Stallman's return denounced by the EFF, Tor, Mozilla, and the creator of Rust | Hacker News Reader

Stallman's return denounced by the EFF, Tor, Mozilla, and the creator of Rust

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34 pointsMilnerRoute54 comments

Even ignoring the things he's currently in hot water for Stallman is a terrible choice as the face of a movement.

As attested to by many who have spent time with him in person, his social skills are horrendous. There's a video of him at a talk, picking crap off his bare foot and eating it. He has some good opinions specifically on computer software, but as a person in general he's seriously lacking.

Is this really the best we can do?

What he picks to eat or writes on his personal website is completely irrelevant: his social skills were sufficient to create a planet-wide movement and completely change the software development industry. Since you think we can do better, please, name a better candidate.

I'm not sure that's true. He didn't invent open source, and while he should be credited with being an early pioneer, he was largely ignored for decades until he got /just/ enough people onboard to find someone personable enough to get it to catch on in the corporate world, which then gets the attention of marketing.... and that's how we got to today. Not just by his "social skills" (or lack thereof) alone.

No. No. No. This is a complete misrepresentation of the events.

Stallman created a GNU project which culminated in the GNU/Linux OS. His contribution is far more important that that of Torvalds, because by the time linux kernel appeared, the emergence of GNU-licensed kernel for GNU OS was inevitable. Had Linux been licensed differently, it would not gain a fraction of traction it received licensed under GPL, and the GNU project would come up with something anyway. They just didn't need it after they had one good kernel. So, without Torvalds ot would have been someone else. Without Stallman, there would be no GNU.

All of this happened a decade before corporations started to take notice. By the time it happened, a great number of developers contributed to the GNU project and have created a lot of applications.

For me the issue now is not whether Stallman should hold 'leadership' positions or not, it's the fact that the pursuit of his removal from all such positions is based on heavy accusations which I do not believe to be true (transphobic, ableist, misogynist, and more).

For example, making a stupid joke about women does not mean that there is malintent at play. One could argue that that joke could have negative impact on certain people and this is one thing. Attributing it to misogyny and sexism is something entirely different.

Get this: Stallman is supposedly transphobic because he refuses to use the "they" pronoun in the singular sense, but instead uses gender-neutral neo-pronouns "person", "per" and "pers". He shortened "person" to "perse".

These were first created by a John Clark in a 1972 issue of the Newsletter of the American Anthropological Association.

They also appeared in 1976 feminist novel , Marge Piercy's feminist novel, Woman on the Edge of Time. According to the wiki below this is "about a utopian future in which gender was no longer seen as a big difference between people".

https://nonbinary.wiki/wiki/English_neutral_pronouns#Per

Thus: Stallman uses gender pronouns from an old feminist novel about an androgynous future ... and that is supposed to be evidence of "thinly disguised transphobia". This was written into petition a letter that supposedly intelligent people signed.

Stallman is weird. He is walking, talking diversity.

He is being attacked in the name of diversity.

Diversity evidently means "no weird allowed".

You can be gay, trans, man, woman, black, white; just don't be eccentric.

This is exactly why I never want to be famous.

I've done stupid things in my life. Most people have. Not the same kind of stupid as Stallman, but stupid.

At some point, any of those things may become politically incorrect, and lead to a takedown.

If this continues, the only people dumb enough to be famous will be power-hungry jerks.

My main life's work was a not-for-profit which did some good. It's credited to a power-hungry jerk. More power to him. For me, it's better him famous than me, and good for me.

For society, not so good. You've got a dishonest power-hungry jerk making self-serving decisions on all sorts of key policy-setting bodies, because he's famous.

I think the problem is not so much "having done stupid things," but in general "doing stupid things, refusing to apologize, and doubling down when called out on them."

> 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.

> Through personal conversations in recent years, I've learned to understand how sex with a child can harm per 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.

https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html#14_September...

I'm eagerly waiting for your apology.

Good that he's come to partially recognize where the problem is. If pedophilia apologism were the only reason people wanted RMS out, then you might have a point.

Now maybe he can work on not being an asshole in 65535 other ways.

Maybe he is working on those 65535 other ways.

Maybe it's hard for people who aren't neurotypical and it takes more work than you can imagine.

