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Re: Amendment to rms-open-letter GR



On Thu, Mar 25, 2021 at 10:50:37PM +0200, Jonathan Carter wrote:
> I'm not sure I like this. I believe that removing the board is a
> critical part of the letter. They are 4 friends that RMS chooses that he
> chose because they never appose him. They are not elected by members of
> the FSF but a self-selected cabal.

As one of the first signers, but speaking solely for myself, I can
confirm that recalling the entire board was for me a critical part of
the letter. The rationale being that reinstating him shows a severe lack
of judgment on the part of the board (technically: on the voting
members, but that's an implementation detail which I thought would be
lost on 99% of the letter readership and hence was in favor to leave
out) and institutional failure, which cannot be cured by simply undoing
the decision.

(Of course a statement by the Debian project, in there is going to be
one, can take a different stance.)

> I'm not sure what the plans would be if the board would actually resign,
> clearly RMS and the board have no intention of doing so[1] (at least by
> their choice of language in that announcement), but ideally the board
> would be selected by the community and be held accountable by them,
> currently they answer to no one and let RMS do whatever he feels like
> without consequences.

For the record, there are successful examples of non-profit orgs going
through major organizational reform via mass resignation + appointment
of brand new board. The case of the Tor project [1] is probably one that
would be familiar with many of us.

[1]: https://blog.torproject.org/tor-project-elects-new-board-directors

Cheers
-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli . zack@upsilon.cc . upsilon.cc/zack . . o . . . o . o
Computer Science Professor . CTO Software Heritage . . . . . o . . . o o
Former Debian Project Leader & OSI Board Director  . . . o o o . . . o .
« the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »

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