Linus eventually realised that his abuse of contributors was a negative contribution and agreed to change. RMS has .. not got to that point.
I've seen the accusations against RMS. I've seen the RMS emails in the thread[1].
RMS' emails bemoan wishy-washy reporting, and are centered around calls for clarity and precision. With some insensitive words.
In response we got even more wishy-washy reporting - weasel words were used, misleading summaries instead of quotations[2], and focus was placed on how people felt outraged. People who weren't part of the discussion.
This isn't the way to build great software. This is tribes warring on social media.
>They're a negative contribution, and they contribute to driving away other contributors
Riddle me this: which drives away contributors - private email threads, or social media wars of attrition?
Is my judgement right? Maybe I am missing something big, that happens. Nonetheless I decide to side with somebody I've seen reliably exhibit the same character over decades, rather than with out-of-character accusations. I decide to side with somebody who delivered great projects[3] over decades - rather than with a social media conflict.
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[1] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6405929-091320191420...
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/d5a4dz/richard_stall...
[3] notably RMS delivered not only software projects, but also organizational/legal projects, and social/cultural projects
The "insensitive words" seem the issue for me, from my reading of his emails, and referring to them as just that seems an understatement.
> The announcement [...] does injustice to Marvin Minsky. The injustice is the word "assaulting". The term "sexual assault" is so vague and slippery that it facilitates accusation inflation; [...] The accusation quoted is a clear example of inflation. The reference reports the claim that Minsky had sex with one of Epstein's harem. [...] The word "assault" presumes that he applied force [...] but the article says no such thing.
Yes the above words are insensitive (calling such accusations "vague and slippery" by definition does a massive injustice to anyone who's ever suffered such a fate), but much more objectively, they're also blindly or wilfully false. The article he links as a reference opens with the following words:
> A victim of billionaire Jeffrey Epstein testified that she was forced to have sex with MIT professor Marvin Minsky
There is no more direct contradiction of RMS' statements than the opening words of the article he links in his email. There's absolutely no question of his communication on this being appropriate.
RMS words can not do massive injustice as they are words not judges, besides his words are actually expressing an attempt to correct a perceived injustice of misqualifying some accusation toward a dead guy that cannot defend himself.
Actually the headlines fits exactly the point RMS is making, that if she was forced, Epstein was the one not Minsky. Then again do not stop at the headline, read the whole article and read the source used for the article, there is no mention of the use of force, the only mentions of her being forced to have sex are with different persons and contradicts her earlier 2011 allegations (page 33). The part mentioning Minsky does not even confirm she actually had sex with him, only that she was sent to by Ms Maxwell (page 182). So I guess you are right there's absolutely no question here, but not in the direction that would fit your narrative and opinion.
It doesn't contradict what RMS is saying.
> The word "assault" presumes that he applied force [...] but the article says no such thing.
"He" here means Marvin Minksy and the part of the article you cited doesn't imply that Minsky forced the victim.
Also I haven't seen sources that claim that the victim had sex with Minsky and seen at least one source that claims that he turned her down [0].
We're not debating what happened: as far as I know, Minsky is presumed innocent until any potential judgements are delivered. What RMS was debating was not whether Minsky has done anything wrong, but whether he has been accused of doing so.
Minsky was accused of having sex with a girl who was being coerced at the time. Even if one wants to split hairs about Epstein being some kind of enforcer figure of said coercion, I'm pretty surprised that people would somehow believe this would nullify Minsky's alleged act being considered sexual assault?
He may not have done it. He is still only "accused". But the act he is accused of is inarguably assault.
Neither of them seems hugely socially savvy. Perhaps someone/something helped Linus get there and RMS hasn't had a similar experience.
Edit: a list of complaints over years: https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman
Edit: at the risk of targeting people for harassment by HN commentators, some personal stories from Twitter. Apparently people kept houseplants to ward off RMS: https://twitter.com/starsandrobots/status/994267630457401344
Linus was told by trusted insiders "Get your act together" and he apparently took that to heart.
And RMS is being removed as a consequence of the angry actions of a woman who didn't even know who he was: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20993364
Edit: I wish you wouldn't do something that you feel puts other people at risk just to back up your point. Especially since you seem to think you have the moral high ground.
You are happy to throw other people under a bus to win an internet argument. Some angry woman who admits her screed wasn't really about RMS per se threw him under a bus. And you're fine with it. Because you seem to think that's morally acceptable if you have some kind of justification.
Social outcomes aren't about the actions of a single person. They are about the cumulative consequences of the actions of many people.
How people choose to respond to problematic behavior is part of that -- and often not in a good way.
> How people choose to respond to problematic behavior is part of that -- and often not in a good way.
Well, yes. There don't seem to be any good answers here. Handling it privately is not at all reliable and may result in the complainer getting privately blacklisted. Going public can be effective, but only if you make a major storm - the outcomes of which can no longer be controlled.
We don't know if people have tried to get RMS to get his act together. But this doesn't seem to be a first complaint out of nowhere.
IMO this was a long time coming, not some brand-new thing.
