Current Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Vice President Howard V. Hendrix posted, late  yesterday, this rant in the SFWA  community LiveJournal, in which he said:

I'm also opposed to the increasing presence in our organization of webscabs, who post their creations on the net for free.  A scab is someone who works for less than union wages or on non-union terms; more broadly, a scab is someone who feathers his own nest and advances his own career by undercutting the efforts of his fellow workers to gain better pay and working conditions for all. Webscabs claim they're just posting their books for free in an attempt to market and publicize them, but to my mind they're undercutting those of us who aren't giving it away for free and are trying to get publishers to pay a better wage for our hard work. 

Since more and more of SFWA is built around such electronically mediated networking and connection based venues, and more and more of our membership at least tacitly blesses the webscabs (despite the fact that they are rotting our organization from within) -- given my happily retrograde opinions, I felt I was not the president who would provide SFWAns the "net time" they seemed to want at this point in the organization's development, or who would bless the contraction of our industry toward monopoly, or who would give imprimatur to the downward spiral that is converting the noble calling of Writer into the life of Pixel-stained Technopeasant Wretch.

I discovered Hendrix's post after reading Nick Mamatas's very vehement reply.

I'm not sure this is an issue in which non-writers can have a serious, coherent response (at least, not one Hendrix would respect; the greater public often doesn't care about scab workers, as I'm sure he would point out). So I'll stay out of this for now.

Update, part 1: Howard Hendrix replies to the controversy in a letter to GalleyCat. (But, notably, he is not engaging in debate anywhere that others can reply to him directly.) This was in response to an earlier GalleyCat story about the controversy.

Update, part 2: SFWA presidential candidate John Scalzi has also responded to the issue.