RMS addresses the free software community
fsf.org
fsf.org
[1]: https://www.thedailybeast.com/famed-mit-computer-scientist-r... [2]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/9ke3ke/famed-computer-scient...
I was out of the loop on this and tracking down the reporting to which RMS is replying was proving more difficult than expected.
One idea.. A system attaches to every article an ID, users read the article and the reader saves the ID for the user and the system later informs him of retractions and critiques, if desired?
That is your opinion. Others may disagree.
> It may have come across as being insensitive
Sensitivity is a huge part of communication despite RMS acting otherwise. Arguably he'd find more success knowing which battles to fight against whom, when and how.
I'm grateful for his work on GPL and Free Software but this does not make him a suitable spokeperson.
There’s no such thing as a retraction anymore, it’s just clarifications. I would have more faith in the media if they admitted when they were wrong, or at least presented, thoughtfully considered, opposing viewpoints. My faith in the media perhaps really took its first hit with Nick Sandman. I just felt weird that all these people were coming down on a kid. The level of vitriol was disturbing, and many it seems were wrong. I expect CNN to say so, but I don’t think they will, and thus the conflict remains unresolved.
I think journalism always mostly did "corrections."
I do recall clarifications and amplifications in physical newspapers, always intriguing.
For better or worse, online news articles are living documents now. Especially in breaking stories, I've seen them get updated over the day/week with all kinds of things (e.g. corrections, new developments, rewrites, etc.). Ideally they'd expose a revision history like Wikipedia, but that's probably more of a nice-to-have since their editorial processes aren't crowdsourced.
I suppose they've embraced some of the "move fast and break things" ethos of tech sector (because you can also fix things fast).
> nice-to-have
I think that explicit changelogs for a journalistic document are actually necessary in order to verify the trustworthiness of the publisher - how else are you going to notice when they start silently "updating" articles that were pushing an extreme (and factually incorrect) narrative at publishing time?
"A newspaper edition will eventually be a repository with good comments on commits"???
If by "obscure" you mean "on the actual article with the error," sure. But that seems like where the correction note should go.
[1] https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html#16_September...
In at least the time that I was at MIT/CSAIL, and to my knowledge thereafter, RMS was not employed by MIT nor was he a student at MIT. He had an email/UNIX account at CSAIL, and he had an office, sponsored by some very senior faculty members, and he was of course around the campus frequently - but the campus is fairly open about these things, as you'd expect from an academic institution, and it's pretty straightforward for faculty to sponsor anyone they like as an "affiliate" (though of course office space is much harder).
He continues to have his CSAIL account, though I believe he no longer has his office. I believe that's all that he means by the term "my position." He did not have a staff role or anything that he resigned.
> sponsored by some very senior faculty members, .... It's pretty straightforward for faculty to sponsor anyone they like as an "affiliate" (though of course office space is much harder).
I think that if someone is sponsored by senior MIT faculty to the point of having an office on campus that's a pretty good claim to being MIT-affiliated.
We would be better off if we could remove those dishonest people from our communities here and elsewhere.
Dishonest reporting, and amplifying of dishonest posts on social media is not something you will ever get an apology for, because those efforts were never meant to survive scrutiny. They were meant to create "pressure" to cause reputational damage.
You cannot convince or engage bad-faith actors. All you can do is identify and eliminate them from your social media circles and sites as best you can.
This is one of the reasons I believe social media sites should enact age-based voting. Such that older accounts that have withstood the reputational scrutiny, have greater influence.
I am not sure this works, on HN for example is easy enough for a small mob to disappear articles by flagging them, on top of that we get no reason why things were flagged or any way to undo it. Account age or karma is not enough, we need much more, make it harder to share/downvote or flag , like by making someone type at least 60 words and ban the accounts for abuse.
HN is a bit unique. I suspect it is less influenced by bad behavior because it is small enough to fly under the radar.
My proposal is to have people do a bit of work not just click a button, write an intelligent argument, it would at least filter the lazy ones out. It is similar when you know someone will review your code you double check your commit first and clean things up, someone might decide that the reason might not be as defendable so maybe a discussion should happen on this topic .
There were different articles about RMS, so why an article that has Red Hat in it's name should stay and other that has an author less prestigious should be hidden, I mean let the community decide, we always repeat ourselves in comments when we talk about latest Apple,Facebook or Google shit so if the users upvote and discuss something then don't fucking hide it, it means it is on topic, the nes that don't want to engage can skip the article or downvote it and upvote soem other article instead that is more interesting.
I nenver flagged any submission, even if I think is offtopic or low quality, I can ignore it, maybe the people that engaged it have other opinion so why I should decide for others what should they see on the home page.
My proposal might not be better , so I admit I can be wrong and I let the HN stuff to do their job how they think is best, just wanted to tell my opinion that even here stuff might be hidden for you because a small number of people decided it.
Voting and commenting influence what submissions other people see too.
