Why wouldn't Guix just leave the RMS's GNU Project then?
GNU is a collaboration of free software projects that was started and is lead by Richard Stallman. Remove the leader, and what's left is just a collection of projects sharing the GNU brand. And it looks to me that this is what the Guix maintainers are trying to do: reduce the GNU project to a mere formality (participation in it would mean no more than a simple declaration of support for Free software), keep the GNU brand, position Guix as THE GNU operating system.
I disagree with the suggestion that the group of people under discussion — who aim to distance themselves from RMS — want to "reduce the GNU project to a mere formality".
I think it's the opposite: that those people want to embolden GNU and strengthen the bonds between the various GNU softwares to create a first-class operating system made of free software, the GNU way. They ended their association with Stallman but continued with GNU because they believe in its goals. One could even say they did it because they believe that GNU is important.
It's been a very long time since RMS was able to marshall a group of people to work toward that goal. The maintainers of Guix and the other signatories of the statement against Stallman's leadership are doing that very thing.
The proof is in the pudding: the latest Guix release had 201 contributors. I think that's a lot.
GNU is internally managed on a private mailing list. Guix and other GNU maintainers coming out against Stallman may have been surprising to those who aren't privy to that list, but for the rest of us, it has been a long time coming.
For a long time, key GNU projects have either effectively quit GNU or, with great effort, wrested authority away from RMS because what goes on "behind the scenes" in GNU is not good. The only change is that now they are doing it in public.
They very conveniently started to do it in public when Stallman's reputation was severely damaged by the media spreading lies about him, when he lost his home, when he most needed support. And they started by publishing a vague defamatory statement against him, and they used the GNU projects website for that. And they continued to defame him on the mailing lists.
Could there really be any excuse for their actions? Was it acceptable even if they believe that they were doing it for the good of the GNU project?
RMS was and still is the GNU project leader.
> It's been a very long time since RMS was able to marshall a group of people to work toward that goal.
He gives talks all around the world, trying to warn people about proprietary software and getting them involved in Free Software.
> GNU is internally managed on a private mailing list.
But this little kerfluffle was on a public mailing list, as was requested by the various maintainers who wanted to oust RMS. It was open for anyone to follow along on the gnu-misc-discuss list from 2019-10 and forward. The discussion doesn't really support your "it has been a long time coming" assertion.
> For a long time, key GNU projects have either effectively quit GNU
If you mean Gnome, it still has a lot of those who support GNU, or aren't even aware Gnome is not GNU. There are enough of them the Gnome leadership only raises issues when it allows them to raise their own profile and public visibility, like what happened during the MIT debacle.
> The only change is that now they are doing it in public.
Thankfully, so everyone can read for themselves how claims that what is going on in GNU is "not good" is very subjective and more of a "not how I personally would like it to be".
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnu-misc-discuss/2019-10/...
Even RMS never suggested they leave the GNU Project (to my knowledge) - and why would he? Guix and Guile are two of the most vital projects in GNU, and the maintainers, both in their capacity as individuals and maintainers of a GNU project, are entitled to espouse their own views. So, if RMS himself didn’t even think they should pack up and leave, taking a crucial aspect of a GNU operating system with them (besides Debian which isn’t part of the GNU projects, how many other GNU operating systems run Linux-libre or Hurd natively?), what makes you think it’s a good idea?
Either fold, have new leadership, or become a formal declaration of endorsing some values (not really a project). Maybe it will eventually center around one subproject and become mostly associated with it (Guix as THE GNU OS).
The problem is that the Guix maintainers want to remove Stallman from his own project while he is alive and active, and they pursue their intention with methods that are unethical, disrespectful and destructive to the community.
> Even RMS never suggested they leave the GNU Project (to my knowledge) <...> what makes you think it’s a good idea?
I don't really want Guix to leave GNU, I'm questioning the motivation of the maintainers.
It’s good that you don’t want them to leave GNU, but then asking ‘Why wouldn't Guix just leave the RMS's GNU Project then?’ seems strange - why would they indeed? I think it’s not unreasonable to take them at face value: they made a statement about their belief that the personal conduct of RMS made him unfit to lead the GNU Project.
For what it’s worth, RMS is someone who I think can change his mind when he believes he is honestly wrong, which is not something you always get with people in his position. This however doesn’t mean his statements should go uncriticised. Linus Torvalds is a gold standard here, where his professional conduct was called into question and he took a serious look at himself, made some changes to his behaviour, and came back stronger than ever. RMS could take a leaf out of his book.
And rms would agree. In fact, you don't need to like rms or believe in Free Software to become a GNU maintainer. This wasn't about that.
