Red Hat pauses support for FSF over Richard Stallman return

Red Hat has immediately stopped funding the Free Software Foundation. The reason lies with Richard Stallman’s return to the board of the organization. According to Red Hat, the FSF needs to make fundamental changes.

Red Hat pauses funding from the Free Software Foundation and events that foundation hosts. The company also supports developers from its community who no longer wish to participate in FSF events. Red Hat said it was “dismayed” by Richard Stallman’s return to the board of the FSF.

Red Hat was one of the organizations that pushed for more diversity in the board of the FSF in 2019 after Stallman left. Only limited steps in that direction have been made since then, according to Red Hat, and Stallman’s return has reopened old wounds. “The few changes in oversight and organization that the FSF announced on Wednesday are too few to bring any real positive change,” the company said. “We believe that the FSF needs to make fundamental and lasting changes to restore the confidence of the broad free software community.”

Red Hat joins a larger group of critics who this week spoke out against Stallman’s return to the FSF. Among them are people from the Gnome Foundation, the Open Source Initiative, and the Apache Software Foundation. Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation in 1985 but left as chairman and board member in 2019 after controversial statements about a victim of sex offender and child molester Jeffrey Epstein in an internal listserv thread.