Red Hat Pulls Free Software Foundation Funding over Richard Stallman's Return
theregister.com
theregister.com
> But a number of the ideas for which Richard Stallman has been attacked and punished are ideas that I as a feminist advocate of human rights find completely correct and positive from the perspective of women’s equality and dignity!
> Stallman suggested Minsky might somehow not have known she'd been forced to do so.
> In the same thread on MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory listserv, he also referred to Epstein's victims as a "harem."
Is that the full story? That sounds very mild comments to trigger such a strong reaction. I don't really understand what is awful here, the first comment seems to say "Maybe Minsky wasn't aware", which sounds plausible (though, I wouldn't personally bet on it...) and doesn't invalidate the woman's claims or justify Minsky or Epstein actions. The second one seems to use "harem" to design how Epstein was behaving around his victims by surrounding himself with young women that he was exploiting, which sounds insulting against him and not them.
Am I missing something here?
Edit: fixed some typos
People are reacting to what they've heard others say about Stallman, rather than what he actually said.
He is being called a transphobe because he wants English to contain a new word which is singular and non gendered because he doesn't think 'they' is appropriate since it has historically been collective. Since he uses his new invented word for this purpose, he is being called transphobic for not respecting peoples choice to use 'they'.
When you look in to the details of what rms is being grilled over, he looks like someone who is honest and well intentioned but fails to communicate in a non controversial way.
Am I missing something or isn't this exactly what neutral language folks do with their made-up pronouns (Xe/Xem etc)? So they singled out Stallman for doing the same?
Also, interesting to see another flagged thread that points to an article with strictly factual information from a very popular source here.
What Stallman didn't employ in his defence, and a fact also ignored by many proponents of 'they' who regularly cite its historical usage as proof of transphobia in anyone who refuses to engage in the practice the now, is that this historical usage was applied when the subject of the sentence was indefinite, whereas the modern call to use 'they' is in the case of a specific, known person. This usage does not have a long linguistic history, regardless of whether the existence of such would, in itself, form compelling grounds on which to continue its usage.
His claim about our ancestors is wrong. They made up new words all the time. Including alternatives to singular they.
Stallman uses the new pronouns for any subject not known to be male or female. Singular they was used the same way historically.
Singular they has been widely used for over 600 years.[1]
The basic function of a language is to communicate clearly and unambiguously.
I say the same whenever I encounter any attempt to overload an existing word.
No, it doesn't much in practice, and less than using a gendered pronoun for situations of unknown gender does.
I just maintain more conversational context than most, and pronouns can get askew really quick. Please, I don't need yet another layer of faux pas to be added on to getting people to unambiguously communicate.
Cancel culture is a flaky allocator, leaking cultural resources, until we 'splode.
Stallman was more concerned with preservation of a historical record of hacker culture (The abort joke). Karen (was that her name? I think I may have forgotten) wanted it rewritten, along with other instances of "90's hacker detritus". Stallman refused. Coding is as much artform as it is engineering, and in that sense, a relic of the times. To wipe it out is to assault our very shared hacker culture's. It was against a wave of PC inclusiveness oriented imperialism that Stallman remained opposed to. The other fellow, Brad got frustrated because Stallman is a stickler for internal consistency of principle and adherence of the meaning of language to the form of life it is a nominative signpost for; which is something I personally find to be one of the best qualities in him.
You've posted something in your link that raises the question of whether any of these complaints should be considered valid.
>No one is indespensable, no one is disposable.
This is equality. The GNU maintainers raised their concern to the Board, the Board made their decision, the Maintainers don't like the outcome, even though the Board lived up to the very principles that Stallman's detractors would leverage to oust the board. As I've mentioned to user geofft elsewhere, you don't get to claim favoritism when your problem was raised and considered, but it just didn't go your way. You also don't get to trash someone just because they chafe with you when they aren't actively detracting from the mission. Now; if you want to challenge his fitness based on forwarding the mission based on objective results, that's one thing, but you have to make a dang good case given he bloody started the entire movement, and plays a significant part in codifying and acting as an arbiter of it's principle direction.
I won't even go into the whole "non-adherence to Safe-Space Policies", as I see those as a fundamental impediment to the pursuit of truth and intellectual advancement. Furthermore, after going through the profferred librePlanet recording, there is no interjection by Stallman that I can find inappropriate, even what I'm guessing is the alleged outburst at the end where Stallman asserts that as the President of the FSF, he is not bound by rules, as to me, it is clear that it precipitated out of a procedural question of the event in that room being at "time". Others were free to leave, and he was exercising perogative after the presentation had officially come to a close. He clarified his stance as the author of the GNU manifesto, and there is nothing controversial to doing so. Everyone had seen what they had come to see.