> but it is disrespectful to the child victims
Yeah, no. When Nadine Strossen, former president of the ACLU, takes the time to weigh in on a personal title on the matter, that means Stallman has been vindicated. One can no longer pin their lack of reading comprehension on him. If someone only gets "the facts" from twitter, that is their own problem, not GNU's, not Stallman's.
> accuse the signatories of the statement of acting unethically or underhandedly.
They spammed all GNU maintainers addresses.
Not all the advocacy for their cause was transparent and above board. It's all there in the mailing list for anyone to see and make up their own minds.
What exactly is it about then? All I have really heard as a not-unreasonable repudiation of their actions is that they have somehow misused their position as GNU maintainers, which is neither here nor there - whether you agree with it or not (I disagree, I believe they have the freedom to espouse views like this regardless of their position, and that they didn't misuse their platform in any way), it's a complete non-sequitur to the matter at hand.
>When Nadine Strossen, former president of the ACLU, takes the time to weigh in on a personal title on the matter, that means Stallman has been vindicated.
I'm not familiar with her or her statement. Her former position is irrelevant, what we should all be concerned with is the facts. For that reason I can't comment on her position on this.
>They spammed all GNU maintainers addresses. Not all the advocacy for their cause was transparent and above board. It's all there in the mailing list for anyone to see and make up their own minds.
I don't know what your definition of `spam' is, but a singular message containing a statement of interest to recipients doesn't really constitute spam to me. You would think that GNU maintainers would want to be notified of this - imagine if the Guix maintainers and others had made this statement and _hadn't_ sent such a notification, there would be talk about how they are secretly undermining the unquestionable leadership of RMS or some other nonsense. Let's also not forget the fact that Jean Louis really did spam the Guix mailing lists for weeks after their announcement, to the point that the mailing lists were almost unusable, and the Guix mailing list moderators only banned him after a large number of complaints.
The fact that you are saying that not all their advocacy for their cause was transparent and above board, while also saying that it's all in the mailing lists for all to see, is confusing to me. Sounds very transparent to me.
The only source I could find for that comes from some sketchy book promotion site. Are you sure that Strossen wrote about Stallman? Do you know of a better source?
The article in question: https://www.wetheweb.org/post/cancel-we-the-web
* It's not his project
* The Guix maintainers care about the GNU project and don't want to see it continue its slow fade into irrelevance
What do you mean by "extreme liberal viewpoints"? The only thing I've witnessed is that the Guix maintainers took a clear stand in support of holding RMS accountable when that was ongoing a year back.
As it stands, my guess would be that it's rather that you feel inhibited in expressing your own hateful ideology?
I am upset that someone tried to ruin RMS' character with false rumors. Expressing my own "hateful ideology" is a little far fetched, given that I don't approve of trying to tarnish RMS' reputation for something he didn't do, and I don't see what's hateful about that. How would you like it if an important figure in the community falsely accused you of being a pedophile? This childish hateful propaganda doesn't belong on a programming language message board.
Read "Jean Louis" response to the gross accusations against RMS if you haven't.
I'm sympathetic towards Stallman because he was subject to a witch hunt and thrown under a bus without a good reason (or at least a good and publicly known reason), but I'm pretty sure you're wrong.
Four people from Guix (among other GNU hackers) signed this "Joint statement on the GNU Project": https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2019/joint-statement-on-the-gnu-pr...
Also, the tensions precede 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18275156
At best, that seems to boil down to an argument over whether an organization can thrive while being agnostic about child sex trafficking. (That may sound sensationalist, but I mean… that's his entire argument against the allegations as presented.)
"It sounds horrible: "UN peacekeepers accused of child rape in South Sudan." But the article makes it pretty clear that the "children" involved were not children. They were teenagers.
What about "rape"? Was this really rape? Or did they have sex willingly, and prudes want to call it "rape" to make it sound like an injustice? We can't tell from the article which one it is.
Rape means coercing someone to have sex. Precisely because that is a grave and clear wrong, using the same name for something much less grave is a distortion."
He's clearly a pedophile! How could the project be agnostic about something like this? Clearly he both endorses and encourages rape of children! (Even though there were no children involved in the story in the first place)
In the USA and many other places we, society generally holds that, below a certain age, people are still mentally "children" and unable to evaluate certain life decisions. Therefore, if someone above that age convinces someone below that age to enter into an act that the younger party is not able to understand, then the younger party was effectively coerced, even if from their perspective the activity was consensual.
There are a few activities that fall into this category: purchasing drugs and alcohol, driving motor vehicles, enlisting in the military, and sex.
So yes, having "consensual" sex with a minor is rightly considered coercion and therefore rape, unless you disagree with the line of reasoning stated above. Yes, it's not violent like some rape, but it is still definitionally rape. And it absolutely can and does have negative effects on the victim, see here (https://psychology.stackexchange.com/a/21989) for a pretty thorough dive into the subject and a huge pile of academic sources.
