rms-open-letter.github.io
rms-open-letter.github.io
rms-open-letter.github.io
Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26535224 - March 2021 (814 comments)
> Especially chilling is when Stallman addresses the accusations that Marvin Minsky sexually assaulted one of Jeffrey Epstein’s trafficking victims
This incident as it was initially reported was fabricated. This letter admits that but tries to reify those fabrications by twisting his words. Saying that maybe his friend Minsky didn't realize what was happening is not defending Epstein or rape.
> He regularly and repeatedly makes comments about “the dishonest law that labels sex with adolescents as ‘rape’ even if they are willing.”
The US criminal code is not above criticism. From Stallman or anyone else.
> He recommended that, should someone find out they are pregnant and the child tests positive for Down’s syndrome “the right course of action for the woman is to terminate the pregnancy.”
Not really an uncommon opinion. The movement to not abort down syndrome babies was really an offshoot of the pro-life movement. Stallman is vocally not pro-life, and you really shouldn't expect him to be. If he believes sometimes abortion is the right choice, more power to him.
> RMS has spent years on a campaign against using people’s correct pronouns. This is poorly disguised transphobia.
Having literary standards is not transphobic. There's no evidence Stallman ever prevented someone from participating because of their identity. There's no evidence Stallman doesn't mean what he says or that he says and speaks coded language only his detractors understand.
These signees should do better.
EDIT: Removed "Stallman-phobic" wording. Even if that's an apt description the phrasing has proved distracting in a different comment thread.
>There's no evidence Stallman ever prevented someone from participating because of their identity.
The standard for being in a leadership position is usually much higher than the one that a regular employee/IC is held up against. Stallman is the public face of an organization comprised of a lot of people. Everything he says publicly is representative of what the FSF stands for.
Who is "fit to lead" by this standard? The FLOSS community also includes many people who align themselves with various sorts of social traditionalism and are quite skeptical of any fringe notion of social "progress". The kind of FSF board or leadership that promoters of this open letter might perhaps demand would be wholly contrary to such people's lived experience. There is no solution that can satisfy everyone, other than increased toleration of differing views.
He is argument boils down to, some languages have four (or more) sets of pronouns: male, female, single and/or plural of people that is genderless (either explicitly or implicitly), singular and/or plural of inanimate object(s).
English has male, female, plural of people that is explicitly genderless (but not singular), and singular only of inanimate objects (but not plural). We don't have a pronoun that can fit a singular third gender or genderless reference. Using they as a singular pronoun in any situation often leads to awkward speech.
Other languages do other things, such as inanimate objects often being referred to with male or female pronouns (independent of having a singular inanimate pronouns), having both singular and plural inanimate object pronouns, or having singular genderless pronouns.
Adding additional words to English may be required to deal with people who do not wish to use male or female pronouns, but also do not wish to be called an it, or be forced to be called a they inappropriately (since they are not a plural, nor a royal we). Such words should appear similar to regular words, such words should be also standardized and regulated.
/End of RMS boiling down: at no point does he say trans people don't deserve pronouns that can fit their needs, he only illustrates that how we handle it now is not a good solution.
Except that we do. Singular "they" has been used since Shakespeare. And you likely use singular they in your normal speech. When you don't know anything about a particular person, you ask about their attributes. Who they are and what they like, what their name is.
> Adding additional words to English may be required to deal with people who do not wish to use male or female pronouns, but also do not wish to be called an it
Indeed, and we generally do this by asking what those people want to be called, not by prescribing what they are allowed to be called. Prescriptivist language is both ineffective and rude, much as you trying to tell me what my name is is rude.
That said, even if you're interested in prescriptivist approaches, Merriam-Webster[0], and the OED[1] recognize singular they, as do the APA, NYT, and WaPo style guides.
Singular they, for a nonbinary person who prefers the pronoun, or for a person of unknown gender, is the standard. Stallman is the one causing needless conflict by trying to push a different approach when there already is a standard.
[0]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/singular-nonbi...
[1]: https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they...
