That he has also done some very good things isn't a good argument for continuing to tolerate his harmful behaviour after he's been asked to fix it for literally decades, and hasn't.
Note also that all of the anecdotes of actual bad behaviour that seem to come up are from about two decades ago, and we seem to be supposed to conclude that the pattern never stopped on the basis of that and a pathologically misquoted and misrepresented email he sent on the Epstein/Minsky case. Considering that the real email is at most slightly tone-deaf, the most likely model of reality to me seems to be that he has fixed that behaviour well over a decade ago, but a number of activists had resolved to never let it go until they found some way to completely destroy any status and reputation he has.
Some countries are more explicit about this and actually constitutionally single out matters of life and death as being prohibited from being traded off against each other (e.g. Germany), i.e. the state is not allowed to play in trolley problems. The corollary is that the state, and most everyone, finds it okay to trade off other harms: you can for instance choose to build an airport that will drive down the value of some people's homes and expose them to considerable noise in order to give convenience and good business to a large number of people. I think discouraging some women from participating in FOSS is much closer in quality of harm to "your home is now worth half as much and you have to put up with the noise of planes flying overhead everyday" than "you die a painful and untimely death".
("Wow, I've seen everything on HN to attack RMS. (...)")
this never happened though.
According not to me, but to Thomas Lord (if you don't know who he is, go and check)
> One remarkable thing about the FSF at that time, when we worked out of dinky spare offices on the campus of MIT, was the degree of participation by women. In the tiny society that was then the FSF, women were more prominent than I had seen in Silicon Valley, or acadamia prior.
And it says a lot about the amount of fabrication going around.
Quote one person in this thread who said that it wouldn't be ok if it affected men instead. Or just one person implying that.
You're assuming a lot here. If anything, I think it's likely less people would care if a bunch of men were alienated, since there's already so many of them in the field in the first palce.
I think anyone who was ever in favor of any war would agree that sometimes a death is justified when it saves many more?
That is a yes or no question. That is literally a binary choice. Yes or no - is murder OK if that murder saves more than one person.
That is literally the Trolley Problem.
The question is, is it acceptable to tolerate someones bad deeds because the benefits of doing so is greater than the harm.
It just isn't the same thing.
Armies don't have much issue with that ethical question.
Murder is a crime.
Where is the crime here?
It is ok to let go a "fuck you" if that persons did good before.
He has been accused, by several independent parties, of, among other things:
-Asking female coworkers to lay down topless on a mattress in his office.
-Threatening a colleague to kill himself if he/she didn't go on a date with him.
-Posting up signs in his workplace along the lines of "Knight for Justice (Also: Hot Ladies)".
Who, exactly?
> -Asking female coworkers to lay down topless on a mattress in his office. > -Threatening a colleague to kill himself if he/she didn't go on a date with him.
Sooooo, your entire analysis is based on legends circulating since the 90s about a weird man who was even told to be scared by plants?
For reference, Thomas Lord, creator of GNU arch (think about Git before Git), who worked for FSF for a long time said
One remarkable thing about the FSF at that time, when we worked out of dinky spare offices on the campus of MIT, was the degree of participation by women. In the tiny society that was then the FSF, women were more prominent than I had seen in Silicon Valley, or acadamia prior.
p.s.: In the closet-sized "office" Bushnell, McGrath, and I shared for a time we did have some spider plants as part of a running silly joke. They did not actually scare RMS away **OF COURSE** and he usually had helpful criticism and advice of our efforts, from my point of view.
Can you tell an inside joke when you see one?
p.s. all of us have being young and done some innocent stupid shit, the kinds young people do, like having stupid signs on the door. It doesn't make any of us a criminal.
But I expect that the second- and third-degree network effects have. MIT has had a huge influence on open source software. Keeping the number of women who contribute to FOSS lower has a snowball effect of discouraging other women from contributing—there are fewer leaders to look up to, and day-to-day misogyny in FOSS spaces goes unchecked more often.
As another commenter pointed out, I also don't think net impact is the bar. But besides that, it's very hard to measure, so I prefer to focus on having positive impacts and limiting/fixing negative impacts. I think the things he said on the CSAIL mailing list continue to contribute to a negative environment for women at MIT.
Surely second- and third-degree network effects occur on the encouragement side of the equation, too. Why would we expect any putative discouragement of women by Stallman to travel further in the social graph than his encouragement of both men and women?