And that's not all. In at least one instance, Stallman specifically hypothesized that the girls who Minsky had a sexual encounter with on Epstein's island "presented themselves as entirely willing". We don't know what exactly happened between Minksy and Virginia Giuffre, and it is indeed likely that Epstein's sex slaves were instructed to present themselves as willing. But with his poor word choice and prior history of publicly not understanding the concept of statutory rape, it was a bad look for him, and all it took was one Vice journalist taking him out of context to bring the shitstorm down on his head.
You can look through some of these consent laws and tell me what that age is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_consent_in_Europe
Point is, I doubt the world's view on sex is as cut-and-dried as you present it.
That said, RMS seems to demonstrate a poor understanding of how his messages will be received. Time after time, he's said things that are perfectly reasonable and defensible when you actually think them through, but on the surface sound awful and turn people away. A big component of communication is tailoring your message so that it will be heard, and I just don't think he's very good at that. In political terms, he's great at speaking to his base but not so hot at converting non-believers.
Let me invent a purely fictional example of something he did not say. Suppose you open an article with "Hitler wasn't completely bad." That's defensible! By all accounts he loved his pets, and it seems like he was nice to his officers' kids. But really, that doesn't matter: that opening sentence has lost an enormous part of the audience, even if the rest of the article built a case that would make sense to people who read the whole thing. Most ordinary people would see that and say "that's crap and I have no desire to hear what else this person has to say", and that's perfectly understandable because most authors who open that way are going to end up saying something absolutely despicable.
Well, when RMS wants to say things implying that maybe pedophilia isn't always bad and perhaps it gets a bad rap because some parents aren't OK with their kids growing up, he needs to be exceedingly careful how he phrases every word of it because he's commenting on an extremely charged subject. And yet, he doesn't. It doesn't matter whether you have a good point to raise if your wording makes most people shut down and reject your idea immediately.
Again, I dig RMS. He's an incredibly smart guy who has some brilliant ideas. But wow, I sure wouldn't want him defending me in front of a jury. I don't think he's a pedophile, but I absolutely see how easy he made it for some people to claim that.
If you say something that 1% of the audience completely misunderstands, so be it. There’s always going to be some contrarians; haters gotta hate. But if the majority of the people have a different interpretation than you meant, then maybe the problem is in how you said it.
RMS has done so much for the computing world. And I firmly believe that he isn't a pedophile. And he doesn't even support pedophilia. Just that he has uttered something, doesn't make him a criminal.
With that out of the way, I haven't heard of anyone harassing him for having Asperger's. However, I think it's possible that he has it and that it has led him to saying things in untactful ways, and it's those things he's said that irk people. I can empathize with people who wouldn't want someone who says those things to represent an organization that they work with, regardless of what caused the person to say them.
I may have worded this badly (not a native speaker, it takes a lot of time for me to find the right words and formulate my thoughts in English), but what I meant is that they are using Stallman's peculiarities (which are likely ASD-related) against him to destroy his character. See the message I linked earlier where Wingo refers to multiple posts on stallman.org suggesting his very biased interpretation of their meanings and of Stallman's behavior.
And it could be painful for RMS: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2019-10/msg004...
> I can empathize with people who wouldn't want someone who says those things to represent an organization that they work with, regardless of what caused the person to say them.
But GNU is Stallman's project (and it is not an organization), he started it. They could just leave and continue working on Guix independently. Some projects join GNU, some leave, no one is forced to work under Stallman's leadership. But it appears to me that Guix maintainers feel so attached to the GNU identity, that they want to hijack it instead.
That said, the parent comment made it sound like it was unreasonable to take RMS's comments as meaning he was pro-pedophilia. And while I think I understand what he was trying to say, I can completely understand how reasonable people could interpret his words in a very bad way. That's the part I was really replying to, not how his dismissal was handled.
> Well, when RMS wants to say things implying that maybe
> pedophilia isn't always bad and perhaps it gets a bad
> rap because some parents aren't OK with their kids
> growing up, he needs to be exceedingly careful how he
> phrases every word of it because he's commenting on an
> extremely charged subject.
For some topics.
RMS has a history of defending or being actively supportive of pedophilia.
This isn't just a matter of RMS being incapable of speaking about a sensitive topic with grace. If I start raising questions about how smart non-white folks really are and supposing that perhaps only white folks can be in leadership positions, multiple times in multiple venues -- well, folks are going to think I'm a white supremacist. And the harm I'll have done to the non-white folks in my community will have already been done.
And no amount of (pp.) "carefully phrasing every word because it's an extremely charged subject" is going to change that.
[1] https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html#14_September...