There are a bunch of reasons why people like different words, and telling them their choices are bad (read: nonconforming) is prescriptive.
Nowhere should you use "pers", unless someone specifically requests you use that pronoun for them. Stallman insisting other people use "pers" is bad and prescriptive. I would similarly say that neopronouns are nonstandard, but if someone asked me to use one, I would. I wouldn't insist on referring to them with "they", or "pers", once that person made their preference known.
Suggesting stallman adopt already commonly used and widely accepted terminology and style is not.
There is a confusion here that they can be used in two contexts: one for a person of unknown gender, and one for a person who prefers they/them pronouns. Stallman claims that they isn't acceptable in the first case (it is) and that "pers" should be prescribed in the second (it should not, you should use a person's preferred pronoun).
(Note here again how singular they/them/their is naturally used in this context).
I don't know if he's insisting other people use pers, but I wouldn't support that if so.
> There is a confusion here that they can be used in two contexts: one for a person of unknown gender, and one for a person who prefers they/them pronouns. Stallman claims that they isn't acceptable in the first case (it is)
Sure, 'singular they' are fine options for unknown gender and for people who ask for 'they'.
> Nowhere should you use "pers", unless someone specifically requests you use that pronoun for them.
I don't agree with this. Simply because "they" is common doesn't mean it's uniformly better than the alternatives. For example, it introduces singular-plural ambiguity in some cases where, say, "xe" doesn't.
> .... and that "pers" should be prescribed in the second (it should not, you should use a person's preferred pronoun).
There are politeness, inclusiveness, and gender-equality arguments in favor of calling people by their preferred pronoun. There are other factors as well. For example, I'd rather not refer to the high-born as "his royal highness" because I believe in equality. Likewise, I'd rather not specify gender at all, but singular-they isn't common for that, e.g. "this is my girlfriend Sarah, they like yogurt".
So I'd rather keep the options open and not sanction people for promoting alternatives.
It drew umbrage from trans and non-binary folk for good reason.
And it is highly prescriptive on a way that adopting the preferred language of the community your are speaking about is not.
It's also hard to see it as not an attack on such people, as he employs precisely the same rhetorical tricks as he does when attacking companies he dislikes and disproves of.
That said, he does have ground to stand on: I don't think "they" for a specific, individual person with known gender (see examples above) has been in English for very long -- at most 20 years in the US, and its use in those cases does break almost everybody's English grammar, and it reduces clarity in places where alternatives don't.
Therefore I don't see it as an attack on people who want to require "they", even though I understand where you're coming from. Instead, I see it as consistent with his free-software advocacy: he's defending people's ability to control the programming language they use in their own mind and protect it from externally imposed breaking changes.
> Every language has grammar rules. They are in the minds of speakers of the language — including, for English, me. The fact that they weren't decided by an official edict doesn't mean these rules are a trivial matter; demanding people change their grammar rules is an affront. You might succeed in convincing me to change the English grammar rules in my mind, but don't you dare demand it.
I was taught generic “he.” That upsets some people now, so Strunk & White says rewrite the sentence as plural, and I do.
Pretty much every style guide on the wiki page since ~2010 allows or prefers singular they. This includes, as previously mentioned, the APA, the AP, the NYT, WaPo, and a number of other relatively large and formal publications. Perhaps the odd man out is the Chicago Style guide, which says singular they is fine for informal writing, but doesn't yet recommend it for formal writing.
While yes, some Baby Boomer linguists may prickle at the singular they, for many in Gen Z, its all they've ever been exposed to, and for many Millenials, they've now used singular they for longer than other forms, in both formal and informal language.
> RMS has spent years on a campaign against using people’s correct pronouns. This is poorly disguised transphobia.
This is spread so thin just to allow it to reach another allegation of -phobia.
What is troublesome is that this letter seeks to oust the entire FSF board.
