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.