She did not correct her misrepresentation but instead went on to publish in an appendix what had been dugged and nitpicked to paint RMS in a way that fit her narrative.
the appendix is easy to debunk:
1 can be summarized as RMS has opinions, his personal opinions not being the same as the majority means they are problematic (use a reversal of burden of proof fallacy in the process). Goes on to says that institutions/companies that do not remove people with personal opinions different from the majority should be removed from the institutions otherwise it should be interpreted that the institutions themselves support those opinions. Of course totally overlooks the fact if instead of public shaming, calling for witch hunt and not talking with the person, having a fact-based conversation with the person about his/her opinion could be enough to change this opinion as had happened here: https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html#14_September...
2 is a collection of applying today standard to 40 years old society, expectation of normal behaviour to someone in the autistic spectrum and leaving the reader to fill the holes when the reason for having a mattress in his office and being proud of it is long documented and unrelated to the sexual framing attempt. Then she presents a 1983 report pointing how it was for women is CS at MIT at the time which makes no mention of RMS in any way but is nevertheless add as charge to him.
3. Goes on to put RMS in the same bag with Epstein, and mentions #metoo as if RMS had been mentioned in it with no explanation and no evidence. Rants about MIT and calls for other institutions to go on witch hunts on threat of chaos such as the one she just caused.
4. is about her personal life and how she felt in social context trying to diminish her efforts and accomplishment, how she is desensitized and prepared for escalation from Stallman but disappointed that he did not and instead went on to apologize. Unhappy with the apology and impervious to the fact that she is responsible and the cause for the misunderstanding and the media coverage, she uses this apology as a call to other people to take her action as a model and fight the powerful people.
So as a whole this appendix is really not more evidence that the original author missed the point and further attacked a wrongly perceived threat and as a result polarized further against RMS and her.
2 -- Stop using "because autism" as an excuse. It's an insult to the many people on the spectrum who don't do and say shitty things. Also, has RMS been diagnosed? Are you a psychologist? If not, I don't think you're qualified to make that statement. I'm not sure you're even reading the same thing I am; she specifically calls out incidents and people who claim RMS specifically harassed them. If you look a bit on Twitter, there are more women coming out who have been similarly harassed. I agree that standards change over time, but when the behavior of 40 has remained consistent over the next 40 years, that's a huge problem.
3 -- It is entirely possible that a single piece can be about and triggered by the actions of one person, but then expand to be more general. Not sure why you can't see that.
4 -- So what? I mean... sure, she has flaws, but so do we all, and that has nothing to do why RMS does shitty things. Also, she _posted the verbatim contents of the emails_ (including the most relevant part, right there, a couple paragraphs into her post). It's on Vice (etc.) for not, y'know, actually reading them and reporting things factually.
I'm just not really sure why you feel the need to latch onto this single post so tightly. It was a catalyst, to be sure, and several media outlets did some incredibly irresponsible, dishonest reporting. But that doesn't change the fact that RMS has been engaging in reprehensible behavior for decades. It's feeling like you're looking at a list of 10 bad things and are saying, "wait, everything is ok because one of these things on the list was wrong!" This might be a shitty straw to break the camel's back, but the camel's back was overdue in breaking.
— Matthew Garrett (https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/52587.html)
The SJW / You Can't Say That crowd also drives away contributors, so who is more right?
Linus bent the knee to identitarian extremism. RMS did not and the FSF forced him out so they could bend the knee to identitarian extremism. If Linus had not bent the knee then the Linux Foundation would have forced him out.
Open Source and Free Software is being attacked on 2 fronts
Corporatism that is taking over and promoting "Open Source" Libraries and Licenses that are very restrictive to User Freedom
The Authoritarian / identitarian left that want to cancel any programmer, dev, or person in software development that does non conform to identitarian Political agenda
I came in to Free Software because it was a libertarian movement, now everyone is trying to drive out all the libertarians and it will kill the movement. Free Software and authoritarianism are not compatible
One barely known person wrote an opinion about a person who's well-known in a specific group and who is respected and has appropriate power, and suddenly all the corporate media write about it. And it happened multiple times.
I think that the biggest problem is that people in the field don't give violent resistance each time it happens. Bad actors are everywhere, you have to fight them. People don't call these people what they are - corporate prostitutes, they don't even say "Je suis Stallman/Linus, etc." They see what happens and just cowardly accept it.
It's the most plausible explanation.
Adjust your tinfoil hat, please. Jesus christ.
And now there's good Linus, there's no RMS anymore, but we have this
https://developers.slashdot.org/story/19/08/30/1529201/npm-b...
Which world do you prefer?
Secondly: their strong leadership brought us an hacker community devoted to the product and correctness of the result, regardless of their personality, as technical leader they excelled and when they went over the line it was for the benefit of the community, never for their ego.
Now we have weaker leadership, attention has moved from being right to being popular, salaries are valued more than technical skills, corporations have infiltrated open source communities changing the meaning of `free` in free software from "free as in free speech" to "free as in free beer" and we ended up with package managers that install trojans or display ads.
If NPM leadership was made by pedantic, ruvid, sometimes assholes, the like of Linus and RMS, this would have never happened.