0. git clone https://github.com/altsalt/rms-letter-comparison.git
1. cd rms-letter-comparison
2. source ./gh_credentials
3. python3 ./code/00-gather_data.py

• To view progress, consider running the following command:
• watch -d -n 30 "wc -l ./data/rms-letter-signers.csv && tail write.log && tail rate.log && tail error.log"

4. Open ./code/01-process_data.R, ./code/02-build_tables.R, and ./rms-letter-comparison.Rmd in RStudio
5. Run each RScript in sequence, they will read in the raw data, process it, save it to Rds files, and produce the PDF, ./rms-letter-comparison.pdf

On March 22, 2021 the former president of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) Richard M. Stallman (rms) announced that he would be returning to the FSF board.¹ This comes 18 months after he stepped down, due to public pressure regarding, among other things, statements relating to the involvement of Marvin Minsky and Jeffrey Epstein.²

On March 23, 2021 a letter was published online calling for the removal of rms from all leadership positions within the Free/Libre/Open Source Software community.³ Shortly thereafter, a counter letter, in support of the return of rms was published.⁴

Each of these letters called for readers to add their signatures via a pull request (PR) using GitHub, one of the largest hosts for FLOSS projects. As of 15:52:36 PDT on March 26th, 2021, the letter requesting removal has received 1,303 "contributor" signatures, while the letter in support of remaining has received 2,280. The displayed numbers are ~2,700 for removal and ~3,100 for remaining.

Included in this repository is a cursory analysis comparing contributors to each letter. The data used was acquired from GitHub via their official API, accessed using the PyGithub library.⁵ It was then processed in R, making use of tools from the tidyverse library.⁶

• [1]: https://twitter.com/nixcraft/status/1373905399707955202
• [2]: https://itsfoss.com/richard-stallman-controversy
• [3]: https://rms-open-letter.github.io/
• [4]: https://rms-support-letter.github.io/
• [5]: https://github.com/PyGithub/PyGithub
• [6]: https://www.tidyverse.org/

• CommitChange
• Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
• Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE)
• Mozilla
• Open Source Initiative (OSI)
• Outreachy
• Red Hat
• Software Freedom Conservancy
• The Tor Project

• @aimee_maree
• @FOSSfirefighter
• @tmcw

The documentation provided for this project is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/. The code provided for this project is released under the GNU General Public License version 3 (GNU GPLv3) https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0. The data was collected from GitHub. All data provided for this project is subject to the terms outlined on this page: https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-of-service

🄯 2021 Wm Salt Hale <@altsalt (.net)>