[OFFTOPIC] Re: Richard Stallman answer to me

[Oleg Goldshmidt]

On Tue, Jun 7, 2011 at 1:20 PM, geoffrey mendelson
<geoffreymendelson at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Jun 7, 2011, at 12:59 PM, Shlomi Fish wrote:
>
>> And we are getting way off-topic here.
>
> No, we are not. RMS has chosen to marry the two topics, now we have to
> accept one if we want the other.

No, RMS should not have any influence on the topics acceptable for
discussion on Linux-IL.

I would agree with Shlomi on this. While this list is about "Linux and
Israel", as someone pointed out, correctly, a short while ago, it is
primarily a *technical* forum. This particular thread is clearly not
technical (I won't attempt to label it as political, moral, a
combination thereof, or whatever). IMHO the topic properly belongs to,
say, an hamakor list that is specifically devoted to FOSS issues, and
- again, IMHO only - is very off-topic here.

I agree with Geoff's observation that RMS acted (improperly, I think)
as the President of FSF rather than as a private individual. He can
have any opinions he wants as a private individual, acting on those
opinions in his official FSF capacity clearly constitutes a conflict
of interest unless FSF now officially supports boycott - something I
have not heard of yet[1]. I still think it is very off-topic for
Linux-IL.

It is up to the moderators, not to me or anyone else, to pass a ruling.

[1] I checked the FSF site and didn't find anything related. I checked
the organization's 990 financial form (the latest available - for
2009) that states that FSF has a written conflict of interest policy.
I could not find such policy on the net (it probably should not
necessarily be there).

Chag sameach,

-- 
Oleg Goldshmidt | pub at goldshmidt.org