Seeking to oust the entire FSF board is kind of the point of the entire exercise -- Stallman or no Stallman. As long as the FSF board is committed to the Four Olds, there will be an army of twitterati searching their entire blog, mailing-list, and social-media history for the six words that will hang them. As long as the FSF and other institutions remain authoritative and outside the control of the "woke" (who are really lickspittle agents of corporate interests mixed with a few assorted grifters), they will be considered hostile and a threat, to be dealt with accordingly: subverted and neutralized, or failing that, destroyed.
The next step is to gain control of the OSI so as to change the Open Source Definition.
> I feel very sad for him. He’s a tragic figure. He is one of the most brilliant people I’ve met, who I have always thought desperately craved friendship and camaraderie, and seems to have less and less of it all the time. This is all his doing; nobody does it to him. But it’s still very sad. As far as I can tell, he believes his entire life’s work is a failure.
This is also a very sad epilogue, and the FSF board is to blame for not being able to explain to RMS why reinstating him was an awful idea.
At the same time, it's also sad that the open latter calls out RMS for ableism, when it's obviously clear that he is in turn not able to understand the situation that has arisen around him and the problem that he constitutes for the FSF.
To be 100% clear I am not saying that this should excuse or justify rms's misogynism or his well-known (by now) views on sexuality. But all this contributes to my feeling of sadness and I am pretty sure I am not the only one that feels like that.
So I am torn. I agree that the FSF board has failed, and I wish RMS would resign from his other leadership positions (including from the GNU project, which has been so instrumental to my career), but this open letter leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.
See also https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2019/joint-statement-on-the-gnu-pr... (Joint statement on the GNU Project, October 2019) for something that instead I agree wholeheartedly with, though I didn't sign it at the time because I am not a GNU maintainer anymore.
Welcome to logical structure parsing. Believe it or not, internal consistency in language snd action is actuallu a pretty hard thing to get right, easy (and natural) to dismiss out of hand. In philosophy, we call it the self-referential inconsistency, and there is a shocking number of the population who not only indulge in it, but get very upset when you point it out due to the cognitive dissonance that comes from it. It really gets the lizard brain going. Bmwhen you strip away the emotional aspects of it though, you will find that there are linguistic roots of almost every conflict. It isn't the way of life the selected words represent that is at issue, but the words assembled by the other party that are at issue.
I second there is a level of immaturity at work, but not with Stallman; instead it is with his detractors. They take any challenge to the respect or superiority of chosen pronoun use as an act of transphobia. It is not. It is an adherence to clear unambiguous communication. They create the perception of transphobia in their own minds where it simply isn't just as readily as the oft derided "conspiracy theorists" see nefariousness behind every corner. His actions, nor his words are transphobic. His detractors, however, are phobic of everyone else that just doesn't care, or prioritizes things differently.
Which, I might add, is just something you learn to deal with as life goes on to get things done.
I'm glad they put their names down as I want nothing to do with these people.
To think that a lot of people here In Mexico laugh at the crazy Political Correctness and overreaction of Americans... I would think he would be more on the side of just getting shit done, live and let live.
You aren't being force to interact with the FSF.
Alternatively, could you explain how you differentiate "we will not work with these people" and "forcing someone out of the community"? Like if enough people refuse to work with someone, doesn't that functionally force them out of the community?
I see two demands: the FSF board step down, and Stallman remove himself from any leadership positions. This is functionally the same request as last time, to keep RMS out of leadership. I'm unaware of any significant backlash to him having been a speaker at LibreConf, so clearly he could still still be a community member.
Outsiders are asking the board to resign over a hiring decision.
Edit: Wow the brigading in here is worse than Reddit at US sunrise.
It's open source software written by volunteers, though. How many people are actually forced to work with RMS?
> These sorts of beliefs have no place in the free software, digital rights, and tech communities.
It's not: we need someone a bit less weird to be our PR person. It's: we need to cancel this person completely out of tech due to their "problematic opinions".
2013: "There is little evidence to justify the widespread assumption that willing participation in pedophilia hurts children."
2015: "I wish an attractive woman had "abused" me that way when I was 14. I would have learned many important things and had a much happier life."