Maybe it's especially hard in a culture which is at once both vocal about celebrating diversity and less accepting of real diversity than ever.

American culture hates diversity. They like to marginalize and punish whoever looks different, and they have shown it over and over through history.

Now, today is trendy to show interest on some specific types of diversity, but from the outside it looks fake, and forced. For instance they make a lot of fanfare about races, big campaigns about changing master to main in a repo, while at the same time they ignore the beggar next to them on the street.

Maybe you shouldn't assume who is and isn't neurotypical, especially talking to them on the internet.

It has been this way for decades already, ref. Diana.

Most people seem to be arguing about the contents of what RMS said or didn't say, his legal/technical contributions, etc... but they are all missing the point.

Public leadership is a different role than simply being a thinker or a developer, and it has different requirements and expectations. As the free-software movement grew out of niche and into the mainstream, RMS "Peter Principled" himself out of his own job.

Public leadership is a different role, which is why I have zero trust in the following organizations leadership except for technical contributions (by order of worst offenders in regard to politics outside the scope of the technology).

Mozilla. Tor. Wikipedia. Stackexchange. Linux. Python. OSI. OpenBSD. Coreboot. Ubuntu.

Neither has leaders that bring trust to their project. Many of them has caused large group of contributors to exist the project because of actions and statement outside the mission scope. The leadership of all of them should be removed and replaced, and yet the projects are at the same time still functional despite their leaders lack.

You can't claw down leaders without tearing down the foundations. The mob is just ignorant how things really work.

Agree with you at least about those organizations I have some knowledge and experience with:

* The Mozilla foundation has an atrocious code of conduct, which allows for people to be ousted through secret trials based on secret complaints. And of course, is vague enough to be interpreted so as to disallow almost any oppositionary conduct. (Due disclosure: I was subjected to such measures as a Thunderbird contributor)

* Wikipedia: Shady elements in management and ownership, see: https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/11/meet-wikipedias-ayn-rand-...

* StackExchange: It's complicated, but basically the company owning the network has exhibited autocratic tendencies, and instead of anyone answering for their unjustifiable acts, there's been a bunch of gaslighting and diversion. Some very partial amends have been made. For the state of affairs at the heat of the crisis, see: https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/333965/196834 for example.

Cancel-as-a-service sounds like a good idea. Like a company checking the whole off and online history of someone, and then just plant some seeds on Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr etc. to make it working. You can pretty much do it almost 100% to be seen as something organic. Tbh I'm pretty sure some people do this already.

Do you think maybe it would also be a good idea to have a society with laws and justice, where people have rights and cannot have their lives taken away by an angry mob without any due process? Just a thought.

Cancel culture still getting stronger. More momentum for the pendulum when the trends bounce back, I guess.

While I think the reaction to Stallman was excessive, I am really tired of the "cancel culture" term. It gives the impression that this is somehow new, when "cancel culture" is one of those things that has existed since there was more than one human.

There has never been a time or a society where saying certain things would not bring at the very least calls for you to be "cancelled." In many other times and places it'll get you imprisoned or killed. Our society is extremely liberal when it comes to speech compared to the historical and global norm.

Here's an example from the Bush II era:

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/dixie-chicks-were-cancelled-...

BTW I feel the same way about "fake news." It's another thing that is absolutely not new.

For me the term seems useful. Cancel culture as a concept is less about the newness of ostracizing people and more about an awakening in the public about the power anonymous voices on the web can be in aggregate.

We probably shouldn't be surprised that such power would be abused as it is discovered in a new form.

We should be able to give the phenomenon a name so we can discuss it.

I kind of feel like cancel culture minimizes the issue by allowing people to talk not effect while completely skirting around the cause.

Saying was he was removed due to public backlash due to history of sexist behavior, and discrimination is much hard to defend then the reductive was cancelled.

EDIT

The recent Suess books case is kind of a prime example of this. Since cancelled doesn't have a strict definition saying the books were cancelled arguably not entirely wrong. But misses the who, what, & why of it. (e.g the publisher stopped printing select low selling books that included offensive outdated stereotypes)

That's a fair point, and I think I agree.

My stance was that 'cancel culture' as a term seems most often used to decry the use of the power of mob rule online. I think the criticism is fair, and we should be able to discuss the effects of such a dynamic.