> I think the things he said on the CSAIL mailing list continue to contribute to a negative environment for women at MIT.
Which things specifically, and in what way?
> Which things specifically, and in what way?
Saying that we shouldn't call sexual assault "sexual assault", and implying that there's any way a rich, famous, 73-year-old man can "have sex with" (rape) a 17-year-old girl, whom he has extraordinary power over, and who, in in this case was his friend's trafficking victim.
The idea that Minsky's "honour" is in any way more important than harm in what happened to Giuffre perpetuates rape culture. It perpetuates the idea that women are worth less than men, and that it's okay for famous men in CS to rape girls. That emboldens other rapists and makes CS very unwelcoming for rape victims.
Minsky should have known. Implying there's any way what he did was okay creates an unwelcoming environment for women, especially young women and girls at MIT.
(Background and links from https://medium.com/@selamie/remove-richard-stallman-fec6ec21... )
...what are the scare quotes for? Is "have sex with" not a definitional superset of "rape"? As far as I can tell, Stallman does not assert that Giuffre was not raped, only that Minsky would probably not have known. (As far as he knew, she could equally have been one year older and legally, voluntarily engaged in prostitution...?) You could argue that (and I think that if Minsky did indeed have sex with her, you would have a very good case) that Minsky was extremely naive and/or irresponsible to not suspect anything amiss in the setting, but sexual (or any other) assault, in the view of many people, requires intent to harm someone against their will.
Here, it seems that the intent, and hence the primary guilt for the assault, most likely was squarely with Epstein and his associates: if a gun salesman takes you to his shooting range and tells you to fire a weapon at a target that he actually secretly tied a person to the back of, and you shoot that person dead, you are not on the hook for murder even if you should really have known that something is off and recall hearing muffled screams from somewhere at one point in hindsight.
> The idea that Minsky's "honour" is in any way more important than harm in what happened to Giuffre
Where did Stallman claim that?
How would Minsky have known? It was 2001 or early 2002, before Epstein's trafficking came to light. From Minsky's point of view, a girl who worked at Epstein's retreat as a masseuse and was above the age of consent [1] offered to have sex with him. (Which, according to Gregory Benford, who was there, Minsky declined).
[1] 16. It wasn't until later that the US Virgin Islands raised it to the current 18.
> In 2012, the Jeffrey Epstein Foundation issued a press release touting another conference organized by Minsky on the island in December 2011.
The press release is at https://www.pr.com/press-release/383199
Almost certainly not, but at this stage it is not unlikely that he'll put off more than he'll encourage going forward. So by the same "net effect" argument you make for accepting his behaviour up to a point in the recent past, he should go. Live by the sword, get asked to resign because of the sword.
> Considering the frankly extremely low percentage of female contributors
That low number of female contributors is at least in part due to the impression people have of working in these areas. Allowing him to continue to alienate people works against efforts to rectify that impression (and where it is true rather than just an impression, work to fix the behaviours that are causing the problem).
> all of the anecdotes of actual bad behaviour that seem to come up are from about two decades ago
Perhaps most, but not all. I've definitely seen some more recent claims, and they were mentioned before this particular episode. They weren't as egregious as the earlier behaviour so he was at least controlling/curbing/changing the creepy behaviour for which I suppose there should be some credit, and there is definitely some curious timing wrt MIT and the Epstein contributions so there is presumably a bit of "throw him under the bus as a distraction" going on, meaning this is a case with significant grey areas, but I think painting him as an entirely innocent victim is a step too far.
Let's be fair handed: if we wouldn't accept it from a politician or other celebrity, we shouldn't accept it from someone whose other ideas we agree with either.
If I save a hundred lives as a doctor and then murder one person, does the calculus go in my favor?
It can be. A sharpshooter killing a terrorist and saving 100 lives would be lauded as a hero.
I'm just asking. I got that feeling reading your comment. I get that feeling reading a lot of comments here. I could be wrong.
As a reminder, he has been accused, by several independent parties, of, among other things:
-Asking female coworkers to lay down topless on a mattress in his office.
-Threatening a colleague to kill himself if he/she didn't go on a date with him.
-Posting up signs in his workplace along the lines of "Knight for Justice (Also: Hot Ladies)".
Again, if you save a bunch of lives, but then murder someone in cold blood, does the fact that you saved way more than you murdered mean that society ought to look past the murder? After all, your net contribution is very positive!
