Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him | Hacker News Reader

Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

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And some of those who do. Let's not forget that. Not everyone is taking sides because of published articles and blogs. Some people have interacted with him and had discussions with him and find his philosophies and behavior offense and unacceptable.

To ignore that reality makes a lot of this fighting even more pointless.

The most important part to me is that Stallman has achieved the dislike of notable people in the community, the kind you’d want FSF building bridges to. All the other signatures is just a poorly conducted popularity contest.

> All the other signatures is just a poorly conducted popularity contest.

In this case, the "dislike", since you are referring to the open letter and the signatures, means "He has shown himself to be misogynist, ableist, and transphobic". This is the text that these people signed and this is obviously the main point of the letter, followed by "among other serious accusations of impropriety".

People have been vilified unjustly before (by insiders and outsiders alike) and will be in the future. If there is some actual proof that RMS is "misogynist, ableist, and transphobic", I would like to see it.

Citing his article about pronouns as proof that he is transphobic is kind of insane and more than enough by itself to make the open letter invalid. And this is not the only thing that is wrong with this letter.

Most "notable" people are to be found in any witch hunt and cancellation effort, starting from the NodeJs pronoun witch hunt of a non-native speaker.

It is always the same developers who sign these defamatory pamphlets. In a project I know, they are less than 5% of all core developers. Two of them have never contributed more than 10 doc fixes.

If dang allowed us to name names, they could be pointed out here. But he does not.

The other category is people who got rich off GNU/Linux, have known Stallman for three decades, knew his personality and his gaffes and now throw him under the bus.

I think it is fair to name company leaders, since they are definitely public figures. I saw Dirk Hohndel of SuSE on the anti-Stallman list.

It was one of my most disillusioning moments of my life. I'm reminded yet again how the world works.

> I saw Dirk Hohndel of SuSE on the anti-Stallman list.

Yes, I was a bit shocked by Suse and Red Hat chiming in. I mean, these guys are literally making money from RMS work, he made their jobs possible. I wonder what Bob Young would say.

>Stallman has achieved the dislike of notable people in the community,

Notable people that were always under the shadow of RMS and see an opportunity to join a do a coup. This is a political power-move to remove a non-cooperating person, no more than that.

I don't think RMS is a villain. I think he's a person who helped create a lot of what we appreciate today, but if he's missing the social skills to be a good representative of the open source / free software community, then it's time for him to step aside and leave it to others.

It's pretty clear that he's been willing to do whatever is necessary to further the cause of free software -- today, that would mean stepping away from the FSF and leaving it to doing the business of promoting free software rather than having to cover up for his mistakes.

> today, that would mean stepping away from the FSF

While I generally agree with the meaning of your comment, I'm not sure about that point. The big storm of 2019 happened because Selam Gano wrote an article on Medium and multiple media outlets published false headlines, some of them literally saying "Stallman defends Epstein" which is an utter lie. So while I understand the concerns about the issues prior to 2019 (that is, the mention of "hot women" on the door to his office, comments about pedophilia and so on), I believe it would be a huge mistake on our part to give in and agree to what the mob is demanding because the main premises are false.

RMS has many flaws and he might be terrible at some social interactions. But he is not the person who many of these people believe he is. Stallman believes in values. His whole life he was fighting not just for Free Software, but many other human rights, including the rights of women, gay people and so on. The fact that Selam managed to convince so many to think otherwise just makes me very sad.

> "Stallman defends Epstein"

A quotation of such a headline is still intact in Selam's "Remove Richard Stallman: Appendix A". Nobody gives a shit. I am sad and also pissed off.

> His whole life he was fighting not just for Free Software, but many other human rights, including the rights of women, gay people and so on.

Yep.

One of my major issues with Stallman is his tendency to see things in black and white, and it's ironic he's now being sorted into the "bad person" bucket.

In truth, he's said some stupid things, some of the worst of which he's admitted he's wrong on, and others that he "lost the forest for the trees" and still doesn't see the larger perspective. I take everything he says with a grain of salt while acknowledging he's done a lot of good.

Uncompromising voices are important for overall discourse, but those voices shouldn't be in positions of power.

This is actually a very interesting and dep topic. Stallman introduced ethics to the discourse about licensing. He also introduced free/proprietary software dichotomy, as the difference wasn't as clear cut in the past. Finally, he co-created the GPL as a way to express his ideals, and as a way to oppose other FS licenses like BSD. Already 25 years ago many people didn't like this attitude, and this is how the Open Source label was born.

But deep down, can we really introduce ethics to the discourse? Is "proprietary software" really "immoral"? I had several discussions with RMS and while he admits some exceptions, his view is that it's basically a form of lack of freedom, hence unethical.

This idea seems stupid today, but I think we no longer notice how much the world changed because of FLOSS. Today, if I don't like proprietary software, I can easily use Linux and not need anything. Thirty years ago the situation was very different, we had very little choice. Today we are spoiled with choice, so the point RMS was making might seem less relevant.

In any case, recent decades brought another change that FSF still struggles with: the *aaS model which means Amazon takes anything they can, put it on their machines, make piles of money and rarely give anything back. No wonder companies like Elastic are pissed about it, but they can't do anything about it. And it doesn't look like the Aero GPL will solve the problem as it's simply way less popular than other licenses. But it seems like there are cases where ethics actually enters the licensing discourse and you can't avoid it.

Is he uncompromising on the issues over which his position of power gives him considerable influence?

> I do not excuse Richard Stallman’s remarks, nor do I challenge the actions of both the MIT Media Lab and the FSF for terminating his positions with them.

Well, you kind of are...

He's also been vilified, justifiably, by those who know him, too. He's an asshole, and his behavior doesn't require knowing him personally to observe.

> He takes everything literally and doesn’t necessarily take feelings and the reactions of others into account when making statements that are outside the bounds of his expertise in free software.

But he is not dumb. He could take those feelings into account, if it's not possible by being emphatic then by using rational deduction or simply by taking the advice of people who are emphatic and tell him "don't do this".

If I could learn that so could he. If he doesn't want to learn that it just means he doesn't care how his actions affect other people. That means he's an asshole (if not something worse).

Being an asshole is also not a problem per se. But then you have to accept how people react to you (again, this is also rationally comprehendable even for people lacking empathy).

But it also means if you are in a PR position where you need allies for advancing the cause you're fighting for then you are not a good fit for this position.

Alienating possible allies is the worst you can do in a PR position.

> if it's not possible by being emphatic

"Emphatic" means "forceful and definite in expression or action." Maybe you meant "empathetic"?

Oops, I wanted to write "empathic". I have no clue how the 'h' switched places. Twice.

Richard Stallman had some good ideas.

Still do.

This is literally written by his publicist.

Here we go again

thanks for letting us know that you were a die-hard feminist, because I certainly only care about t-shirts and old labels, not actions here and now.

another supportive voice to let "hackers" go on with the culture of misogyny and discrimination, a front page hit!

> Look at his real history — not the sign about welcoming “hot ladies” on his MIT Media lab office door, which someone else wrote as a joke and which he removed but not before someone took a photo of it — but his record in helping to give everyone in the world access to free software. He has truly made our world a better, more free place.

Ugh, this alone destroys the author's entire argument. You can't just erase something bad that someone did by saying they did a lot of good in the world, it just means they have done both good and bad things.

That sounds a great deal like every single person. Let he that is without sin, cast the first stone.

You can’t just erase something good that someone did by saying they did a lot of bad in the world, it just means they have done both bad and good things.

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