I have also seen what I think you are describing, which is a sweeping under the rug of real issues underlying such an outcry, by dismissing it as 'just cancel culture'.

Cancel culture was never this bad or this random. The Internet has amplified its impact a thousandfold.

I would also say that nobody would ever frame fighting for the right to fire gay people, or the right to refuse to sign marriage certificates as cancellation.

Right, it ignores the the freedom of speech of the listener. The person that hears an offensive statement, has a right to say it's offensive.

It also ignores our freedom of association. If you say terrible things, I might not support your cause or give you money. And the consequence of that is that people that make their money in the public eye may lose their jobs.

It's pretty ridiculous to believe that you can say whatever you want but deserve support regardless... as if you're entitled to my attention and wallet and I should be helpless to change my own personal life to exclude you... ignoring my right of self determination.

People who talk about cancel culture seem to forget these other rights.

What you say is true - but cancel culture goes beyond this: these people actively try to get the subject of their disdain fired and go further to ensure they are no longer able to speak publicly again. That's what it means to be "cancelled." It's not ignoring you or not associating with you, it's about excommunicating you. Totally different.

I fully agree that the phenomena you refer to are not new, however today's Twitter outrage crowd did not exist 30 years ago, there was no small, vocal group of people able to bend huge corporations to their will or steer public discourse or shape narrative of major events as it happens today.

It just wasn't happening at this scale in the past. This is new.

Dixie Chicks in/around 2004/2005 went public against the war in Iraq. At the same time sales for Dixie Chicks albums plummeted because they're "too liberal".

This was before twitter was a thing, facebook was "barely" a thing, myspace was dying...etc.

1968 (year may be off)...iirc there was a huge huge march (I've seen videos, before my birth) against the Vietnam War... you could say they were trying to "cancel" the war...guess that never happened either because something that big couldn't exist without Twitter.

In the middle ages over 300k women were murdered as accused witches, amazingly no twitter is responsible for canceling witches either.

1776 ... a few colonists decided to "cancel" their ties to Great Britain.

1860 ... a few traitorous racists decided to cancel their "ties" to the union...

all these things without Twitter.

I think the modern cancel culture outmatches any cancelling happened before. Through the internet, almost any people can get “cancelled” by a large number of people. The current SNS system also amplifies negative emotions like anger, so it’s even much easier to get cancelled. Even when you do the right thing, an excerpt can render you a sexist, racist, etc.

A big problem here is that the fittest to this environment is those who do nothing, since it’s very difficult to satisfy diverse social norms that have relatively small intersection. So I think the cancel culture does oppress the freedom of speech and thoughts, since the internet won’t forget and the mob won’t forgive.

You're right that it outmatches it, but it's the first time that the consumer can directly influence things by getting their voice heard. Previous cancel culture was limited to those who already had a captive audience: churches, large corporations, marketing agencies, and news outlets. Now that there's a wider, and (arguably) more free ability to communicate in large groups and quickly organize and share information, it's simply turning in new directions under the leadership of end users instead of opinionated juggernauts.

Instead of cancelling rap music for explicit lyrics we're cancelling people who, despite their credentials or accomplishments, are still terrible people. The backlash isn't even that he's just done terrible things in the past, it's that he stands by his terrible opinion that he has done nothing wrong.

So what? Who cares what cancel culture was and what it is? If you're a target, you're a target. There is only The Mob; their faces, affiliations, and politics matter little.

> I think the modern cancel culture outmatches any cancelling happened before. Through the internet, almost any people can get “cancelled” by a large number of people.

I think it's the opposite: if you got cancelled previously—Walmart, Barnes & Noble, etc. stopped selling your book perhaps—you'd simply disappear into a memory hole. Nobody would have a way to find out about it, so nobody would know to care. Now at least other people may find out about it, and you can make a stand to fight back.

> since the internet won’t forget and the mob won’t forgive

The internet forgets plenty, and whether the mob's forgiveness even matters depends on whether your audience is in the mob.

> outmatches any cancelling [that] happened before

Absolutely does not; not even concurrently happening cancelling around the globe.

It doesn't match the Holocaust event associated with WWII; it doesn't match foreigners being nabbed and held in Chinese prisons; it doesn't match Rohingya people in Myanmar; it doesn't match Syria; ...

