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Comment by foobar33333 | Hacker News Reader

It's really sad to see the witch hunting against RMS. A man who has committed no crime and has only shared a few honest and good faith opinions. Do we have to try to scrub people from existence when their opinions are not the same as yours?

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Nobody's saying we should scrub RMS from existence. Just don't secretly put him in charge of the FSF, without warning, and announce it during Libreplanet like it was his birthday party. Nobody from the FSF even knew this would happen except the board. It was a surprise to all of the FSF staff too.

Already one board member has resigned over this. It's completely wrong to be running the FSF like your own private fan club instead of what it's supposed to be: a foundation for all of us, to defend software freedom for all of us. It should not be RMS headquarters.

He wants to keep blogging about how harmless it is to have sex with teenage girls, he can keep doing that. He doesn't have to be in the board of the FSF to do it.

>He wants to keep blogging about how harmless it is to have sex with teenage girls, he can keep doing that. He doesn't have to be in the board of the FSF to do it.

He hasn't done this since 2006 and has since published that he no longer stands behind the statement. Do we want to live in a world where a single incorrect thought made decades ago will forever tarnish your ability to participate in society?

That's a pretty big statement to live down.

edit: I seem to lost the ability to reply to your other statements.

Is he actually trying to make himself a better person? Other people have listed where he has made several statements over the years since 2006 that show that he hasn't changed what he thinks. Just because he was a pioneer in programming and created the idea of free software does not give him free pass the rest of his life.

HN and many online sites often go on about how unfair it is that previous criminals are locked out of work and have no path back to normal. RMS in this case is not even a criminal, simply someone who said he was skeptical of the effectiveness and need of the current laws 15 years ago.

Does this not go against the desire to help people come back from previous mistakes?

It is not fair that criminals find it hard to find work. Therefore, we should make El Chapo the next Attorney General. And OJ Simpson can be President while we're at it.

> He hasn't done this since 2006

https://web.archive.org/web/20161107050933/https://www.stall...

https://web.archive.org/web/20170202025227/https://www.stall...

https://web.archive.org/web/20170224174306/https://www.stall...

https://web.archive.org/web/20170612074722/http://stallman.o...

https://web.archive.org/web/20170616044924/https://www.stall...

https://web.archive.org/web/20171020041022/http://stallman.o...

https://web.archive.org/web/20180131020215/https://stallman....

https://web.archive.org/web/20180104112431/https://www.stall...

https://web.archive.org/web/20180509120046/https://stallman....

https://web.archive.org/web/20180911075211/https://www.stall...

https://web.archive.org/web/20180924231708/https://stallman....

https://web.archive.org/web/20180919100154/https://stallman....

https://web.archive.org/web/20181113161736/https://www.stall...

https://web.archive.org/web/20190325024048/https://stallman....

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2019-may-aug.html#11_June_...

https://web.archive.org/web/20190801201704/https://stallman....

https://web.archive.org/web/20190903050208/https://stallman....

https://web.archive.org/web/20191011023557/https://stallman....

https://web.archive.org/web/20180924231708/https://stallman....

> has since published that he no longer stands behind the statement

This is true, but he's got plenty of other statements he still stands behind. I'm not sure he's said anything about how we shouldn't have sex with animals either.

They guy makes 10s of comments a day on a wide range of new articles and then publishes them publicly. Trawling over the thousands of them and presenting the the worst of them with no context what so ever, feels kind of seedy and pathetic to me.

Here is the context I got these links from, but I have noticed that if I present the context, people don't see the links.

http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2019/10/15/fsf-rms.html

I want to be clear - is the problem that he has any public opinions outside the realm of free software, or that they are unpopular opinions? Because it seems to me that voicing unpopular opinions is basically what Stallman has always done, and it seems... I don't know, "capricious"? to laud him for this when we agree and condemn him when we disagree - and not just condemn as "wrong", but as badly behaved and unworthy of being a public figure. Stallman hasn't changed, only society's tolerance for views outside the mainstream - which seems like the wrong direction to me.

I say this as someone with some sympathy for at least some of the things he has said in your copious list; my reluctance to specify which things indicates a problem with public discourse today, I feel. (Although even if I did not feel uncomfortable, I also would not want to sidetrack this thread into a political debate)

They're not even unpopular (seeing as they match some of right wing), just dangerous and likely stated in irresponsible ways.

> a single incorrect thought

Emphasis on "single".

If this was true I would agree with you. He has since apologized for that. However, it was not only one stance and that's what prompted his "resignation"

He was trying to split hairs in what constitutes assault just because he wanted to defend a colleague.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/17/20870050/richard-stallman...

