Justice for Dr. Richard Matthew Stallman | Hacker News Reader

Justice for Dr. Richard Matthew Stallman

jorgemorais.gitlab.io

57 pointsJDW102330 comments

Justice begins with truth.

1. He only has honorary doctorates. If you wouldn't say "Dr. Zuckerberg," don't say "Dr. Stallman." (Meanwhile, Dr. Bill Cosby has an earned doctorate!)

2. Related to the previous point, his "position" at MIT was an office with a mattress, thanks to having influential friends in the faculty there. He was not paid by MIT, he had no teaching role at MIT, and he was part of no MIT research projects.

3. Even if every error printed by the media was corrected, there is - and has been for years - significant dissatisfaction with him at MIT, within the FSF, within the GNU Project, and within the free software community at large.

4. Stallman continues to be welcome to debate the truth. It's a valuable part of a free society. What MIT and the free software community has made clear is that he is not welcome to debate the truth and serve as a representative of MIT and of the free software community. MIT gained nothing direct from his affiliation as unpaid research staff assigned to no research projects; all they gained was an association with his reputation. As soon as that becomes a negative association, there's no rational reason to keep it. Similarly, the free software community has argued for the removal of Stallman from his leadership position because they've seen that he prioritizes his interest in debating about sexual norms over his interest in leading and growing the free software community. (See, for instance, http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2019/10/15/fsf-rms.html .)

It is true that the media flare-up about Stallman's Minsky/Epstein commentary was the immediate political motivation for him leaving his MIT affiliation (since the most active benefit of his affiliation was his presence on the CSAIL general mailing list where he made this comments, and there has been general displeasure at his presence there for well over a decade) and his FSF role. But I'm not sure what the benefit to the world is to re-appoint him to his FSF role only to "re-try" him for his actual failure to do his work - especially when so many GNU projects seem on the verge of forking.

As a member of the "free software community" I take issue with your speaking on my behalf.

And I have communicated with various others in our community who feel differently from how you've painted us with such broad strokes.

They said there has been significant dissatisfaction, not every person who uses free software is dissatisfied.

No, he said,

>What MIT and the free software community has made clear is that he is not welcome to debate the truth and serve as a representative of MIT and of the free software community.

I don't remember a great groundswell of anti-RMS statements from the FSF community. In fact, when Ludovic the guix maintainer brought it up on the gnu guix mailing list, Ludovic had to start banning people and removing list messages because so many people in the community loudly disagreed with him.

The irony is the FSF has a censorship problem, and people who support RMS are among those being censored.

https://danielpocock.com/where-do-censored-developers-go/

> 3. Even if every error printed by the media was corrected

That would be a huge step, and not some minor detail as you're trying to frame it.

And they were not 'errors' - his statements were quite deliberately misrepresented. If I, a non-native speaker, can understand what he wrote, then native-speaker journalists should not be presumed to be so incompetent, especially since they did not correct their stories and headlines once informed of the 'errors'.

It would be a huge step, and it would be worth doing, because the truth is important - but it would not be a reason to reinstate him at MIT or at the FSF, and it would not change the ongoing conversations within the GNU project about GNU leadership.

It doesn't make sense to remove someone from a position because of a few things they said. Rather, we should evaluate the individual as a whole. Is he a good person or a bad person? Is he effective or inneffective? Based on everything I read about Stallman so far over the years, I'd say he is truly decent human being and an extremely effective leader. He is almost certainly a better person than all of the self-righteous, hypocritical bureaucrats who are now trying to take him down who never did anything altruistic their entire self-centered lives.

IMO, if Stallman didn't do any crime himself, he can say whatever the heck he wants about anything. People need to toughen up and stop being such hypocrites. We all have a brain between our ears; how about we start using it to decide for ourselves if some celebrity or politician is right or wrong instead of trying to censor them. Just because they're famous doesn't mean they're right and it doesn't mean you have to agree with them.

Sure, that seems like a much more reasonable basis for this discussion.

There has been very strong consensus at MIT for decades that he's not a decent human being and he himself tries to take down people who are doing altruistic things but dare to host their volunteer signup form on Google Forms. I genuinely don't know what the argument for reinstating his MIT position is.

The internal politics of GNU have been awful for decades too, largely due to RMS, and I know plenty of free software folks (including a few folks formerly associated with FSF - i.e., true believers in the cause that RMS managed to deconvert) who think his leadership is ineffective, harmful, or both. So, if there's a claim that he's a good leader for the FSF and for GNU, that seems like something we can have a direct, factual debate on.

"RMS didn't make the statements about Epstein that the media claimed he said, therefore he's a qualified and effective leader of the free software movement" is fallacious. "The media attacked him unfairly, so he needs his old job back to get back at them regardless of his fitness for the job" isn't justice, just revenge.

This post discusses 'terminological precision' and tries to clarify 'mischaracterisations', which is fair enough, but fails its own litmus test by using terms like 'hate fest' and 'witch hunt'.

Stallman’s experience with the online outrage mob is rather typical of the way they operate. The authors comments about the witch hunt were very on point. Defending the target does make you a target yourself. This sort of thing happens to people all the time, the only difference about this case is that RMS has enough supporters out there that some of them will actually speak in his defence.

The real problem we have as a society is that this sort of puritanical orthodoxy is becoming more common place. The way this intolerance shuts down a lot of inquiry and honest discussion seems obvious to me, and the way sinners are identified and publicly ruined is just another natural consequence of this system of values. A person is expected to have lived their whole life in perfect conformance to the orthodoxy. Any transgression, past or present, warrants complete exile from society, and any association with or defence of such a sinner warrants the same.