2016, on Down's syndrome: "If you'd like to love and care for a pet that doesn't have normal human mental capacity, don't create a handicapped human being to be your pet."
2017: "[..] together with the dishonest law that labels sex with adolescents as "rape" even if they are willing, [..]"
To be honest, the parts on transphobia seem a bit overblown; he does seem to be accepting of different gender identities (and even plurality), but still doesn't like the use of they as a singular specific pronoun. However, I just really don't think it's necessary to re-admit someone with those ^ views to the board of an organization.
Given a choice of leader, I'll stick with the one eccentric who from the start knew exactly the direction industry and politics would go. I'll take the guy with 40 year success streak of being able to say "Called it!", who refuses to give one inch on the principles behind free software to the point he's inconenienced himself to stay true to them in a world being increasingly eaten by proprietary software, over the wannabe social media influencers who can't even successfully comprehend the content of an email, or understand the difference between caring about concise language and adherence to consistent internal principles and transphobia.
Also, to be quite frank, given the cancel movement's continual habit on getting called out for being fast and loose with facts, I think they need to reconsider their PR strategy. Talk out the side of your mouth is cheap. Lies and misinformation even more so. At least what Stallman says is backed by his actions, and his continued steadfast support of the organization that threw him out unjustly.
I really don't think most people understand just what level of commitment to a cause that takes, and I think if half the people concerned about his "problematic opinions" would focus on issues in that sphere on a platform that isn't the FSF, the world may legitimately become a better place. Instead, you just get this token drama that holds the State of the Art back. I swear, if I ever pull off independent wealth enough to take an extended sabbatical I'll come take someones position to unburden their conscience of working with the likes of Stallman or Linus, or whoever the world is dumping on for carrying the progress of Free Software forward. Never seen a group of people so disenfranchised with literally carrying a legacy to the species on their backs that they have to start eating each other to continue making the experience bearable.
The entire world of proprietary software and all the adherents there of want division. They want chaos that detracts from the quality of Free Software. They want infighting, they want a more manipulable figurehead. They want work they can steal, make their own, then hold society hostage for access to.
The only one with their eye on the ball seems to be the very GNUisance everyone wishes to condemn. That's the world we live in now I guess. Nothing but ultimatums and outrage.
I truly don't understand this. I am neither autistic or even a 10x programmer.
RMS is such a genius dude who can match an entire Symbolics programming team that had genius and legendary hackers. His math skills are superior even among the elite math students at MIT(source at end [1]). RMS wrote the first version of gcc and many other utilties and *yet* despite all of his talents and genius gifts he started FSF and choose to remain poor because of his strong belief in freedom. This is immensely inspiring.
Its very rare to see a genius and who scarifies their life for a cause in a single person. The people i can think in this category are Noam Chomsky, Aaron Swartz.
How can any other person being the face of FSF a better fit?
* 2000's, Linux Conference in San Francisco / Silicon Valley, I asked him about porting some app from LibC5 to GlibC6, I bought the GNU LibC manuals there. I imagine he was more confused than me about my newbie questions, but he patiently heard me out and gave me some valuable insights.
* 2010-2016ish, FOSDEM conferences in Brussels. Attended multiple talks of him about FOSS.
Even if RMS dares to 'apologise' or say 'Sorry', those who already signed that list will never redeem his 'sins' and to them he is condemned forever to the lost and banned.
So I wonder if it’s not “virtue signaling” here that’s the problem, but the virtue being signaled itself that you don’t like.
Since then, I have seen user freedoms continue to erode. Statists continue to push for more controls and backdoors on encryption. Repressive governments have the cooperation of the companies that run the mobile device app stores. Desktop operating systems continue to degrade with the addition of advertisements and increasing amounts of DRM, spying and "trusted computing" features that limit what you can do with your own machine. In short, we are one or two steps away from Stallman's nightmare scenario, where the illegal use of debuggers and compilers is considered a crime.
I used Stallman's first cancellation to advance my own permissive-licensing agenda (albeit by a very small amount, as I'm an unknown). Introspecting upon the way I reacted initially, I now suspect that this is simply another attempt by powerful interests in government and business (notably, a great deal of enmity against RMS comes from Microsoft and Salesforce) to destroy a man that has dedicated his life to keeping computing free.
