Return of Stallman sparks outrage among open-source and free software leaders | Hacker News Reader

Return of Stallman sparks outrage among open-source and free software leaders

zdnet.com

23 pointsCrankyBear19 comments

This all just amounts to character assassination. It's a witch hunt. 2nd and 3rd hand accusations. Accusations of assumed "intents" and assumed "beliefs". Demands to prove your innocence. Clear and obvious vendettas (Sarah Mei). It's a witch hunt, and the only ethical thing to do is just stop.

Secondly, I think - how do we inoculate ourselves from Witch Hunts? We use logic, fairness, due process. If there is or was (and I agree there even might be) cause for an investigation into improprieties. Fine. But do it by the book, not by the Kangaroo court of public opinion. Show me the rule that was broken, the law that was broken. No anecdotes. If you can't, it may mean that the system is broken, not really RMS. Fix the rules. Fix the laws. OK then, fix the system. Then we talk about what is fair. Then we enforce.

I suppose the leaders have to be outraged right?

Defending him would require taking an actual stance on the matter. It's far more convenient to just go along with the cancel crowd and say Stallman is a sexist, or whatever.

I am outrage at the outrage. Stallman has benefited humanity more on a single weekend that all these activists put together over the course of their miserable, sterile, toxic lives. Where is the petition to bring Stallman back? I'll sign in a jiffy.

A lot of history's very well-known human beings sometimes displayed 'creepy' behavior. They weren't 'neuro-typical' either. (Dig the newspeak for 'normal' and 'abnormal')

For each one of them, there are 100,000 'creeps' who never got caught - and contributed a lot less to humanity. Sometimes their behavior was even creepier than the behavior of all the sanctimonious trigger-pullers in US culture today. Who's next here in Salem?

Where are the scales of justice? A hundred provable things done right can't balance out suspicions? Suspicions raised by people with no names? No statute of limitations? We're digging ourselves into some very deep trouble with this stuff.

Main Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26573717

I'm not outraged.

dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26573717

Whatever credibility the FSF achieved after the Stallman resignation is gone now. Sad.

Well, hopefully this will help clean the free software movement from all those people who think no non-neurotypical person should be in a position of power.

Whose number may seem unusually high, but it isn't if we consider recent history. People is quick to discard all those who think different. And the holier-than-thou mentality is deeply rooted in the American mind.

Hopefully all those people will leave to form their "pure" and "exclusive" community where they could endlessly discuss about how many pricks can dance in a forum's thread, or something like that, so people who really want to work can advance the movement unimpeded by drama-seeking Karens.

>Well, hopefully this will help clean the free software movement from all those people who think no non-neurotypical person should be in a position of power.

Literally no one has argued that.

People have argued that Richard Stallman shouldn't hold positions of power because his behavior and his beliefs make people feel unwelcome and uncomfortable. No one has ever claimed that Richard Stallman shouldn't be in a position of power because he is non-neurotypical, assuming that he is.

People are downvoting this but I've also never seen it anywhere. Can anyone cite any sources of people making this claim?

The primary driver for him stepping down seems to have been the controversy surrounding him defending someone engaged in sex with a minor provided by Epstein with arguments like “she likely presented herself as willing” and arguing that wether she was above or below the age of content made no difference.

Right, I guess like everyone else I've got my own opinions on that but it was pretty clear to me that that was the impetus for all of this. I have not heard a single person attacking him for "not being neurotypical"

Of course they don't. The people who bullied me didn't argument that either, but the end result was the same. We are attacked because we are weird. Which is sad. Software development was a safe haven for all the weird people who wouldn't fit elsewhere. But then the neurotypical arrived, and they didn't like our weirdness. So we are being bullied out of software development.

> Software development was a safe haven for all the weird people who wouldn't fit elsewhere. But then the neurotypical arrived, and they didn't like our weirdness.

Interestingly, it being actively promoted that socially maladjusted males were ideal for the field—from, IIRC, about the 1970s—was a key part of driving women and others not fitting that constructed stereotype out of the field.

Contrary to your claims during the 70s and 80s the number of women in computer science increased to a local maximum, after the "atomic family" of the fifties changed the gender dynamic and decreased it. It only started to decline again in the mid 90s and 2000s, which i believe is because video games were almost exclusively marketed as toys for men and boys.

Statistics: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_349.asp

For me it seems unsurprising that people who like to sit inside, read books, play with electronics and have used keyboards from a young age are labeled an ideal fit for the field of computer science, because they are, compared to kids that played mostly barbie or sportsball. That you call them "socially maladjusted" is related. Hint for parents: if your kid never wants to play with classmates and prefers to read, it is not a little geek, it is getting harassed at school. And now take a guess why the field is full of boys with physical disabilities or neuroatypicalness. Especially the early internet allowed these marginalized people to connect to others based on interests over vast distances, removing the need to "fit with the local group". On the net no one knows you are a dog. As such there is a resonance effect that increased fitting between weird boys and computer science. I do not need to imply any active intention by an unspecified entity to explain that.

> Hint for parents: if your kid never wants to play with classmates and prefers to read, it is not a little geek, it is getting harassed at school.

This is the first time I see the connection presented that way... But I'm not sure if it is really correct. I always thought that geek kids became bullied, because they look different, and people love to make fun of different people (you can see examples all around the media). Not that bullied people became geeks. Do you have more info on that relation?

Anyways, something I can extract for sure is, if my kid is a geek I better make sure he is not being bullied, because it's a possibility.

This is unconvincing to me. Sure you can always guess what people "were really thinking" but you have no evidence one way or the other. It certainly does not give credence to some coordinated effort to attack him because "he is wierd".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com