Come on!

A question for those who are against so-called "cancel culture": are there any statements from someone like RMS that, in your mind, should result in the FSF kicking him off their board? If he became a Holocaust denialist, or joined NAMBLA, should the FSF keep him on their board?

What's up with all those Russian-sounding first names in the list of RMS supporters? Serious imbalance.

I discovered the same thing. It seems literally a clash of 2 cultures.

I think the dislike of cancel culture is stronger in Russia and Eastern Europe because it reminds people so much about Communism.

> I think the dislike of cancel culture is stronger in Russia

Because “cancel culture” is a propaganda boogeyman invented by (or at least, used on behalf of) the political faction in the US that has been somewhere between useful idiots for and actively collaborating with Russian propagandists for the last half-decade.

I think that coming from a country with a rich tradition of totalitarian brainwashing and political cleansing, we are more sensitive to hypocritical self-righteousness and virtue signalling.

Maybe you should talk to them and find out.

According to messages on their Github, they theorize that Russian speaking individuals are less likely to fear for their careers, as a consequence of signing that letter, even if they otherwise support it.

Someone opened an issue about this, maybe you could take a look:

https://github.com/rms-support-letter/rms-support-letter.git...

https://rms-open-letter.github.io/ and https://rms-support-letter.github.io/ , just impression.

So far no organizations in support of RMS, only people (without fear ??)..

The other side.. how many of those organizations then are dependent somehow - on founding, corporations, etc. ?

Is it about easing* (control) to make some ocean bloody (which now is open and blue**), and RMS (who made it blue) is not dead yet?

* Divide And Conquer

** Blue Ocean Strategy

FWIW, it's not just Hoare. It seems that nearly the entirety of the Rust community, people like Klabnik, Cantrill, etc, are solidly Woke.

Which is mildly funny, since one of the early guests of On The Metal, Jonathan Blow, is decidedly anti-woke. The kind of guy who definitely would have been fired from Joyent for improper pronoun usage. Fortunately, the interview was very good (as is the case with nearly every OTM episode!) and stayed away from community politics.

Cancel culture seems to point to the extreme, as in there is no return, there is no atonement, and there can never be forgiveness. I think that completely goes against the general thinking of right and wrong, and has turned cancel culture into a weapon to permanently ostracize people, rather than to correct a perceived wrong.

Since this hit the newswaves, I've read both sides, and investigated the claims from both sides. Interesting.

Glad to see comments here in favor of openness. Starting to see encouraging little signs like this of the tide turning against the recent push for censorship/deplatforming/cancellation in so many spaces.

It's time for a new movement, a new cultural and legal framework that will protect key project founders and contributors from undue pressure from angry mobs on twitter and other latecomers. Maybe RMS will start something on his own, maybe a new person will step up. Either way, look out for one such and give it support - progress in software engineering, and maintaining freedom to hack depends on it.

re-posting an earlier comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23690039)

This.

The underground in underground programming refers to maintaining low visibility, as to present low target silhouette. Additional benefit is not attracting too many participants that are in it for the clout, rather than for solving problems & good engineering.

Open Source is no longer sufficient for software freedom; the current 'battlefield' is maintaining security from activist pressure or gradual take-over.

Synopsis:

The pro-Stallman letter had 3,632 individual signers

The anti-Stallman letter had 2,812 individual signers

The most ironic outrage letter is by the EFF/FSFE, which is the only organization which actually did what they accuse rms of, sexism at the workplace. https://fsfellowship.eu/court-case-fsfe-women-and-volunteers...

The other well known rms attacker is also long known as harasser: Molly De Blanc https://debian.community/google-influence-free-open-source-s...

Stallman's problem is that he committed the wrong atrocity. The EFF, for instance, has been running to the barricades to support Chelsea Manning's right to be a part of the EFF.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/02/military-prison-blocks...

If Manning wanted to file a pull request for some project, I'm sure the EFF would be out there fighting to enable it.

I wouldn't be surprised to find the same support for restorative justice from the people at Firefox and Tor. (Isn't the Rust project just an offshoot of Firefox anyway?)

The point is that anyone who believes in the principles of restorative justice and hates overpolicing should be fighting to make it easier for Richard Stallman to rejoin the FSF (and some of the other projects too.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com