Wow.
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Statement of FSF board on election of Richard Stallman (RMS): u.fsf.org/3bf
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He is sorry that people are angry, you see.
A way to avoid tarnishing the FSF reputation due to RMS's mistakes would be... not to have him on the board?
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In Italian we call this a "sviolinata".
Besides the horrible "he is too good to kick out, even if he pushes others out" cliché... does anyone actually think RMS's strategy worked out?
Where is all this user-replaceable software? What did it accomplish?
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Open Source clearly succeeded. It's paying my salary.
But Free Software?
What device can you actually modify the behavior of thanks to the might of the GPL? What large application?
Even if it were ok to ignore the misbehavior, why would you want to keep following his strategy?
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In many ways OpenWRT succeeded in spite of the GPL
The source code for the WRT54G was released, the *WRT projects were started.. and only after that someone started a lawsuit over the GPL which killed all Linux based product development at Linksys for years
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Instead of Linux based routers with source code drops, for the next several years we got a stream of VxWorks based routers/access points/etc
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The GPL has probably done _some_ good (without it, its somewhat doubtful we'd have anywhere near as many devices supported by OpenWRT)
GPL enforcement has, largely, just done harm
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It's also not something required by GPLv2 but rather GPLv3.
twitter.com/DanielMicay/st
Using legal system to force vendors to release kernel source code doesn't do you much good if you don't have a way to use it. Exploiting boot chain would not really be a proper way to use it.
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Replying to @craigsuperstar @FiloSottile and @GMMeyer
Linux is GPLv2 rather than GPLv3 so vendors don't need to allow replacing the software. They only need to provide the kernel sources to their users.
For example, it's entirely up to phone vendors to support unlocking the bootloader and optionally verified boot with a custom key.
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GPLv2 didn't deal with this for devices as a whole where they can and do often use a secure boot chain to verify the software. Even if they don't, they often won't provide a direct way to replace the firmware.
Cooperation with hardware vendors is far better than coercion...
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You want them to not simply dump code for their kernel drivers / modifications with a specific kernel version but to get that code upstream and ideally contribute to long-term maintenance and testing.
Also, proper support for using different software not requiring exploitation.