Ask HN: Why is news of Richard Stallman being suppressed?

8 points·lettergram··5 comments

I generally understand political stuff being shut down, but Stallman is arguably one of the founders of "hacker" culture. Seems a bit off that news of him stepping down from GNU would be off the front page.

You can see yourself:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=last24h&page=0&prefix=true&query=gnu&sort=byPopularity&type=story

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The main thread appears to be flamewar-killed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21103133

There is also doubt that it is an authentic message.

It's been one of the most commented articles already, so it's not that it's forbidden to talk about. There's just not much point having the same discussion again when he steps down from another similar position.

It was on the front page for quite a while. But more importantly, HN was really founded as a place for folks interested in startups rather than open source, and I suspect most folks here find a lot of the open source folks to be kind of cringeworthy in general. E.g. unlike Slashdot readers, I doubt most people here really want to be associated with folks like ESR or RMS.

I probably should point out that the open-source community has always been and still is fully welcome here. HN is large, it contains multitudes.

Fair. I didn't mean to disparage open source in general. My issue is that I think there are a bunch of positions that certain prominent open source folks have taken that, if you were to advocate for them in the workplace, would likely trigger a discrimination lawsuit.

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