Not only that, if this isn't cancel culture and/or this needs to serve as the one exception, would we not also be required to go for the full nuclear option and stop using not only the GPL family of licenses, but all software that refuses to migrate off said licenses? Merely asking the FSF board to stand down is a meaningless gesture, as the entire foundation would need to cease to exist as it shall always be under rms's shadow.
Cancel culture is a dangerous thing, and shouldn't be tolerated in any liberal community that intends to protect the rights of individuals using ideals such as Freedom and Free Speech.
Note: Although I dislike how RMS conducts himself in person from time to time, that isn't a good reason to shove him under the bus. He makes arguments with zero tact, but does not make arguments made in bad faith. He clearly is somewhere on the Autism spectrum, and most likely was never diagnosed due to proper diagnosis not being invented until his 20s, and proper treatment not being invented until his 40s. The community needs to make sure we don't become some violent revolution that turns around and eats our own because its convenient.
Except in pointing out the hypocrisy of the right, no one on the left is accusing anyone using the right-wing ”cancel culture” buzzword (which differentiates it from the old-standard “political correctness” that it replaced, which was used in internecine disputes within the left before being adopted by the right, but even that was never generally deployed against the right even though they used the same tactics; pretending that the main flow is the other way around reads like false-flag concern trolling.
I don't care about the etymology of the phrase, it is just the most apt description used by current internet culture. We called it something else before it was named cancel culture, and we shall name it something else in the future, as we shall with all other things. Your red herring does not answer my question.
Yeah, that's why I didn't quote your question but instead the argument suggesting the question had any relevance, which is what I disagreed with.
Not everyone who believes there is a problem with "cancel culture" is on the right. Some people on the left (e.g. [0]) believe that there is a real problem being described by that term, and that the term's popularity with the right is not a reason why people on the left should reject it. Of course, left-wing believers in "cancel culture" don't necessarily agree with every example of it cited by right-wing believers in it, but there is definitely some overlap in cases–for example, the article I'm linking cites a Latino truck driver being fired for making the "OK" sign as a case which was criticised as "cancel culture" by people on both the left and the right.
[0] https://arcdigital.media/the-whispered-left-wing-dissent-on-...
What I increasingly hear are definite assertions that there is no such thing as “cancel culture”, only people’s actions having consequences. Also, following naturally from this, anyone then using the term “cancel culture” is therefore also subject to said “consequences”.
If the definition of the nebulous concept of 'cancel culture' is so broad as to encompass disassociating ourselves from a person we consider heinous, and encouraging others to do the same, then I'm not sure there's any value in the concept to begin with. It's hard to argue that we should all limit how we use our freedom of association so that someone else may occupy a position that they are not entitled to.
I'd look forward to hearing that, bit I wager the answer is no. You can call a pile of feces a rose, and it doesn't change the nature of what the pile of feces is
I'd like to thank you, and invite you out for a beer or the drink of your preference if you're ever in my neighborhood however, because you sound like one of the precious few sensible folks that actually project political action through past it's first order consequences to the inevitable conclusion.
It's rare enough at times that it's nice to call out when it happens, even in passing.
And this coming from someone who disagrees with most of what RMS has said on these topics.
Having read a number of articles on both sides of this issue, I see no reason to believe that their advocacy is anything but genuinely motivated by a desire for a better community.
I seriously feel like this would do the very exact opposite. It's throwing out the baby with the bathwater in a hugely damaging way and who the actual fuck wants to work in such an environment.
And why for example do these people regardless of whether they agree with him or not genuinely believe that rms is trasphobic because he thinks there is/should be a gender neutral pronoun that would be better for common usage than they/them. I think the one he suggested sounds stupid and won't find common usage at all...but I definitely do not think he's trans-phobic because of it and that his view on this matter should somehow be a contributing factor to the entire board getting thrown out or him being shunned from anything free software sounds absolutely stupid.
