Moral Support for Richard Stallman From the FreeBSD Community
SOMEONE informed me of a discussion in the FreeBSD forums, offering sympathy and empathy for Richard Stallman (RMS). He suffered from the same slanderous, lying mob who attacked my wife and I, at one point resulting in nearly two days of downtime here in Tux Machines (based on deliberate lies, not a misunderstanding).
The BSDs are better off having a good relationship with the GPL/GNU camp. We have many common or overlapping goals. "Both *BSD and GNU are aiming for software freedom," someone has explained to me, "even if they choose radically different approaches to try to get there."
To quote portions from the forums: "I wish him [RMS] all the best. I hope the strength that RMS has demonstrated fighting the foul software industry translates well to his next battle! [...] They tried to cancel/destroy him 4 years ago - now they're most likely hoping that this does. [...] I doubt the lynch mob of four years ago are very selective about whatever means gets rid of him. He was stabbed in the back by gutless cowards within his own ranks. [..] I was never a GNU fan, but he is one of the few still making any kind of stand against corporate owned and controlled "Open Source", where most others have sold out. [...] Yes the "pronoun brigade" were the useful idiots at the time, doing the dirty work. But those who had real reasons for wanting RMS out of the way, only had to sit back and wait for these outraged frothing at the mouth types to finish their work and then thoroughly denounced him [...] As with the modern political class, these self styled "activists" dig the dirt on their target and then try to channel an outraged herd mentality to ostracise and expel - combined with the new craze for these "CoC" things in order to somehow legitimise said actions."
Some of these comments may sound divisive and rude, but they echo what my wife and I experienced. RMS had no chance of ever appeasing these people, and he only sort of humiliated himself by trying (back in 2021). People whose lives are truly hopeless and miserable sometimes obsess over dragging others down to their own level/misery. That's a lot easier than doing or creating something positive. █