I think the person you're responding to is referring to RMS's comments in 2019, not 2006[1].

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/09/richard-stallman...

The Epstein thing is a relatively minor incident of Stallman just being really stupid about what hill to die on and when. In the most charitable interpretation of it, he's defending Minsky as an ingenue who couldn't possibly have known that it is wrong to have underage women pimped at you just because they might be willingly pimped. Most reasonable people would recognise that making this defense, as a public figure who is supposed to be representing an entirely different political movement, is extremely bad PR for your other movement. It's a bad way to be a leader, to be sort of by proxy kind of defending Minsky's associations to Epstein. It leads to bad press, which it did, and it weakens support for your other, actual cause of software freedom.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/9ke3ke/famed-computer-scient... [2019]

Turns out people don't want to do business with you when you make comments like that.

Doesn't matter how much cool software you wrote. Or how much you donate. After a certain point people would rather not be involved with your behavior if it doesn't align.

Fortunately in this specific instance we see society taking SA and r**, as serious topics.

Let's hope we have more of this. Maybe one day I'll finally meet a female colleague in the tech industry who _doesn't_ have a harrassment story to share.

Stallman wrote "the most plausible scenario is she presented herself to [Minsky] as entirely willing."

That's very different from saying she was entirely willing. Taking words out of context to change what someone said is bad, right? Perhaps you should be outraged at Vice.

> Turns out people don't want to do business with you when you make comments like that, unless it’s the music industry

FIFY

I find it weird that Michael Jackson is on the radio so often and Chris Brown is still releasing new music and selling out, yet if they were behind a keyboard rather than microphone, they would have been cancelled long ago

> Do we want to live in a world where a single incorrect thought made decades ago will forever tarnish your ability to participate in society?

It seems Some of us do want to live in that world. For those who are fascinated about that, please google Culture Revolution in China from 1966 until 1976. You could learn so much about how to destroy those who had made a mistake in their lives (BTW, don't worry, if they don't have made any mistake yet, you could found some or make up some for them), and also along the way, destroy yourself.

> He hasn't done this since 2006

He's done it at least as recently as 2012 (and I think he did it later than that in a side comment reacting to a political issue that some adovocates on one side had equated with pedophilia to underline how bad it was, but I can't find the quote at the moment), and didn't recant on the issue until 2019, during the furor that led to him leaving his FSF role.

He defended adults having sex with children as recently as 2013.[1] And fixed a link in an older comment in 2018 without saying his opinion changed.[2]

[1] https://stallman.org/archives/2012-nov-feb.html#04_January_2...

[2] https://www.stallman.org/archives/2006-may-aug.html#05%20Jun...

The FSF would not exists without him so he quite deserve to be a board member (but yes maybe that he should no longer be on the top of the board)

Not being a criminal is about the bare minimum requirement a decent person should pass.

The trouble with Stallman is that as far as I can tell he's just barely tolerated by pretty much everybody who had to interact with him in person. Yes, he did a very good thing, and that contribution should be recognized. And he's got some great ideas that I can agree with on the subject of software.

But unfortunately he's just not a good leader, whether in the area of the FSF's agenda or even software development and at this point is an active detriment to his own cause.

Yes, I'll grant that he's been unfairly criticized for some things, but even ignoring all that doesn't make him a good choice for the position.

>Not being a criminal is about the bare minimum requirement a decent person should pass.

Funny it's the opposite with US-Presidents.

Speaking of good faith opinions, are you arguing in good faith that the witch hunt is just because his opinion is not the same? Can we refuse to do business with people when their opinions are legitimately abhorrent? Can we distinguish between differences of opinion and abhorrent opinions?

Anyone can refuse to do business at any time. I'm suggesting that this move from redhat is a disappointment but not that it should be illegal.

Assuming this email is the root cause of everything. https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6405929/091320191... Could you explain what part of this email is legitimately abhorrent about?

> Can we refuse to do business with people when their opinions are legitimately abhorrent?

Absolutely. Unless the refusal is about several legally-protected categories.

> Can we distinguish between differences of opinion and abhorrent opinions?

Some people can, some people can't.

I have not looked at the accusations claims in depth but anyway RMS has factually brought more utility to mankind (through network effects) than almost anyone else I can think of. Hence attacking him and the FSF seems quite hypocrite and ungrateful compared to what he gave to us. Critizing him is fine, witch hunting is not.

More than Fleming, Gutenberg, Bell, the Wright brothers, Einstein, Torvalds? No.

This is not the point, my comment is not a contest for which human has given the biggest utilitarian impact, the point is that he is among those men.

More than Torvalds, yes.

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