25: Governance, Leadership, and Founder's Syndrome

FOSS and Crafts

What story does an institution tell about itself? To whom does a governance structure and its leadership serve? To what degree are leaders within a governing institution subject or exempt to the rules of the governed? We use this framework to discuss the unexpected announcement of Richard Stallman's re-appointment to the FSF board, by the FSF board.

Content warning: depression and sexual harassment are both mentioned in this episode.

Links:

• Founder's Syndrome (Wikipedia article)

• Statement on the Re-election of Richard Stallman to the FSF Board by the EFF

• An open letter to remove Richard M. Stallman from all leadership positions

• Microblog post expressing lack of foreknowledge of announcement by FSF staff and Libreplanet volunteers

• Not The First Time We Tried (FSF, GNU, RMS, etc.) by Sumana Harihareswara

• Kat Walsh's statement of making arguments in opposition to RMS's reinstatement to the board (Twitter version) and announcement of resignation (Twitter version)

• The Free Software Foundation and Richard Stallman by Benjamin Mako Hill, longtime FOSS advocate, former member of FSF board

• Programming is Forgetting: Toward a New Hacker Ethic

• Documentation of accusations of women being harassed by RMS

• Political cartoon between RMS and Chris from when Chris was in college

• Re: Bug in emacs tetris

• GNU Emacs and XEmacs

• 2018 Letter to the board in response to RMS's behavior and the board's lack of response

• Marianne Corvellec’s Libre Planet 2017 talk “The GNU Philosophy: Ethics beyond ethics” where RMS says "I'm the president of the Free Software Foundation... so I don’t have to follow the rules"