I have a signed copy of this. I love it. Free Software, Free Society was maybe the most important book I read in college.
I wish RMS didn't have the issues around women that he does, but I immensely venerate his thinking on software freedom.
I wish RMS didn't have the issues around women that he does, but I immensely venerate his thinking on software freedom.
RMS has lots of enemies, and most of the stuff you read about him is fabricated. You start with a grain of truth, mix in a few half-truths, add a bold-faced lie, and you've got a great smear.
I mean, he doesn't have the best human interface, but people take that, and use that as the basis of rumors to destroy him.
Read about his departure from MIT/FSF. Compare what he wrote to what he was accused of writing.
The GP said, "I wish RMS didn't have the issues around women that he does"
He does have sexist problems and has as long as I've known him (late 70s). We have been on again / off again friends over the decades, but never enemies so no reason to fabricate anything.
As you say he has other issues both good and bad; this comment is specifically about the one issue.
"Richard Stallman resigns from FSF, MIT after defending child rape" - OSNews
Seriously. Yes, he's awkward around women, and has sometimes hit on women in sometimes cringeworthy ways. He's also awkward around men, for that reason. There's a difference like night and day between the actual issues, which are about on-par for much of the population, and what's reported. Heck, I'd say that's about on-par for about half of the MIT student body back when it was a genuine nerd school rather than the "#1 branded university in the world."
But he knows that no means no, he doesn't mean harm, and he doesn't abuse his power.
And compare the treatment he gets to other people in position of power. Compare that to the MANY MIT faculty who DO use power dynamics to abuse female students, and who DID fly to Epstein's island to party. Heck, compare that to executives and politicians, or, well, many others in positions of power. You're not going to convince me Stallman is worse than the median there, or even the 25th percentile. It's just that one group is politically savvy, and the other, socially awkward.
And this is exactly how you get a plausible smear. You start with a smaller issue, and you twist and exaggerate it until you have a pedophile-rapist. And yes, it was intentional.
EDIT: Your other comment makes me thing you're 100% serious about this. The fuck? We need to smear him because he's an awkward nerd? An awkward person is not inherently harmful simply for being awkward. What harm has he "continually done" to deserve this?
You're making an is-ought distinction. Of course we should not believe serious accusations against someone until they can back up their claims -- in an ideal world. In the real world, standards of evidence are routinely weaponized against decent people by assholes. Everybody knows that Trump has colluded with Russia, but no one can make anything stick.
As another example, there is a small but growing movement to weaken the standards of evidence for rape and sexual assault. These crimes are notoriously difficult to get evidence for that meets the burden of proof, and the result is a very low conviction rape and active harm to women and society by rapists on the loose. I find it increasingly hard to challenge this argument except on theoretical or procedural grounds, and some countries -- such as Spain, which has special violence against women tribunals where the burden of proof is essentially on the accused to prove innocence -- have already followed through with this idea in their laws.
> What harm has he "continually done" to deserve this?
Numerous women have come forward with stories about being sexually harassed by Stallman over the years. He creates what is known in law as a hostile work environment. Women are afraid to work with him because they might be inappropriately propositioned, and risk consequences if they turned him down. (Stallman was "protected" by people in the MIT community, including Marvin Minsky.) And of course, he actually did advocate for legalization of child rape earlier in his career.
> Numerous women have come forward with stories about being sexually harassed by Stallman over the years.
Sources? Not trying to be dismissive, but I can't find any on DDG or Google.
> And of course, he actually did advocate for legalization of child rape earlier in his career.
He never did that. He advocated for child consent. You may think I'm nitpicking but it's an important distinction. Child rape colloquially means unconsentual / forced sex, but technically means any sex since children cannot legally consent. If you say he defends child rape you are colloquially saying he defends unconsentual sex, when he never did such a thing.
No such thing. Children cannot legally consent to sexual activity because they cannot meaningfully consent to it in the moral sense, either. All sexual activity between an adult and a child is an abuse of the power dynamic between adults and children, and causes lasting psychological if not physical harm to the child.
Therefore, all sexual activity between an adult and a child is rape.
Therefore, Stallman is/was an apologist for child rape.
