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At what point is your work no longer your own? FSF wouldn't exist without Stallman's vision and subsequent decades of tireless effort. Who gets to decide that Stallman no longer deserves stewardship over his own life's work because of a poster and some tired anecdote about plants?

At the end of the day, the FSF board had to decide what they wanted to do, either a) let RMS continue to do his usual thing without repercussions and become a less-relevant organization that people don't take seriously, or b) clean house and maintain some level of trust. Presumably they also considered a c) let RMS continue to do his thing and hope that there's no fallout. But I guess they considered (c) wasn't realistic, didn't want (a), and decided on (b).

No one is saying that RMS's work with GNU or the FSF is somehow invalidated. He's done some absolutely fantastic and amazing work, and I honestly do believe that, without him, we are actually losing something valuable. But we're also losing some bad stuff too. My feeling is that the bad stuff outweighs further good that he could do, but of course that's open for debate.

> ... because of a poster and some tired anecdote about plants?

Deliberately minimizing and dismissing the allegations against RMS is a bad-faith way to push forward your argument. Please don't do that here.

What makes it bad faith? Read through this thread. There's a lot of hearsay and misrepresentation and obviously some people just plain uncomfortable with RMS's persona regardless of what he did or didn't say.

And that's why I think this argument:

> a) let RMS continue to do his usual thing without repercussions and become a less-relevant organization that people don't take seriously

doesn't hold any water. First of all, as a lay person, I don't take the FSF seriously anymore because of this move. How can an organization defend our liberties when it's not willing to stand up to a witch-hunt targeting it's founding member? Second and more importantly, I think the people who do matter don't care: they have the reference point to know that this culture shift is fleeting and that, more importantly, FSF wouldn't even exist without someone who stubbornly, aggressively defends digital civil liberties. You can't _have_ the FSF without a Stallman behind it, and my bet would be this is the start of the FSF's slow fade into obscurity.

> First of all, as a lay person, I don't take the FSF seriously anymore because of this move.

I get that, but you're just one person (as am I). If we take all of the people who previously had some respect for the FSF, my guess would be that more than half of them will continue to respect them after this, or actually respect them more (as I will). If all of this had come to light and the FSF have done nothing, I'd respect them less and take them less seriously. I suspect that's true for a lot of other people as well.

Of course, I don't know this for sure, it's just what I think. But that's all we're doing here anyway: just throwing around our opinions.

> the problem isn't that he's unable to understand, the problem is that he's unwilling to

This is a common line used to attack non-neurotypical people (and not only!). They have not considered the possibilities that their explanations or arguments are weak however.

Or, the simpler explanation, given that MJG has known RMS for many, many years, and had interacted with him often, is that his assessment is actually correct.

But still, regardless: assuming all the allegations dredged up about him over the past couple weeks is true, do you actually believe it's ok for him to behave that way? If so, then we should just stop discussing this, because it's not going to be productive. If not, then what would you suggest instead? I presume you'd suggest something less harsh than pressuring him to step down from his leadership roles. But what exactly is there that we can do to improve his behavior, after decades of his lack of desire to change? Would you be fine telling women who have to interact with him that they just have to deal with his harassing behavior? I certainly wouldn't be.

> If your assistant also takes a look at your office (given to you as a favor by a respected educational institution) and tells you that "Knight of Hot Ladies" is not appropriate, then you take it down

The top-posted article/parent says this is exactly what happened to the Hot Ladies remark though! Someone else wrote it on his door, took a picture, and it was taken down!

Yet here you are referencing it as if it was something RMS actually did. How many other lies are being spread and believed due to the game of twitter telephone being played here?

We have one person (this article) claiming this, and others claiming RMS put it there. I'm not sure who to believe, but given the other allegations, it doesn't seem out of character.

But ok, let's assume for a second that the article is telling the truth, and that someone put that there to mess with RMS, and it was promptly taken down, unfortunately too late to prevent a photo getting taken.

So what? How does that invalidate all the other bad stuff RMS has done?

Allow me to substitute autism for a different handicap and see if you still agree:

If you have a condition where you have trouble not swearing, while also running an influential organization and acting as its figurehead, you need to be able to mitigate these issues. If this means you have an assistant who you run emails by before sending them, so be it. If female colleagues are putting plants in their offices because they know you don't like plants and it will deter you from visiting them, you either need to recognize that on your own and do something about it, or allow a trusted someone to help you fix the situation. tourettes isn't an excuse for bad behavior. It can explain some bad behavior, but that bad behavior cannot continue over decades; it must be dealt with in some manner.

