, but did talk in 2021. With him > being a member of our board and the Chief GNUisance, we *can* inform > that we work closely with RMS. > > Also, thanks for expressing your interest in seeing a talk by him. > Even though we can't have the same people speaking every year, we do > try to take note of speakers people want to see. > > On another note, would you be able to give us more information about > the your Ukranian NGO? We'd be interested in hearing more about it, > especially where it pertains to free software. > > Hope this helps, and hope you keep safe. > > Best, > -Greg > > -- > Greg Farough // Campaigns Manager > Free Software Foundation > > Join the FSF and help us defend software freedom: https://my.fsf.org

There's absolutely nothing wrong with this response, but why remove/block the message from public viewing? Maybe they try hard to keep politics off these mailing lists, which is sort of understandable, but the question asked wasn't a political one. It's just a suppressed question. ⬆