At least I think is not fair to use flag on an item I think it should get less attention, then I should flag all posts about the frameworks or languages that I think are getting too much attention (I do not flag and very rare downvote )
dang seemed to endorse flagging repetition and flame war. I don't know what to tell you if you interpret that as just too much attention.
So let me ask, in general we have a page where we are encouraged to upvote good articles and discouraged to flag things we do not agree or a mediocre how can the system prevent that the flag is not abused by the minority that flags things they just disagree.
I don't want to HN employee, it is a big site and there is probably a lot of issues that need to be checked and addressed, my point initially was that HN is better then FB but there could be better system there.
My favorite so far is a Star Trek related subreddit, the rules are clear and enforced. For example no meme, jokes or lazy comment or submissions are allowed, you are encouraged to either report or educate people that are not respecting the rules. It did not generated a bubble relative to the topic, and the memes,jokes and filth has it's own subbreddits and you have the big subbreddit where most everything is allowed.
There, "rageflagging" (flagging because you do not like what is being said, not because it violates some content policy) is fairly common. I don't know why it wouldn't be here on Hackernews, despite the latter's pretense to "quality discussion".
The difference is, at least on DeviantArt the staff intervene when there's a flag, and politely tell the flagger to block the person if they don't like what they have to say. Flagging on HN seems automated and algorithm-driven, which makes it abuse-prone.
2. If you disagree with a flag, then hit the “vouch” button and resurrect it.
It is the opposite of what social media that optimize for "engagement" do.
The HN community also has a habit of downranking controversial topics. For example, subjects like women in tech and racism tend to get buried quickly. It is not that these are not worth talking about, but I think keeping these out help a great deal at preventing bad behavior to emerge. For me, it is a win, and it is not like places where you can talk politics are lacking on the net.
Blame wars should be fixed differently IMO, you could temporary ban accounts that do not respect the rules, users can report comments and indicate the rule that is broken, this require better moderation and clear rules.
Though, I am not sure if HN could implement this, is too big and probably mi preferences work better on smaller niche forums with a few good moderators and a community that cares about the quality and pushes the participants to communicate in the allowed rules.
You mean, only in some non-asshole way, so that we don't look exactly like them?
How about not be like them at all? People are stupid, but they can learn from their mistakes, and society can help them by accepting an apology rather than shunning them forever.
Exactly.
The correct way of handling these instances of bad behavior is to block, shadowban and ignore.
Then those accounts just become hot commodities, or you front load a bunch of accurate reporting about banal stuff and bank that credibility for when you want to go fangs out.
Think about it, that's how we've gotten into the "post-trust" situation we're in now. Age does not against bullshittery confer protection. No technical measure will. No edifice is permanent except that in the churn, some people with standards will rise in spite of it all. They'll get torn at at every opportunity, but it's also why critical thinking is everyone's job. You can't delegate it. Nobody can be a habitual follower by default. You have to check.
So many firms exist with the sole purpose of perception/crisis management simply because it is so powerful a tool. No one can protect you from having to think and come to your own conclusions. I thought differently for years. That the media could be trusted for having skin in the game, and dedication to the ideals and tenets of their profession.
Then I learned about how crushlingly pragmatic the world is. Either you acknowledge it, and plot your way around it, or you get run over by it.
I leave with a few quotes and a rather notorious person who rammed home an illustration of this point.
>In this and like communities, public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. Consequently he who moulds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.
-Abraham Lincoln, Ottawa, Illinois, August 21, 1858, Debate with Stephen Douglas
>Whatever is right can be achieved through the irresistible power of awakened and informed public opinion. Our object, therefore, is not to inquire whether a thing can be done, but whether it ought to be done, and if it ought to be done, to so exert the forces of publicity that public opinion will compel it to be done.
-William Randolph Hearst, unpublished editorial memorandum, date unknown
>"You furnish the pictures, and I will furnish the war." - also William Randolph Hearst
https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/173692
Make no mistake. The Fifth Estate is a pseudo-Governmental entity for a reason, and as a citizen, demands due diligence before letting one's sense of the world get run away with.
How do you distinguish between dishonesty and honesty? Who gets to determine that?
It sounds like you are attempting to block the people who blocked other people. It isn't a good cycle to get into.
Listening to arguments we disagree with is going to be incredibly valuable in the coming years. Not everyone is arguing bad-faith. There are some people who genuinely believe different things. Addressing those differences directly, through open discussion, will be much more productive than a procedure to "identify and eliminate".
There are two types of communities, in my opinion. ...and most, like HN, fall somewhere in the middle.
There's the community that's open to all, doesn't censor anything, and is flooded with low-quality or manipulated content.
Then there are the communities that are private. They have groups of mature people who DO appreciate different opinions, and are able to engage in constructive discourse. Obviously dishonest content, as judged by older accounts or mods, are removed. Ideally older or high-reputation accounts have greater voting weight.
