You are okay forgiving people as long as their "net impact" is positive? Is it okay for someone to murder a person if they saved more than one life before ?
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.
Armies don't have much issue with that ethical question.
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.
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.