This is exactly the character of the ridicule and bad faith that seems endemic to this controversy. There isn't anything to it on further examination. If you only read and accept at the surface level, or ascribe to the notion that it is somehow inappropriate to engage in a deeper dive or clarification of something you yourself are the progenitor of or ceremonially highest authority on is wrong, do any of these accusations this seem to hold water. If that is truly the issue that the GNU maintainers are in a tizzy about, then it does not at all seem like Stallman is the one in error, and it is, in fact, those accusing him, that are. Every time I look into something offered as a datapoint in support of his dismissal, I see a human being acting in good faith. There is nothing wrong there.
Just to prove that I'm not cherry picking in Stallman's case, I've had a similar event back in my college days when I was specifically asked to not give feedback or ask questions with regard to someone's presentation. I had to respectfully decline, on the principle that in the event they (the asker) or someone in the audience were to continue working on the subject matter at hand, it would only detract from the pursuit and furthering of the state of the art down the road to not in good faith ask additional questions where their material raised them, or had holes. It's a question of integrity, and I cannot begrudge someone for doing so. It can be uncomfortable. Remaining calm and defending one's thesis is not a natural skill, but nevertheless critical in the pursuit of the truth, and nothing but it. If we don't subject that which is before us to the acid of a contrasting or different viewpoint, we really don't get the most out of any intellectual encounter.
My moral compass is not skewed that hard (at least I like to think it isn't, but then again, no one does), and I'm probably in possession of much rounder edges than I was 5 or 10 years ago, but I can't accept that half of these complaints are well founded or anything else than "how dare they not capitulate". It's rather the point that they don't. If they were that easy to get to roll over, I wager they shouldn't be stewards of Free Software.
I want to get behimd it; but... I'm just not seeing FSF or Stallman as having done anything wrong, all things considered.
Finally, his return to the board came as a surprise to everyone outside the FSF board, including sister organizations like FSFE and even voting members of the FSF. Now it looks like the current FSF president is planning to step aside for Stallman to assume the presidency, all with no apology or even expressed remorse for the behavior which led to his resignation in the first place, and I think that's adding fuel to the outrage.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/red-hat-withdraws-fr...
> after a two-year hiatus due to his own highly controversial remarks about his perception of Jeffrey Epstein's victims as "entirely willing."
RMS didn't get cancelled for his words, he got cancelled for what everyone thought his words were.
If I'm being cynic, if you are a large company wanting the FSF to be less relevant, you should probably encourage them to let RMS alienate more people. To quote a recent HN comment of mine: "RMS came to speak at my university. He probably did more damage to general student perception of anything associated with the FSF than industry-ass-kissing professors did in the 3 years prior in that one day", and my impression is that the FSF is worse off to achieve its stated goals with him at the helm.
Perhaps they want to steer the direction of the free software movement to be more corporate friendly, i.e. get people to write software for free but none of that pesky copyleft stuff. More directly, there is an optional "or any later version" in the GPL, so if they can get the FSF to make the next version of the GPL more corporate friendly that also includes a lot of existing software (although I don't know how popular this clause is in practice).
I have seen Stallman speak at various universities over the years, and I have witnessed the same speech and its intrinsic message fall flat on its face at, say, Stanford, whilst receiving a rapturous response from students at Berkeley just a week later.
The prevailing student culture has much to do with how well a message is received, particularly in these politically charged and volatile times when people so easily get distracted from the message by the messenger himself, or even third-party reports regarding the messenger's past.
Yes, that's why plenty of nonprofits orgs and their leadership have also complained about the same things, and why an FSF board member resigned over it. All the complaints about Stallman are false-flag objections by people with a covert agenda of making money undermining software freedom.
That's much more likely than that Stallman, like so many other prominent figures in a number of fields, is genuinely being impacted by society’s reduced tolerance when it comes to broad subject of sexual harassment.
What I absolutely will not do is presume guilt based on what might be something of a metaphorical lynch mob. I expect and require something that looks like due process, and so I'm continuing to watch how this public conversation goes.
I personally agree that putting rms back into place was maybe not the best move. But why is he not even allowed to participate at all? Why not aim for a compromise?
I am very confused by the sheer toxicity of this whole reaction and it feels more like the big players were just waiting for an excuse to finally openly bash the FSF.
Sometimes you have to take at face value that Red Hat is made of people, who can have principles and act according to them.
Disclosure: I work for VMware, ostensibly a mortal enemy, and they are so far on the correct side of history here that I'd be proud to wear the crimson fedora today.
Edit: I hope they don't give in to the howling mob.
Also very interesting to see the difference in commentary compared to the reddit admin fiasco.
Have you read them? Every single one of them is freedom bent.
This seems to suggest that a leadership role results or should result, ipso facto, in a reduction of its occupier's freedom of speech.
I don't follow that rationale at all, which isn't to say that I don't acknowledge that such comments can and obviously do in some cases lead to public distraction from the actual work of said leader, shifting the focus to the leader's perceived identity and moral fortitude.
That's a lamentable development to be sure, but to advocate abstention from public discourse as a precaution against the danger of becoming a distraction from the cause you advocate seems to be a clear case of blaming the victim. Stallman is not at fault here.