The danger in the latter is that the community loses the diversity of thought if those top accounts misuse their power to direct a narrative, but as these private communities are numerous - participants can simply leave. You could even make the argument that they could be paid communities, if the quality and analysis of the community is high. For example, I pay to belong to the Arms Control Wonk Discord channel because that community provides detailed analysis on international events on WMDs/conflicts that you cannot find elsewhere. It is low on advocacy, and high on analysis.
HN is in the middle. They ban poor quality accounts, but it's still a free and open forum. For now it works, but as it becomes more popular, I've noticed a decline in content quality and an increase in advocacy.
If it does not create outrage or get any clicks, they have no incentive to do it. It's not like journalists have a conscience.
As long as we haven't found a way to entertain the masses without these embellishments I have no hope for an honest media.
Just remember this when they are stirring political division. This president caused this crisis, or this politician said this horrible thing. It's probably not as bad as they say it is.
Saw site mentioned in an HN comment a few weeks ago. So far appears to be an "objective" aggregator.
The activists won their war. No reason for them to declare it unjust.
Honest question - is there a way in which someone could not immediately condemn Minsky without defending him?
That's a part of it (aside from general moral disgust). How does RMS defending an Epstein client help FOSS? It does not, and it detracts enormously.
I'll tell you what it does keep me from, accepting him as a leader.
The letter is evidence that the abuse will continue, amplified by the visibility and power of a leadership position.
> "I've learned something from this about how to be kind to people who have been hurt."
Implying that he will continue to hurt people. Of course all of us will ... however his kind of Hurt is the issue. He takes no responsibility for doing the hurting.
He provides no reason to this behavior stopping here and now, in this letter. He admits to having difficulty with social interaction, and yet he provides no remedy, no, "Here is how I will fix this going forward."
E.g. to solve this, he could use words which have first been edited by an assistant: he could only continue to talk publicly / talk with those whom he "leads" (which is a lot of people given his high-level role) through a filter.
This is just an example, however it is unrealistic. It's his job as an adult to lay out a plan to remedy this.
Linus had a turnaround moment, and wrote a convincing letter. Compare the two.
His remedy seems to suggest that he might manage to grow his empathetic skills, while retaining his boss-level. That is irresponsible, IMO.
This whole issue carries an insulting undertone, as the FSF Board deemed RMS worthy of being leader, when the (former!) supporters disagreed with that value-statement, given his insufficient skills.
I'm also not sure why "inclusive" is a good criterion for FSF leader, it seems like just a hollow shibboleth buzzword at this point. People who harp on "inclusion" are usually the most interested in exclusion.
That alone makes him unfit to lead anything (among the many other things he's done). I do not want to hear his opinion on this subject.
I would not work with someone who conversed like this in a professional setting. I'm not alone. It's wildly inappropriate at the very least. It's not his field and he's personally involved with the accused.
Yes, that's exactly it. Respectable people would have felt the same way about homosexuality 100 years ago as you do about sex involving minors.
Further, your characterization as "rape of a minor" is problematic. What's a minor? If one minor is involved, it automatically becomes rape? In much of Europe ages of consent are surprisingly low (14) to Americans, who tend to expect 18. What about a 17 year old and a 19 year old? Two 14 year olds? A 15 year old and a 20 year old? Is what's 100% wrong and prison-bound in the U.S. morally permissible in Spain because the laws are different?
Or maybe you have access to the Objective Moral Truths, such that this game is easy for you? If so, do share. It'd make all of this so much easier.
YES. This is how it works legally, because one person does not have the emotional and intellectual maturity to provide fully informed consent.
What about Japan where age of consent is 13?
Or Switzerland were the age of consent is 16, although if the age gap between parties is three years or less – for example between a 13-year-old and a 15-year-old – no charges can be brought
Even if we grant the latter is harmful and wrong, the mechanism via which the harm happens is different, as is the amount of harm.
Most countries have laws allowing relationships within an age difference of 3 or 4 or 5 years.
But some people want to blur the lines around consent claiming that a 15yo can consent to sex with some 45yo without the latter being held responsible.
> the mechanism via which the harm happens is different, as is the amount of harm
I never argued otherwise.
Just like for any other illegal behavior, legal systems are designed take into account the circumstance and impact of an event.
But this does not change the initial point about informed consent and rape being rape.
I think it does. "Rape being rape" relies on the word having a precise meaning where all things in the category share essential characteristics that allow you to make moral judgements based on category membership.
But "rape", like all heavily contested political words with high moral weight, is definitely not such a word. It has a canonical example value (unfortunately I feel I have to be specific here: a stranger dragging a fighting women into the bushes and sticking his penis in her until he cums), but has a range of meanings that varies fairly drastically across conversational contexts (e.g. we talking ethics/morality? Law? Descriptiveness?), geography (e.g. is drunk sex rape? Depends on jurisdiction. What counts as a "minor"?), time and even subcultures.