That is very jurisdiction-specific / cultural-specific position. In my home country, there is clear legal disctinction between child rape (non-consensual sex with child) and child sex abuse (consensual sex with child).
I would be surprised if the 'age-of-consent' laws (the age limit name is also cultural specific, here it is 'age-of-legal-competence') were generally motivated by legal fiction about children unable to give consent. That seems to me more like ex-post rationalization of such laws. IMHO these laws just codify social mores without need of specific rationalization (like incest laws).
What's curious is:
1) Going against social mores tends to cause psychological harm
2) Looking across history, plenty of cultures broke those mores without psychological harm
That's not just sexual mores. All sorts of things. Corporal punishment is harmful to kids in Western Culture, but not harmful to kids in many other cultures worldwide (yes, with good evidence).
The evidence for what constitutes healthy person-person relationships is mostly culturally-situated, whether that's parent-child, sibling, friends, work environment, or otherwise. The same behavior which might be considered a child abusing their parent in one country might be considered the parent abusing the child in another (and lead to actual psychological harm for the abused party).
It's helpful to look at mores across cultures and history to see which things are fundamental to humans, and which are culturally-situated. Of course, that doesn't make breaking culturally-situated norms okay -- it still causes psychological harm.
What is more problematic is that we can't talk about this in more than abstracts. I could pick dozens of concrete examples, and if I raised them in a public forum, my career would be dead.
In my opinion, what he actually said on the listserv is very benign compared to the consequences he faced for it. If that is the whole story, he was treated unfairly.
Here's another part of the story http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2019/10/15/fsf-rms.html
In some ways, that made him less effective as a free software advocate, as did many of his other more controversial views on just about every topic. In others, that made him more honest.
That's not what's being reported, though.
I liked this line:
"The message of universal software freedom is a radical cause; it's basically impossible for one individual to effectively push forward two unrelated controversial agendas at once."
Were there people who didn't care about the issue at hand but just wanted him to go for other reasons who opportunistically seized upon the issue to finally rid themselves of the troublesome monk? Of course, and I have some particular people in mind. But the converse is also very much true. RMS is a complex person and you cannot pull but one thread from the fabric.
> And compare the treatment he gets to other people in position of power.
That's simply whataboutism, not an argument. The rms issue is the rms issue. I would be delighted if you worked on some of the other injustices in the world as well.
RMS has suffered a crippling emotional blow but he will get back on his feet. In these regards rms is hardly unique: he grew up in a community of people very much like him, many of whom routinely make far more shocking statements than he ever did. Leaving that environment for Harvard, and later MIT demonstrated and developed in him an ability to learn, which few apparently can see (and which even fewer possess themselves).
My experience with people going after corruption (n>3):
No one is perfect. Everyone breaks some laws, does something taboo, holds some controversial view, or does something improper. If you're going after power structures, they'll take that and pull on it to destroy you unless you back down.
This was done to an extreme in Communist regimes. For the most part, people didn't go to prison for criticizing the government. People who criticized the government went to prison for some other, complete inane but technically correct reason.
For a public examples, See Hunter Biden. Compare to Donald Trump. Yes, there appears to be corruption with Hunter. No, it's not out-of-mainstream for DC. Yes, it's greater than Trump's family. Only Biden has the resources to defend himself -- half the country is supporting him. Unless you're a presidential candidate, something like that WILL take you down.
Allowing that to work really benefits the power structures who can do PR and hire investigators. And it really harms anyone out of the mainstream or with unpopular views, where a simple cancel culture can kill your career.
None of those people should remain in positions of power, including faculty positions at MIT. The fact that RMS finally got consequences for the behavior we're discussing is good; the fact that the others didn't is bad; the fix is to apply consequences to the places where they're deserved but missing, not reverse some just deserts that were finally given.
Given that so few people do this (in general, not just in regards to RMS), A smear is just as bad for PR as a non-smear, so it makes sense that organizations would want to limit collateral damage ASAP.
Median Indians, Africans, Chinese, Arabs, and Eastern Europeans all feel "creepy" to American women (at least until they learn the differences in body language, communication patterns, and so on). Indeed, they feel creepy to each other. For that matter, lawyers, engineers, and marketing people all feel "creepy" to each other until they build those cultural bridges.