These letter subscribers just want to put "their" face on another man's life work.
*RMS* may not conform to your societal standards, but condemning the man (him, or Torvalds, who also comes under fire,) marrs your reputation, and not his.
> He has shown himself to be misogynist, ableist, and transphobic, among other serious accusations of impropriety.
I have met RMS in person, (had Chinese food with him, in fact,) and though he may ignore some social conventions, he is a person who has very valuable and unique opinions, and a force to be reckoned with. These accusations appear to be, while not baseless, motivated by an extremely twisted socio-political ideology.
*Shame on you for bringing cancel culture into the world of software.*
https://github.com/rms-open-letter/rms-open-letter.github.io...
We all interact with people that have strange opinions everyday, we just usually don't hear them, let's all move on.
He was wrong. The last decade has shown the FOSS ecosystem trapped, packaged and resold by companies offering "services". And when the FOSS leadership should have been doing something about it, they devoured each other over modern notions of morality and social justice.
Nice to see that big names at Gnome and Debian apparently have nothing better to do than throwing a public hissy fit. Seems these organizations are run by man-children.
IBM, Microsoft, Amazon etc are laughing all the way to the bank.
We're reaching the point in our society where thought-crime is a reality. You're not allowed to hold certain opinions, and if you do, you can't have a job or participate in the commons anymore. You must be imprisoned, stripped of your ability to provide for yourself, and ostracized from society.
Soon, these people will begin to claim political offices and they will have the police and military at their disposal to enact their will. Delete your post history, and lobotomize yourself before they come for the rest of us as well.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/12/the-las...
EDIT: Sidenote: We were offered embryo genetic testing and selection as part of IVF rounds. Didn't give a second thought to not selecting unhealthy embryos.
These people are attacking Stallman to reinforce their self-image of being "good" and "progressive".
Both are deluded. Stallman has no influence on the topics they contend but these people unfortunately have some influence in this matter.
This is a poor assessment, as it doesn't account for the fact that people cultivate the environment they want to be a part of. Removing people like Stallman from positions of influence within the community changes the tone of the community; while you may believe that change would be for the worse, it's better to acknowledge that others genuinely believe the inverse, rather than dishonestly dismissing it as blind reinforcement of self-identity.
They shouldn't lose their positions because of Stallman's beliefs, but because of their own unwise decision to return him to a position of greater influence.
In that case, would you agree that the stuff about his opinions is irrelevant? In fact, given that there's some likelihood he'll remain at FSF and certainly will remain a famous programmer, wouldn't it then be best to draw as little attention as possible to his unpopular opinions? (This is not the same as "wouldn't it be best to draw as little attention as possible to his alleged bad behavior", because whereas him mistreating people would be bad no matter how many people knew about it, him having unpopular opinions that won't change anything does not harm anyone, and if people are distressed to learn about those opinions, then publicizing those opinions increases that distress.)
I wonder how many of the people personally offended by what they think RMS said have taken it up with him? "Transphobic"? really? I haven't spent more than a few minutes speaking to RMS, and that years ago; but "-phobic" isn't a word i can see applying to him.
GNU, which he created. So basically the point here is to appropriate another man's life work and make it your own putting another label on it.
Wow, this seems to be a complete lie, on the surface of it.
When you read all these documents, you find that they care 115% about the issue of how to refer to people in order to respect their gender idenity.
The singular gender-neutral pronouns Stallman refers to in [16] are actually gender-neutral: they are ones he invented himself and uses. He's just bothered by the bad grammar of using "they" as a singular, and the ambiguities it causes in sentences where it could plausibly have either multiple people as an antecedent or just one person.
Or is there some new development that I'm missing? Are there people who would like to be referred to in plural, due to multiple personalities, so that using singular pronouns makes hurtful assumptions against them?
"I am not a 'perse', Mr. Stallman! I am two people: a man named Bob and a female named Stephanie. Please refer to me by the correct pronoun 'they'."
... kind of thing? I admittedly don't keep up with this stuff.