I don't think he did.
"False accusations -- real or imaginary, against me or against others -- especially anger me. I knew Minsky only distantly, but seeing him unjustly accused made me spring to his defense. I would have done it for anyone. Police brutality makes me angry, but when the cops lie about their victims afterwards, that false accusation is the ultimate outrage for me."
He was arguing that he was wrongfully accused of rape, because according to the testimony the sex never happened and nobody has been able to prove otherwise (an eyewitness swears that Minsky refused her).
He then added that even if the sex happened, and he had no doubt that it could be possible, the victim was sent to him to act as willing, so that would make it statutory rape, due to the age of the girl (unknown to Minsky at the time).
He was contesting the legal semantics, not the fact per se.
More importantly, he was talking about it on the mailing list of MIT in response to this
“deceased AI ‘pioneer’ Marvin Minsky (who is accused of assaulting one of Epstein’s victims)”
In his own words Stallam said
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.
[...]
Whatever conduct you want to criticize, you should describe it with a specific term that avoids moral vagueness about the nature of the criticism.
Hardly a defense, he was calling for better and more precise terms to describe what happened.
Something I would expect from someone of his age talking with young students, fueled by passion and rage
I’m writing this because I’m too angry to work. says Selam G. on her blog post.
Angry people that let their anger win never made the World a better place IMO.
Whatever is the truth, I think it takes courage to defend someone you know "only distantly" when you think he's been wrongfully accused (in your opinion) and to do it publicly even though that could cost you your career and you have nothing to gain.
Anyway Minsky's long been dead.
Great, it's an interesting philosophical question. If the issue is so important to him, he should transition to a career in philosophy, or sociology, or anthropology.
However, as a board member of the FSF, a public-facing leadership role, his job is to promote free software and nothing but free software. He shouldn't muddle that message by talking about ideas that are generally taboo in normal conversation. And I don't think it's just the [blue-team elite coastal] public for whom sex-with-minors talk is not regular dinner conversation, or at least I hope it's not.
The only reason that didn’t create more controversy before is that he is very left-wing politically and so are most power brokers in the industry. So being outspoken about the Iraq war, etc didn’t get him canceled in the same way as happened to the Dixie chicks. If he were a strident Republican I suspect his political notes would have put him in trouble far sooner.
One could certainly argue that as an ambassador for FLOSS he should have avoided all politics on his website, on the other hand i guess it was only the two (very bad) notes on statutory rape that were dredged up later, along with a variety of other material, to justify the campaign against him since the initial Epstein/Minsky related allegation fell apart so quickly.
I'd also push back on the post further up: It's not a particularly interesting philosophical question, and I don't think pure inquiry is RMS's goal here given his tendency to aggressively hit on women that are completely uninterested in him in contexts where such behavior is inappropriate.
I agree this is de facto the case. It's kind of sad, though, and I don't think the world needs to be this way. There should be a way for an e.g. CEO or similar to have a life and persona outside of a job.
> That kind of influence is an enormous privilege, one that nearly everyone that has it has had to chase aggressively their entire careers if not lives.
I don't think RMS did that, and I don't think "nearly everyone that has it has had to chase [it]". Some people do, and others just... become (in)famous in their respective fields. Imagine just wanting to be good at basketball, getting some of level of fame, and then just hearing "shut up and dribble", etc.
> there are many famous people who've figured out how to self actualize their lives without attracting attention
And how does one go about this without e.g. not saying anything at all? Discussing politics or societal ills is -always- going to irk some people. It's really not fair to say that, because someone now has some level of reach, that they have to basically say nothing at all. Why is there no personal responsibility or accountability? I'm going to assume the controversial stance here that people just don't raise children right, to not dwell on peoples' words just because they're "famous". And that is a larger societal issue than celebrities simply having opinions as a human being.
We cannot change the behavior of every person in the world.
But we can change the people who represent the FOSS community to the world.
I'd say it's getting harder and harder to tell the difference.
Being a public figure has a lot of downsides. Maybe society could, as a whole, be a bit nicer to public figures (and everyone else for that matter). But that is a bigger ask. And it’s not exactly clear how to achieve that.
It's called private life for a reason: it's not in public.
But when acting as a public speaker and spokeperson you should be acting accordingly.
Weird remarks about age of consent on public mailing lists, or hitting on every young woman at a conference or eating skin from a foot in front of a whole audience are all behaviors that put the whole FOSS movement in a bad light.
I'd love to see what contributions to FLOSS the downvoters have achieved.
By that logic, a person without primary job in social study can criticise him for his social behaviour. People are more than just what they work on and everyone has ideas to themselves how society should be including me, you and him and sometimes like to tell the world about this. I generally tend to ignore that, e.g. when a programmer tells how bad trump is or what should be the age for consent in this case. But this doesn't mean there should be anything bad in expressing social opinion publicly.
Wtf does that have to do with free software?