The thing about all this is, when you run a non-profit organization, the things you say is seen to represent that organization whether you want them to or not especially when you're a fairly well known person like RMS. Watching the things you say is part of the job unless you want it reflecting badly on your organization. In the end, if the FSF and GNU don't feel like the things RMS says should represent them, then that's just how it goes. It's too bad, but when you become an adult, you become responsible for the things you say and the consequences that come of them.

Are you also responsible for the deliberate misrepresentation of the things you say?

Regardless, it’s problematic when you also have to be responsible for things you didn’t actually say.

But that's also part of the job. It's certainly unfortunate and unfair, but it's not more unfair for him than any other public figure. That's why a qualified leader needs to be careful with words and so far above reproach that a) it's hard to accidentally mischaracterize what you say b) if someone does, it seems out of character with what you actually believe.

Deliberately making public statements about controversial topics that have nothing to do with your leadership role is certainly your right, but it's a strategically risky move. It's like "defensive driving" - whether or not it's illegal to brake check a driver behind you, it's definitely a bad idea.

RMS and the free software movement would both have been better off if he'd stepped into an internal technical leadership role and found someone else to take on the advocacy / moral leadership / public speaking role. It would have been a better use of his talents (and honestly it might have left fewer GNU maintainers bitter about how he isn't actually writing very much code anymore but still tries to overrule decisions every so often).

It's also part of the job of a journalist to not deceive their readers. But I guess we're going to let that slide, and demand public figures speak in such a way that is impossible to misrepresent or take wrongly out of context. Assuming that's even possible...

> But I guess we're going to let that slide, and demand public figures speak in such a way that is impossible to misrepresent or take wrongly out of context. Assuming that's even possible...

That is literally the job description, yes.

Sure, you will sometimes fail at it. Sure, I will sometimes write bugs in my code. If I deliberately write code without tests and ignore code review and cause problems in production, my employer would be justified in firing me - not because I wrote bugs, everyone writes bugs sometimes, but because I made no effort to avoid them. Similarly, the occasional gaffe is understandable, but using your official work email address to talk at length on irrelevant subjects in ways that are easy to misinterpret is being deliberately irresponsible.

You should hold journalists accountable for telling wrong stories, but you should also expect that journalists, too, will get things wrong sometime. The robustness principle indicates that you'll have a better time in practice being careful and precise about what you say than having high expectations about how others interpret it.

Headline news: geofft@HN states, "I deliberately write code without tests and ignore code review and cause problems in production" and goes on to say "my employer would be justified in firing me" - - vice.com

That's fine, because such a story is implausible to anyone who knows me or has heard of me. Go ahead and publish it. I support your right to free speech. Do you?

(Also, my job is technical and not PR, and I have been arguing consistently that both RMS and the free software movement would have been better off if he had made himself a role that was primarily technical and not PR.)

> Go ahead and publish it. I support your right to free speech. Do you?

Even free-speech extremists such as myself and the US Supreme Court don't support libel.

I've long suspected that people who virtue signal about free speech don't actually believe in it nearly as much as the people who genuinely have something to say.

And now you have proof; The "it's free as in speech" FSF has fired their founder for something he said.

"But I guess we're going to let that slide": I hope you realize that, with that phrase, you are exactly doing to geofft what you complain about the journalists doing - you're distorting his words to make them say something that they didn't say.

When I was going through school, we spent a bunch of time specifically on communicating with the press and the public. I was always taught to be very careful about what you put into a press release as it's expected the press will take everything you say will be taken and used out of context. When you give an interview or are using a method of communication that could become public you stick to the facts on the press release or whatever official speaking points you have and leave it at that because the press will take everything you say and spin it out of context. This was in relation to disclosing data and information to the public about scientific findings but the premise is the same for other public communication.

Stallman wasn't making a press release. He was defending a dead friend on an internal mailing list.

Even if I may disagree with some of his opinions, that does not mean that I disagree with all of them. But whether I agree with it or not is not the point. Rather, is that you should not try to argue about sexual norms when trying to discuss free software instead; on your personal website you can discuss whatever you want whether I agree or not.

"...he prioritizes his interest in debating about sexual norms over his interest in leading and growing the free software community." Whether or not it is true, it would seem to me that, debates about sexual norms are off of the topic of the discussion of free software, and should be kept out of their mailing lists (but he can post it on his own personal general-purpose mailing lists if he has opinion of it, but not the one for MIT or FSF, please). But if he has something to say about free software then he should say.

>Some excerpts from many years ago did defend the alleged liberty of children to have sex – even with adults – “if the child accepted it”. For example, in 2003 Stallman wrote

>>"I think that everyone age 14 or above ought to take part in sex, though not indiscriminately. (Some people are ready earlier.)"

>In 2006 he was skeptical of the claim that “voluntary” pedophilia harmed children. He wrote something similar in January 2013, but within limits.

>This author opposes such an opinion! However, Stallman later changed his mind and, on 14 September 2019, (belatedly) retracted it.

YIKES. I hadn't even heard that part. Convenient timing to suddenly change his views on the subject.

Seriously, if a young lady one third your age, who you have never met before, in the retinue of a ostentatiously wealthy guy, would present herself to you for sex, and you don’t question the circumstances you are willfully ignoring a situation that’s likely illegal. Stallman was defending the indefensible here.

Where was that young lady's parents? Do you typically let your underage daughter travel with a playboy billionaire for the stated purpose of giving massages to his clients?

How is that better? Isn't your moral obligation to denounce that situation?

Her father was directly responsible for her situation, being her legal guardian. RMS is not responsible for her situation at all and has a right to have his opinion about it.

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