Either they should have stood by RMS in the first place, or they should have let the matter be. But flipflopping like they did is pretty silly.
If there is legally actionable evidence against someone, then let there be a court case.
Sick of seeing public figures disparaged in this way without proven basis.
Ready for round 2?
Let's see who u-turns first.
This is a real thing happening in tech, by people who are serious; we can't just stick our heads in the sand and flag it out of the way.
Edit: too late; by the time I typed that, it was vouched into undead status.
https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2019/joint-statement-on-the-gnu-pr...
I know what I would do if the organization I do free work for disregards my opinion in such a blatant way.
I would just walk away. I wonder how many will do this?
Yeah, especially since it seems like the comments he's being condemned for here are ones he's since disavowed:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/03/richard-stallman...
> "Many years ago I posted that I could not see anything wrong about sex between an adult and a child, if the child accepted it," Stallman wrote. "Through personal conversations in recent years, I've learned to understand how sex with a child can harm per [sic] psychologically. This changed my mind about the matter: I think adults should not do that. I am grateful for the conversations that enabled me to understand why."
http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2019/10/15/fsf-rms.html
It's clear that didn't work.
> In his acceptance speech, Bradley gave advice to software freedom activists, noting that all should follow a few simple principles: take care in the words they choose in their communications, be prepared to "speak truth to power" (both to powerful proprietary software companies and to other Free Software leaders), stubbornly refuse to use or develop proprietary software, and find ways to bolster and coordinate with other important social justice causes, such as those that seek to ameliorate systemic bias and combat climate change.
> Bradley also acknowledged that his work in collaboration with Conservancy's Executive Director, Karen Sandler, has allowed them “to achieve accomplishments in Free Software that neither of [them] could achieve working alone”. While thrilled to receive this individual honor, Bradley views his collaboration with Karen and Conservancy's staff as an excellent example of how software freedom activism is bigger than any single individual's achievements or views. Bradley added: “we succeed with the best results for the future of software freedom when we work together, set aside personal ambition, and reject cult of personality.”
I am quite frankly tired of this.
I don’t give a crap what RMS thinks or says quite frankly or this lot.
What did being divisive ever solve? All they are doing is creating more problems, more animosity and discrediting us all.
http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2019/10/15/fsf-rms.html
https://wingolog.org/archives/2019/10/08/thoughts-on-rms-and...
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/52587.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25193674
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21000374
Don't believe everything the media tells you. Tech news sites only report on what they read in public sources, which leads them to wildly inaccurate conclusions like the idea that objections to Stallman started with his comments about Epstein, or that there was no objection to him from inside the free software community.
The ableist thing is probably his recommending that women with Down's syndrome fetuses should abort them.
Trans, genderqueer, or nonbinary people often express their preferred pronouns. If you do not use these pronouns to address or refer to that particular person, it is considered transphobic.
By far the most common gender-neutral pronouns are "they/them". It does not matter what Strunk & White says -- you are considered a transphobe if you do not use "they" for someone who has an expressed preference for "they". Period. By choosing deliberately not to respect their preferences, you are thought to deny or "erase" their gender identity.
You may think this doesn't matter. Ultimately, even in the grand scheme of terrible things that have been done to trans people, it's quite a small issue (the buzzterm is "microaggression" after all), and it certainly doesn't matter in a technical discussion. But securing compliance in small things like this is a dry run in pressure tactics: if people, especially if held in high esteem, buckle under and adopt and enforce the orthodox practice with regard to gender pronouns or other detail, the tactics worked. Ultimately the goal is to use those tactics to sway decisions on issues that matter, like who gets an authoritative say in what constitutes open source and which overarching goals should the movement serve.
Can anyone explain to me what the OSI even does and why they seem to have the time to protest RMS?
From their website:
>For over 20 years the Open Source Initiative (OSI) has worked to raise awareness and adoption of open source software, and build bridges between open source communities of practice.
So they build bridges? That's a great goal.
So what bridge are they building here? Seems more like they are starting a fight. That seems against their stated mission.