And why does he keep doing this over and over again? There's no smoke without fire
/s
It has nothing to do with free software, you're right, they are his opinions on stuff.
It's not independent, you can't just drop the context. RMS the 9-5 software dev at some nameless corporation having this discussion is, while still unacceptable (because the relevant society has decided that it is obvious why sex with minors is harmful), not nearly as impactful as RMS the respected-by-many leader of the free software movement. The clout he has from that position and work makes him influential even outside of the sphere, as well as affecting people who might join the movement but are pushed away because they find his other opinions unacceptable.
That's why we're talking about it in this comment thread instead of ignoring it like we do most of the weird takes on the internet.
> I'm also not sure why "inclusive" is a good criterion for FSF leader, it seems like just a hollow shibboleth buzzword at this point. People who harp on "inclusion" are usually the most interested in exclusion.
The paradox of tolerance explains why it might feel like being inclusive of many groups of people involves exclusion.
I think the problem in it with respect to mine lies here: "because the relevant society has decided that it is obvious why sex with minors is harmful"
But it's not obvious who is a minor or when a minor having sex is wrong. I commented elsewhere, but what about two 15 year olds? A 15 and a 20? In some country X where age of consent is 14, vs. in some country Y where age of consent is 18--is there a moral difference? Where is the real moral line that society has decided upon, according to you? 17.375 years?
The Minsky / RMS thing involved this sort of question. The girl was 17.
Not to mention how clueless you have to be to discuss age of consent laws on a many-thousand person workplace mailing list with teenagers on it.
but on the other hand some might think that the FSF is becoming one of those organizations were "social indignation" has more importance than "due process" and it might alienate old and new contributors that value that aspect.
Politics is always a trade off, you can't make everybody happy.
Society declares a lot of things obviously wrong and most of us never really examine why they are wrong, particularly from first principles. I think being willing to examine and question these kinds of assumptions fosters a very open culture where people aren't afraid to speak up (unlike the other 99% of the world where you live in fear).
E.g. I'm in the same boat Stalman was in that I've never recieved a satisfactory exaplanation from first principles about why mutually agreed (using that term because "consensual" has legal meanings) non-penetrative sexual interaction between a child and an adult is harmful. I've just been told to take it on faith that it causes horrible damage (and ignore the obvious confounders in the "studies"/anecdotes and the surrounding society working hard at placing the victim label on the child, which could easily cause damage itself).
Does sound like a pretty terrible manager. An unpaid volunteer position on the board doesn’t really seem like the position where these problems would happen again. And they weren’t the reason he got in hot water - that was all related to a media firestorm over Minsky/Epstein.
What would you consider an appropriate statute of limitations here?
I do find it questionable to dig up decades old actions that were apparently dealt with at the time by appropriately unionizing and fixing the situation, and say that means a person should never have even a volunteer job again.
I feel like a problem that plagues software worse than other industries is that BigTechCo can pay multiple times more than what I'll call "greater good" kinds of places like:
* government
* education, especially in high school
* software freedom / open source / communal / etc types of places
The one that I mourn the most is high school computer teachers. How many startups were started by people with only a year or so of college? How important is high school in choosing your career? How often is curiosity suppressed in high school when students try to go off the standard curriculum into material the teacher isn't familiar with, and think of how easy it is to do that in programming?
But I digress. I want to call out an example of this kind of "clearly, obviously for the common good" done right: Let's Encrypt. I think their software people make ~200k the last time I looked? Which is pretty dang good. I think the main thing it might lack is the kind of comp you get to via equity in a startup or public company. But given LE isn't that kind of company, I don't think you can fault them too much for that. So while I wish LE devs were paid like senior google devs, 200k gets you pretty damn far anywhere but NYC and San Francisco.
First it was the Epstein connection, which proved false.
Then it was predatory behaviour at MIT with three quotes from over 3 decades, a sign on his door, and a mattress doused in implications.
Then it was simply "making some people uncomfortable", which is sort of a given if you talk about free software to groups of people who are in the proprietary software industry, and says nothing at all.
If you want the "real issues" addressed, stop drowning them in fabrications.
Is this about Thomas Bushnell? Because I feel this is about Thomas Bushnell[1].
Bushnell is currently a friar in a religious order and works for google, and there is nothing wrong with that[2].
I can easily work with devout religious people and respect and accept them for their superior knowledge of the matter at hand (say, Don Knuth), but there's nothing wrong with politely declining their opinions when it comes to "issues" or how to become a "better" person.
Again, no disrespect to Bushnell, who I'm sure did a fine job, but I'm not willing to take his assessment of the personality of an avouched atheist at face value.
[1]https://medium.com/@thomas.bushnell/a-reflection-on-the-depa...
[2] well, working for Google can be debatable depending on what you do there.
It doesn't have to be. I've known over a dozen people working at the FSF over the years, and they _all_ had the same stories about trying to avoid RMS as much as physically possible because of his behavior and how he treated people. At some point we have to stop looking for excuses and start listening to the people who are actually there.