Tell me, why don't you go and fight someone whose actions endanger women and children? Maybe go after the rich friends of sleazy playboy Epstein, who was very charming with the ladies and ran a criminal brothel. Or go after the prophet who married girls as young as seven and wrote about that in a holy book followed dogmatically by a major religion. Or go and protest actual child labor and marriage in Nigeria. And when i mean "go" and don't mean "talk more" i mean please go.
And take your agenda with you. Your "more welcoming to women" is nothing but some self-absorbed narcissism, you are like a chauvinistic minstrel knight, who is claiming to make the road safe for the weak sex by the might of your sword, yet does nothing but bicker and bitch about your chosen enemy, the "creepy nerd who voiced opinions you don't agree with" - oh what heroic deeds you do. Such macho behavior would not even impresses some giggling girls of first semester gender studies, and it will surly not impress the honorable ladies of the community, who wrote code that sent people to space, power aircraft carriers, nuclear plants and the internet, who followed for generations in the footsteps of women like Rear Admiral Dr Grace "Grandma Cobol" Hopper. They neither need, nor want your twitter drama style vigilante protectionism.
Oh and on your way out, take that "smearing people for great justice" and "the accused should prove innocence" garbage you spouted in your comments here out with you. You overstepped, you are far out of line, and your opinions don't speak well for the community, so by your own logic, get out! Am i being clear? You are done, you are canceled, you f'd up and are not welcome anymore.
So say, how does it feel, when people go after you for some stupid thing you said?
Again, i am not defending rms opinion about a topic of your choice, my point is: every community the SJW enter with their agenda of what they say will bring positive change long term turns into a toxic swamp of social drama. They are a splinter group of totalitarian socialists, believing to mold the people into ideal humans by means of social pressure, and are willing to harasse or even terrorize people, while demanding every aspect of society must follow their orthodox philosophy, because only then they can get rid of all the degenerates. I sure don't want those radicals as leadership, either. I see them as a danger to the very foundations of democracy and freedom. But they are very successful because they imagine themselves as the righteous guardians of morality and grant immediate feelings of power and social cohesion when they vigilante mob someone.
So tell me, who should lead the community? Because for me it looks a lot like it is soon going to be a duma selected to match quotas of race, age, gender and sexuality, but limited to a strict and orthodox set of believes not about the communal subject matter, but about everything else. This duma will be plagued by constant infighting, bickering, and their tries to socially assassinated each other, like a bunch of crabs in a barrel. They will focus not on source-code but on code-of-conduct, not on merit in the subject-matter but on the flaws of the person. They will establish no inclusive infrastructure, but systematic precedence for canceling access, denying bug reports and even merge requests because of things like arbitrary twitter drama. For this astonishing communal work they will be paid by the corporations that wish for nothing more then to embrace and expand the community, throwing around buzzwords like welcoming, diverse and inclusive to justify such involvement. How is it a welcoming community that tells people that their technological and intellectual commitment is not welcome, because their opinion on an unrelated matter in a different context is not in line? These very corporations already try to rebrand "free and open source" as the feature-incomplete version of "enterprise edition" and their next step is to exploit: participating in such communities will become a job requirement: you want to be a programmer? work for free, prove you not only have technical skill but can stay in line in behavior and opinion, and then we will maybe see about some gig work. It is young adults, barely legal, who are most vulnerable to such promises and they will comply willingly.
He's a strange man, but the beauty of free software is that you can be free to only view a man or woman as the sum of their code if you choose to.
However, (according to Bradley Kuhn, who was a FSF board member at the time) his removal from the FSF was a long time coming even without that incident, though that wasn't obvious from the outside.
Bradley Kuhn was able to write the sentence "In fact, RMS' views and statements posted on stallman.org about sexual morality escalated for the worse over the last few years" with each word linked to a separate post from RMS, spread from 2016 to 2019. Perhaps it's just my reading of them, but your comments give the sense that his defense of Minsky was the only wrong thing he said. That's its own half-truth on your part, there's plenty more that he's been saying for years.