Yes, I absolutely still agree. A mental illness does not absolve you of responsibility for your actions. If someone is a well-known member of some community and is in a position of power and influence, and they have a condition where they have trouble not swearing, I would think that having someone (without that condition) vet their public communications before sending them out would be a minimum logical, smart thing to do.

I think your analogy is a little bit fallacious, though. We're not talking about a verbal tic here; we're talking about actual actions that make women feel unsafe in his presence.

Put another way, I would be far far more comfortable telling someone "hey, yeah, he has a verbal tic that makes him say 'fuck' a lot; it's weird, but just ignore it" than I would be telling a woman, "hey, yeah, he's [something] and that makes him inappropriately hit on you all the time in situations where he has power over you; it's weird, but just ignore it". Yeah... nope.

For what it's worth, since anyone can predict what Matthew Garrett's opinion on this was going to be, it is in the Bayesian sense very weak evidence for anything.

This is a perfect example of an ad hominem attack which adds little to the discourse: https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/ad-hominem

The comment I was replying to was also using the fact that mjg is a specific person who knew Stallman as a reason they are credible. When the thing being discussed is how reliable someone is at conveying private information they have, rather than them making some argument devoid of experience, ad hom is not a fallacy.

That’s not how your comment reads. It reads as “well, we know how he feels, so keep that in mind.” Which, is an ad hominem attack.

If you didn’t mean it that way, than please consider that your word choices come across as mocking, which changes the received meaning.

It absolutely is an ad hom, I'm just claiming that that is not a fallacy in this case, since the trustworthiness or bias of the dude is the thing we are discussing. Ad hom isn't always a fallacy. Nobody has even discussed any arguments coming from mjg, they're just chalking him up on a tally of who is on whose side. And I think the dude is super biased, and that whose side he is on isn't evidence of anything since he picks sides based on ideology, not on a case-by-case basis.

If you have cancer, you need to mitigate these issues. Cancer is no excuse for dying…

Yes – autism is a perfect explanation for behavior not following typical social norms. That's more or less exactly the core of this disability.

From my point of view RMS really tackles his disability as far as he can: Announces his preferences, choosing interaction forms appropriate to him (email), openly telling that he'll refrain from group discussion…

Besides that I still don't see, where RMS really crossed the lines which requires actions to actually destroy his life. In the same time someone like Trump permanently crosses really vital red lines in all aspects… every… fucking… day…

> I cannot believe people keep defending him given the accounts of what he's actually done (assuming you believe the accounts). What about the women who have been creeped out or harassed by him, or who have left the field because of him? Don't they get any consideration?

No, because obviously, his contributions to free software are more important then him making women uncomfortable in their workplaces/places of study/conferences. /snark

If he had the capacity to comprehend any of this he wouldn't be the sort of person who talked about the Knight of Hot Ladies at work. Unless Garrett somehow turned out to be a some kind of medical expert, his opinion on Stallman is about valid as Stallman's on anyone else.

You don't have to be a doctor to diagnose asshole behavior.

But you do to judge what people with any given type of mental health issue can and cannot do.

I think that's fair, but I think there are also a lot of people in this discussion who reject out of hand the idea of: "this person shouldn't ever be in a position of authority over people because their mental health issues cause them to act around those people in ways that end up being construed as inappropriate at best, and actively making people feel unsafe at worst".

A handicap might mean that you just can't do certain things. No, it's not fair, but it's not like we expect the a quadriplegic person to be a long-distance runner... at least not with the medical technology available to us today. I hear a lot of rhetoric (that I agree with) around how a mental illness should be treated just like any other illness and not stigmatized as something to be embarrassed about. But it goes both ways: if a mental illness is just like any other illness (or handicap), then it's perfectly possible that some mental illnesses might mean that some activities aren't feasible, at least not until we understand them well enough to provide better treatments.

Even if that's the case, so what? People seem to have been trying to help RMS fix his behavior for decades, and he hasn't. It doesn't matter if that behavior stems from a mental health issue or just him being an asshole. The behavior needs to stop. Ejecting him from MIT, the FSF, and the GNU Project are certainly drastic actions to remove him from places where he can do harm, but at some point, after literally decades, maybe you just give up on trying to change or moderate someone, and get them out of your life.