> First it was the Epstein connection
Correction: _Last_ it was the Epstein connection, a straw on a pile of many straws.
I'd love to, if only these people who are so aggrieved would properly write down their experiences instead of "I didn't like him anyway" after-the-fact tweets.
> Correction: _Last_ it was the Epstein connection, a straw on a pile of many straws.
Yes, quite enough to build a strawperson as an effigy, and now you're doing it, because there was no Epstein connection. In all of MIT, the only person you can trust not to have any sort of connection to Epstein would be rms, but yeah, let's blame him and the dead guy, and take it from there.
If you prefer the phrases "defense of Minsky in his 70s having sex with a minor on a private island where Minksy then later hosted another conference _after_ Epstein's public conviction for sex trafficking and being designated a level three sex offender" or perhaps "refusal to recognize sex with minors as rape" we can use one of those instead. I don't mind. Because Stallman _did_ say he believed that Minsky had sex with a 17 year old on a billionaire's small private island and saw nothing wrong with it, and Minsky _did_ host a conference on Epstein's island after Epstein's crimes became public.
> I'd love to, if only these people who are so aggrieved would...
I think it's weird for you to expect everyone to blog about their daily negative experiences instead of venting to their friends and then trying to forget.
The two sides here are people who work at or with the FSF (or who have close friends who work at or with the FSF) and people whose only exposure is shit blogs that come up on google. And the people who work at or with the FSF are like "RMS is a nightmare for me or for a close friend of mine", and the people who google shit blogs are like "I don't find these shit blogs to be compelling enough to notice the fact that the people saying that RMS has been a nightmare are all the people who have to work with him". Everyone gets to pick their side though.
> I think it's weird for you to expect everyone to blog about their daily negative experiences
And I think it's weird that most with personal grievances against rms can't be bothered to write anything but the shortest of anecdotal tweets and most with pleasant or neutral experiences take the time write long form articles including names, dates, locations, etc.
If one sets out to ruin someone's life one could at least put in some effort to convince those that are not automatically on your side.
For example: RMS did not believe in providing raises — prior cost of living adjustments were a battle and not annual. RMS believed that if a precedent was created for increasing wages, the logical conclusion would be that employees would be paid infinity dollars and the FSF would go bankrupt.
That's unlawful in Italy to avoid salary discrimination where people in poorer areas (the South) are paid less for the same job.
It's considered a great victory by Italian huge worker unions.
Or this other one
RMS created non-safe spaces at both MIT & the FSF. When I was at the FSF, RMS had little to no empathy for the staff. The FSF was not a healthy, functional workplace. We formed a union to help protect ourselves from RMS — he controlled our pay, benefits, and workplace conditions.
Again, this is totally subjective.
It's a work place not a kindergarten, you don't like the place you leave, we are talking about software engineers not cleaning staff, they'd have a chance anywhere else.
this is simply this guy personally holding a grudge against RMS, but there's nothing objectively bad here.
You know what's really bad? that it happens at Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple l, but you don't know because workers simply can't talk about it.
Low paid workers fear of losing their salary, high paid workers don't care about them and also don't want to lose their huge benefits and say screw them
What is terrifying is people thinking that knowing something is worse than not knowing because if you talk, it's bad for you.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/may/05/amazon-pr...
What is bad IMO is thinking that unions are inherently a bad thing, but I am glad they exist and I am member myself of one of them in Italy that has 5.5 million other members and I gladly pay monthly to be part of it,even though I rarely need them they offer free services and protection to all the workers.
If nobody has been fired, harrased or threatened for proposing to unionize, that's a great plus in my book that puts the FSF ahead of many other job places in the US.
ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2019/10/15/fsf-rms.html
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
> FSF under Stallman kinda lost to open source anyway and hasn't really done anything besides virtue signal to others about how pure and ethical they are
Then why do you care at all about the FSF in the first place? It sounds like you're here just to spread rumors and opinions in this case.
I can't answer for the OP but it's clear that the FSF was a in a leadership position within the software world in the 1980s and 1990s. That position has slipped precipitously despite the increasing importance of the GNU software they developed in every aspect of modern computing. RMS, both in his behavior while representing the FSF at conferences and his (lack of) understanding of the modern computing environment[1], was/is very clearly part of the reason for that decline. I think the principles the FSF stands for are good and important, however without an organization to promote them they will continue to wither in the modern age and bringing back RMS will not help to reverse that trend.
[1] How can a man who spent years refusing to use normal web browsers and insisting on having web pages e-mailed to him possibly be positioned to develop policies to promote the principles of Free Software within the framework of the modern web?
Who cares about 'leadership position' aren't people capable of deciding things for themselves?
> FSF stands for are good and important, however without an organization to promote them they will continue to wither in the modern age and bringing back RMS will not help to reverse that trend.
