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Comment by ianai | Hacker News Reader

Way I remember it, mathematics has accepted contributions from any walks of life over its history. “Mathematics is so beautiful to transcend whole societies and be for the ages.” Or something. More practically, mathematics is just so hard that people who are willing to spend significant time with it are rare. People who find significant mathematical ideas are very much more rare. For these reasons, it’s a practical thing to accept mathematical contributions from anyone regardless of their other proclivities.

Writing good software is hard. I’d recon it’s similar to mathematics in difficulty often. It’s worth it to consider someone can both be awful in other factors of their life but still make meaningful contributions to society through things like math or software. It helps that he’s always willing to show you his code for audit purposes.

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Also, I’d add that a feeling of having contributed something meaningful to the world is something like a basic human need. You won’t die if you’re fed, sheltered, and have access to clean water. But if that’s literally all you do in a day you will soon be fiddling for something to do.

So instead of rushing to exclude people from society, society needs to provide people enough room to be themselves to keep from dangerous fiddling.

Further, forgiveness is a more critical tool to the forgiver than the forgiven. To forgive a grievance isn’t to forget it. It’s to put an end to the part of your resources devoted to punishing your opponent or thinking ill. That frees up those resources for more positive uses. The forgiven never needed to expend resources to earn your forgiveness and thus doesn’t have the same resource commitments - hence forgiveness offers less to the forgiven than the forgiver.

In this situation forgiveness has has offered a board seat to the forgiven, which is something of considerable value.

I can confidently say I've devoted zero resources to punishing Stallman, other than a few comments on this thread. Yet his benefit from the board's forgiveness is quite clearly large.

There's a big difference between excluding someone from society or even contributing to a project, and appointing them to the board.

The reason that mathematical contributions are accepted from anyone regardless of other proclivities, is not because the people who find significant mathematical ideas are very rare. While that is true, the reason that their contributions are accepted is that it doesn't matter who the person is, or what they do, or anything. It only matters if what they came up with is true.

To reject a completely correct mathematical concept because it was contributed by an awful person--even the worst person in history--would be madness, and any attempts to suppress or disenfranchise the work of "inconvenient contributors" indicates that you're not actually pursuing mathematics, but engaging in political warfare.

And sufficiently fulfilling a software requirement is like being mathematically correct if not actually correct.

But I fear you’re being over constrained by this specification. My larger point is it’s important, very, to not draw too many lines and wind up with a “polite party” of 0.

> And sufficiently fulfilling a software requirement is like being mathematically correct if not actually correct.

Absolutely.

> But I fear you’re being over constrained by this specification. My larger point is it’s important, very, to not draw too many lines and wind up with a “polite party” of 0.

I'm not sure I understand where we disagree. Or I'm missing what you are getting at with this paragraph, my apologies. I think contributions to mathematics should be open to anyone, everyone, and everything.

The FSF isn’t a mathematical enterprise dropping out nuggets of code whose value is unquestionable, like pure mathematical truths - it’s a lobbying organization. And for a lobbying organization both 1) credibility and 2) having supportable goals matter.

If you believe there is value in campaigning for increased freedom for users of software, then you might benefit from the FSF having concrete campaign goals and the ability to be taken seriously.

Inviting RMS back to the board does not help them in that regard.

Your ability to benefit from the software produced by RMS has no dependency on his being elevated to a seat on the board of an organization whose opinion might be sought, say, if congress were debating laws mandating access to source code of voting machines.

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