It sucks but it doesn't make it any less true.
So tldr, I agree with you, this may be appeasing people who have just taken an interest to make trouble, and sponsors that dont want to get involved, but it is completely alienating people actually interested in free software.
Get angry about something real, like Georgia voting to keep poor people from voting.
I guess the most unpopular ones are his comments regarding relationships with minors... Regardless of strongly disagreeing with him, I lean towards freedom of speech on this one.
EDIT: I also must say I haven't read his comments in full, so it's possible he said things about this which I'm not aware of.
To which he recently added that he changed his minds after discussing about it with unspecified people.
-- Bradley Kuhn (at-the-time FSF board member), http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2019/10/15/fsf-rms.html
On the original blog, every word in that sentence is a link to a different post on stallman.org
He regretted saying it later, because he misunderstood the concept of grooming.
We all get to have separate opinions.
I think I'll write a blog post about why I feel this way.
There is literally nowhere further from the path a company could go.
IBM just kind of... exists
For Red Hat to choose a side wasn't really the smartest move especially also calling for the whole FSF board to resign for the sake of 'diversity and inclusion'.
I mean, Red Hat going to IBM already meaning it was on the way out. Probably better off anyway.
What does "diversity and inclusion" have to do with Stallman returning? Is the Wokeist subtext here that "we don't need yet another white male" on the board?
RMS is the reason most of these people have the jobs they have. He is very far from being "yet another" anything. As long as RMS has done his best to correct any mistakes, they should be extremely grateful he is willing to return.
Red Hat seems more and more out of touch with Free Software and Open Source.
Edit: weakens the FSF if Stallman is gone, that is.
It’s very obviously because he makes women uncomfortable. This isn’t really a woke thing. I love crazy woke people drama as much as any other techbro, but this is a big stretch.
The announcement of the Friday event does an injustice to Marvin Minsky:
“deceased AI ‘pioneer’ Marvin Minsky (who is accused of assaulting one
of Epstein’s victims [2])”
The injustice is in the word “assaulting”. The term “sexual assault”
is so vague and slippery that it facilitates accusation inflation:
taking claims that someone did X and leading people to think of it
as Y, which is much worse than X.
The accusation quoted is a clear example of inflation. The reference
reports the claim that Minsky had sex with one of Epstein’s harem.
(See https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/9/20798900/marvin-minsky-jeffrey-epstein-sex-trafficking-island-court-records-unsealed.)
Let’s presume that was true (I see no reason to disbelieve it).
The word “assaulting” presumes that he applied force or violence,
in some unspecified way, but the article itself says no such thing.
Only that they had sex.
We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is
that she presented herself to him as entirely willing. Assuming she was
being coerced by Epstein, he would have had every reason to tell her to
conceal that from most of his associates.
I’ve concluded from various examples of accusation inflation that it
is absolutely wrong to use the term “sexual assault” in an accusation.
Whatever conduct you want to criticize, you should describe it with
a specific term that avoids moral vagueness about the nature of the criticism.
Computer scientist Richard Stallman, who defended Jeffrey Epstein,
resigns from MIT CSAIL and the Free Software Foundation
I want to respond to the misleading media coverage of messages I
posted about Marvin Minsky's association with Jeffrey Epstein.
The coverage totally mischaracterised my statements.
Headlines say that I defended Epstein. Nothing could be further
from the truth. I've called him a "serial rapist", and said he
deserved to be imprisoned. But many people now believe I defended
him — and other inaccurate claims — and feel a real hurt because
of what they believe I said.
I'm sorry for that hurt. I wish I could have prevented the misunderstanding.
Source: https://selamjie.medium.com/remove-richard-stallman-fec6ec21...
He is defending a 73 year old who had sex with a 17 year old. He doesn't know the 17 yo in the situation, is calling her a part of a harem and saying that it's not "really rape" even though legally it is. All this in a mailing list containing undergrad students who are of that age.
This is another power grab by RedHat, which has been infiltrating many open source projects in the past decade.
Their representatives are dominant and operate in groups. If you contradict them even on technical matters, they'll remember for years to come and make your life difficult.
RedHat has been a net harm for several projects, this is another political move to grab even more power.
What power? The FSF is decrepit and its influence long spent.
In general I think that dragging other issues like "Stallman should have pushed the AGPL earlier" as a justification for calling for his second resignation is not fair (not attacking you here, but people on the web who did that).
These issues have been out there for decades and could have been brought up much earlier.
I also find it immensely hypocritical to see members of old-style distributions piling on Stallman now. Apart from RedHat I saw a high ranking SuSE person who got rich off other people's GPL software signing the anti-RMS petition.
These people have known exactly what exploratory and non-mainstream views Stallman expoused (held might even be too strong).
All of a sudden the "see the light" and throw him under the bus.
Talk is cheap.
The entire free software community seems to have turned on their own founder - I don't think there's anyone sane left.