So, people can form something similar to the FSF then. Put out a better product, whatever it is the FSF does, and then people will care. Otherwise, your opinions don't matter.
The FSF doesn't owe you anything, and they're only your leader if you choose to follow them.
The companies that have spoken out against Stallman represent 100's of billions of dollars in capital. It's pretty pathetic when you think about it.
How can you look at the "modern web" and claim that? It looks like he understands it perfectly well, even back in the day, but what can he do other than say it's not good for user freedom when faced with user-hostile corporations with literal billions at their disposal?
> refusing to use normal web browsers and insisting on having web pages e-mailed to him
That's silly. His workflow is obviously email based, which, given that he travels a lot and stays in places with possibly less than stellar connection, is perfectly practical. Get all your work on your device when you have a connection and work through them in batches until the next good connection.
Having wrong or plain stupid ideas does not mean you should die and all the [brilliant] work you are doing should go to waste.
the bigger the target you attack, the better. right? what is your contribution to this world?
they are not even close to the same thing. look, RMS is a weirdo - everyone understands this. But most people are not even close to his level. This exceptionality has it’s drawbacks and its cost. Do you really think the FSF wants to deal with all this? What is the thought process behind reinstating RMS?
The duty to resist it rests on our collective shoulders.
It often depends on what that outside work is; if RMS was a bad soundcloud rapper, I couldn't care less, it's inconsequential. If he was a known puppy puncher (which he isn't), I'd care a lot more, because that matters so much to me that I don't want to even remotely support anyone like that.
But in this case the complaints aren't "outside of that area", they're directly related to his role as a leader of the free software movement. His harassment of people directly hurts other people in the movement and people who potentially could join and help out. His musings on pedophilia are not simply unacceptable, they directly lead to people dismissing the movement because they fear joining a movement that abides such opinions. That they are both is part of what makes him unfit.
> all the [brilliant] work you are doing should go to waste
I believe that the opportunity cost of keeping someone like RMS in a leadership position is higher than the accomplishments he achieves by that position. It's not simply a "cancellation" for some abstract moral reason, it's that he is _not worth it_ compared to what could have been achieved with the people he pushed away.
The argument is that by retaining his position he is actively alienating people. Do you think he is such a phenomenal genius that keeping him is worth ten good people quitting or not joining in the first place? A hundred? A thousand? Where is the break-even point where it becomes more beneficial to keep a "genius" than being welcoming to new people who feel deeply uncomfortable around his behavior. And are you measuring him by what he has created in the past, or are you really considering his present value and likelihood of future contributions?
What if he's not so brilliant after all and you're allowing one "genius" to cost you equivalent or even superior "geniuses" with less abrasive personalities?
We like to tell stories about individual heroes, but if there is one recurring pattern in history it's that we're always standing on the shoulders of giants -- and even that imagery is misleading as it is not really just a handful of giants but armies of them, mutually supporting each other as they carry your weight.
Unless the people at the FSF calling for his ousting are privately acknowledging that this is only because of the 'bottom line' (I don't think that's the case), then it becomes necessary to judge the actual reasoning of those hundred/thousands of people's decision to avoid RMS. Put simply, when is it okay to just implement a blind appeal to popularity?
He's a drain on the organization's reputation. People don't join the FSF because of the great working hours and phenomenal pay, they mostly join it for ideological reasons. We're not talking about retiring a beloved mascot because people don't like it anymore, we're talking about removing an individual holding a position of power who's actively keeping people away by being a sex pest.
"Having a CEO in favor of Data Privacy/Product Safety/Responsible Bank Lending will lead to thousands of potential employees avoiding our company!"
I'm sure you'll disagree with the particulars on the FSF case, but I'm just saying popularity is not the slam-dunk you're implying.
There are no numbers here, so this is literally impossible to debate. You can say X, I can say Y, and it's all completely subjective.
I personally don't think that he's driving away people like people claim. RMS is involved with the gnu project, fsf, and free software (now renamed open source), but those projects are each far bigger than he is.
> What if he's not so brilliant after all and you're allowing one "genius" to cost you equivalent or even superior "geniuses" with less abrasive personalities?
Again, this is impossible to debate in good faith. There are infinite hypothetical alternate realities, what good does it do for any of us to muse over them? Maybe a "super genius" exists and is being held back by RMS' continued existence. Maybe not.
It's not just cus of RMS saying the age of consent is wrong...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_petition_against_age_...
On one hand, they seem to have this quasi genetic memory of things being an abomination unto the Lord[1], while on the other hand, it's not hip to be openly religious, so they won't openly mention the Lord[1], all the while maintaining their puritanic shackles and even have outrage at the people who don't have those shackles.
Just you wait until they realize what you wrote about Foucault and denounce any and all of his achievements ;-) It seems to be very trendy these days.
[1] The ironic bit, of course, is that the Scripture doesn't state what the age of consent should even be.