For full disclosure, I think you can make a reasonable case for at least some of what he said in the link I just posted. For instance, an 18 year old having sex with their 17 year old partner doesn't automatically make it non-consensual, and lots of states have so-called "Romeo and Juliet" laws that agree. That's where the call for caution and careful phrasing come in: does he intend to mean it's OK for an 18 year old and a 17 year old to date (which I'd agree with), or for a 40 year old and a 15 year old (which I'd vehemently not agree with)? If what he meant was the former, I wish he would have clearly stated so and avoided the whole issue. If it really is the latter, then there's no way I'd attempt to defend that or be willing to consider the nuance (and more than I'd be willing to consider your analogy).
You're willing to give him the benefit of the doubt because you're a fan of his work and his ideologies in other spaces. Which makes sense, I dig it.
For myself, I'd rather not expend the mental gymnastics. If RMS had ever wanted to set the record straight, he could have. If he isn't willing to clarify, personally I'm uninterested in attempting to do it for him, and inclined to assume this (like his other writing) is direct and unambiguous.
(Edit, to add:) And to reinforce my previous point: sometimes the damage one's words do can't easily be undone, and treating everything like it's a philosophical debate and not someone telling us who they are may reinforce that harm.
That one comment by itself seemed bad but explainable. If he's said worse, well, damned if I'm going to be an apologist for a pedophilia advocate.
It's one thing if someone makes an offhand comment like "Oh yeah, Hitler wanted to be an artist!"
You'd be like "Ok, interesting tidbit but whatever".
It'd be a whole 'nother thing if one multiple different occasions you start talking about positive hilter attributes.
I think it's reasonable for people to be pretty uncomfortable with the number of times and frequency that RMS seems to want to talk about underage sex. That certainly does not make him a pedophile. It is, however, pretty off putting.
All this makes me feel very much like the Hans Reiser case. I was internet active at the time and remember all of his fans swear up and down about how innocent he was and how much he was a victim of the corrupt judicial system. Then that fateful day happened when Reiser was convicted and basically said "Ok, if you'll give me a lighter sentence I'll show you where the body is".
Stallman did a lot of good for the opensource community, which makes him a hero to many. I think, however, it's unhealthy to try and justify his statements on pedophilia. It's ok to talk about the nuance of the laws (Certainly there are major issues with the way CP laws work. It's a bit crazy that teens are getting convicted of it over normal teen behavior). Stallman has been really icky here. He talks not about age difference but instead how "voluntary" the acts are. Trying to read in "Romeo and Juliet" scenarios when he himself doesn't even mention that is trying to paint a more rosy picture of what stallman wrote.
All of this, frankly, can also be cleared up by clarifications from Stallman (which he's not published). He could say pretty much exactly what you've said here "When I was talking about X, this is what I meant". He's not done that and I think that's really telling. Maybe someone told him to STFU, but then again, he's not really been silent on his positions on sex throughout the years, so why start now?
And ultimately, you're right: if everyone misinterpreted him, it's on him to come out and explain what he really meant. It wasn't my intent to play devil's advocate here, and my original point was just that I think he can be a poor communicator on difficult topics.
https://stallman.org/archives/2006-mar-jun.html#05%20June%20...
> I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia
> harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem
> to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are
> then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea
> that their little baby is maturing.
https://stallman.org/archives/2012-jul-oct.html#15_September...
> Rick Falkvinge joins me in demanding an end to the censorship of "child pornography"
The other is where he's doubting that pedophilia is harmful to children. So yeah, that's pretty well "in support of pedophilia." That one isn't subjective, it's the words he typed, and try as I might I can't find an interpretation where he's not saying pedophilia is fine.
If I said "I am skeptical that infants smoking weed is harmful to them", does it mean that I smoke weed, or that I smoke weed around infants? Or that I actively support it? Or do I (perhaps wrongfully) state that I am skeptical about claims around the topic?
Personally I think pedophilia is just about the most awful thing in the universe. I wouldn't engage in in depth speculation about how it affects children, because I think it's a horrible thing to think about, but the fact that RMS engages in those conversations doesn't make him a pedophile. And it definitely doesn't make him an "active supporter" of it.
"This article argues that our current laws on the topic are counterproductive, because they protect child molesters instead of bringing them to justice, they criminalize a generation of normally-behaving teenagers which diverts valuable police resources from the criminals we should be going after, and they lead to censorship and electronic book burning as well as unacceptable collateral damage to innocent families. Child abuse as such is not condoned by anybody, and this article argues that current laws are counterproductive in preventing and prosecuting it."
So they're arguing for a change in laws such that child molesters could more easily be prosecuted? And here you are accusing a man of actively supporting pedophilia based on some gossip from someone who also didn't read what he was actually saying?
We are talking about what stallman has written. The above is what he wrote. The distinction he's drawing between "voluntarily pedophilia" and "involuntarily pedophilia" is one that I don't believe exists. Particularly because "grooming" is a common tactics of pedophilies.