Both Richard Stallman and John Sullivan have issued statements concerning the allegations made against the FSF by Libreboot’s lead developer.
On Friday we reported that Libreboot’s lead developer, Leah Rowe, had posted a notice to a GNU mailing list, removing her project from GNU. The reason she gave was that a friend employed by the Free Software Foundation, had been dismissed for discriminatory reasons. “The Free Software Foundation recently fired a transgendered employee of the FSF, just for being trans…,” she wrote. “I’m declaring here and now to the whole world that Libreboot is no longer part of the GNU project.”
Friday afternoon after we published our report, Richard Stallman, founder and president of FSF, posted a brief, unofficial statement in an email to the thread around Rowe’s email. “The dismissal of the staff person was not because of her gender,” he said. “Her gender now is the same as it was when we hired her. It was not an issue then, and it is not an issue now.”
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
Speaking of things as certain as gravity…
While Larry’s been keeping an eye on things at the self-proclaimed most-important-open-source-conference-in-the-multiverse, I’ve been keeping an eye on the happenings in the FOSS world elsewhere. In the process, I’ve managed to make Larry part of this Week in Review.
Oh wait…no I didn’t.