Even projects under the gnu.org umbrella probably don’t interact that much with RMS, let alone have discouraging interaction.
I have no dog in this fight but have a bias for factual discussions
I agree in principle, but I think there's lots of good arguments against it as well.
More importantly than the question of whether it's legal, I'm amazed that people can still see themselves as "the good ones" after all the things they do to their fellow humans.
* In German, we use the word "Meinungsfreiheit", which literally translates to "Freedom of Opinion", not "Free Speech", so yes, technically speaking, we don't have free speech; only the right to express our opinions.
A nice side effect of criminalizing defamation would be that the enforcment would be up to the state. When it is a civil affair only rich people can defend themselves.
I would be dollars to doughnuts that the author of that site and the editors of that "wiki" have made or thought worse things at some point, but because they have not reached a certain level of celebrity, there's no dossier on them. It's truly ridiculous to me the amount of effort spent on trying to claw others down.
I accept that inequality exists and perhaps RMS has some awful opinions, but if that's the case then just ignore him.
If there are people who are choosing to make it incumbent upon themselves to take down these "problematic" individuals, then it must be because they think that all of the systems that have allowed a person to continue to exist despite those opinions must be unreliable in adequately judging them. If that's the case, then wouldn't it be more practical to fix the endemic problem rather than destroy a single person? I'm guessing that the latter is just easier to do and more profitable as well. You gain "credibility" by attacking someone else, so it's difficult to believe that they are doing it for altruistic means.
All in all, I'm pretty sick of this nonsense. A world where everyone is constantly being watched by eachother and reported on is already too authoritarian for me to want to continue living in, not to mention the already authoritarian governments doing the same.
> I would be dollars to doughnuts that the author of that site and the editors of that "wiki" have made or thought worse things at some point, but because they have not reached a certain level of celebrity, there's no dossier on them. It's truly ridiculous to me the amount of effort spent on trying to claw others down.
"With great power, comes great responsibility." When operating in contexts where you have a lot of power, one has to be more careful with their words and actions. If he had voiced that opinion to a friend of his, no one would have complained. But voicing his opinion minimizing rape on a university mailing list has direct negative effects for a lot of people.
Also, some people do listen, apologize, and put in the work to learn.
> I accept that inequality exists and perhaps RMS has some awful opinions, but if that's the case then just ignore him.
The problem is that other people don't just ignore him. By ignoring his harmful behaviour, we let his negative impact spread further as others repeat his misogynistic ideas.
> A world where everyone is constantly being watched by eachother and reported on is already too authoritarian for me to want to continue living in
I'm sorry and hope you find a way to continue living in this world. And I agree strongly about authoritarian governments.
I don't really think calling out a post on a large mailing list counts as "everyone is constantly being watched by each other" though.
I can find nothing that meets this criteria in the above links. Do you have an unusual definition of "misogynistic", were you being rhetorical or do you have another source?
That very mailing list was about to arbitrarily accuse a dead innocent man of a crime to help provide cover for actual criminals still walking the halls at MIT.
This charade around Stallman is an injustice against Epstein's victims, the decent people at MIT, and Minsky.
I feel like that is pretty sensationalized. The argument being made there is that regular birth is a common thing, and should be left off the list unless it is something out of the ordinary.
For the actual background on the current chain of events at MIT:
https://sterling-archermedes.github.io/index.html
For earlier allegations, take the original sources including quotes and references:
https://stallman.org/archives/2006-mar-jun.html
(note: there are many more archives. This also gives you an idea of the effort it must have taken to find those few "damning" posts, and to skew those out of context)
That's not really feminist, isn't it?
> • Co-Principle Investigator for a U.S. Department of Defense SBIR Phase II research contract, prototyping autonomous ground vehicle (AGV) with collection system.
And if you get alienated from a career path because of one bad professor, go and find something else that you want so badly that you are willing to tough it out. Otherwise you will always blame your professional success limits on people not supporting you enough, or cracking an off-color joke or two or microaggressions. Do you honestly expect to never have to deal with a problem boss/coworkers/customer in a super-competitive private sector job? Don't tell me nurses and schoolteachers never have to deal with someone like RMS or worse. And sure, some degree of bad behavior should have proportional consequences, but do we hear about how women get alienated from these professions en masse?
[citation needed]