The implication that leftist thought is rooted in pedophilia is, I'm sure, intentional flamebait. I will just point out that, whether or not people are right to vilify Stallman, no one here is suggesting that we abandon the free software movement because one of its most prominent figures said unsavory things. So there is no logical inconsistency.
Aren't Foucault, Derrida and Lyotard still big names and influences in postmodern thought (and the whole "woke" movement)?
Is there a place I can quickly catch up on these events?
I also don't think that the foot skin eating thing is a non-starter. People are weird; I can live with that.
But the other stuff is obviously troubling.
No, only about the top third of the article is that. The rest covers the various subsequent attacks and goes through their claims at length.
What can the FSF do better, with or without RMS ? I honestly don't think there are too many good solutions. The parts that matter to FSF (i.e., free software at the hardware layer), are also the most challenging and for which there are no business incentives, political awareness, or will. Otherwise, garden variety free/open source software is already fine and flourishing depending on business interests.
> Otherwise, garden variety free/open source software is already fine and flourishing depending on business interests.
Open source thriving is actually a loss for free software, in the view of the free software movement, because open source software can and does still restrict user freedoms.
His support for pedophilia was explicit (though in context it was actually support for “consensual” sex between adults and children, not support for mere pedophilia, which is an orientation, not an action.)
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-01/msg00...
Imagine taking the time to publicly explain to an out-of-practice dev why some technical feature is needed, then being accused of a "pressure campaign" that requires the out-of-practice dev to consult privately, "with people I have confidence in."
Gnu devs have an impressive amount of patience and grace to put up with that. But I see a lot of other FOSS devs try to replicate RMS's unnecessarily aggressive rhetoric. They often shoot themselves in the foot with it, disrespecting and consequently losing valuable contributors who are otherwise aligned philosophically with the project in every way.
That kind of disruption is at odds with every value FOSS devs claim to hold-- meritocratic, decentralized, etc. Even Debian put the hammer down when an out-of-practice dev tried to use permissions to disrupt the work of a new dev. Nobody sane and self-respecting should put up with this kind of behavior.
Edit: clarification
GCC plugins were a stallman thing, LLVM was even offered to the FSF at one point IIRC. Is there anything competent he has done post-2000 or so?
While you may not care about it, GPLv3.
- Because it was a new license, it necessarily resulted in license fragmentation, which is an ongoing headache for the free software community. It's worth doing if there's a serious need that outweighs the costs and you can guide the community towards dropping the old license, but....
- The Linux kernel had always been GPLv2 only and remained GPLv2-only, which meant that the most interesting GPL-licensed code on TiVos and similar devices was not subject to GPLv3.
- Embedded devices like TiVos generally want a small userspace. The most popular choice was Busybox, which announced that it was GPLv2-only.
- Also, Busybox turned out to be a reasonably straightforward product to replace, which hurt the ongoing aims of GPL enforcement - including regular old GPLv2 enforcement about simply getting source code at all: https://lwn.net/Articles/478249/
- The FSF moved its own projects to GPLv3 only, but that scared the largest surviving commercial UNIX vendor (Apple) enough that they remained on GPLv2-only versions, and eventually started sponsoring the development of permissively-licensed competitors to even reasonably difficult products to replace, such as LLVM and its ecosystem (lldb etc.) instead of GCC and its ecosystem, which are now technically on par with GCC, if not much more advanced. (Historically, one of the FSF's biggest successes at making inroads in the proprietary software world was getting Steve Jobs to use GCC and release the Objective-C frontend for it!)
- Because the FSF couldn't guide enough other major projects towards GPLv3-only, many brand-new GPL'd software projects continue to use "GPLv2 or later" to this day to work around license fragmentation (i.e. so they can share code with other GPLv2+ projects), meaning any additional strictness of GPLv3 is irrelevant in enforcement.
- Of the major issues around software freedom and digital autonomy today, approximately zero of them are TiVoization - and, as described above, that's not because GPLv3 was wildly successful in combating the threat, it's because it turned out not to be that pressing of a problem.
There is basically no leverage in GPLv3. Just about everything you'd want to do with free software today, you can do with GPLv2 or permissively-licensed works.
According to what? It seems to me tivoization is exactly one of the biggest issues facing users these days, especially in an IoT world, so how you can draw that conclusion (and the others) baffles the mind.
I think if you really want to understand GPLv3, you should listen to Eben Moglen more than RMS, because Eben has the ability to articulate in a way that RMS doesn't, and has given some very good speeches about not just GPLv3, but on the FOSS ecosystem as a whole.
Why is it that almost always I find the attacks against GPLv3 to be so lacking in substance? (for example, using an openly user hostile company like Apple as a reason for why it was bad just seems... like blatant pandering to me, as opposed to a real argument)
And it's actually a little strange that they still release code and build on a different free-software compiler when not legally required to, despite being so user-hostile of a company, arguably quite a bit more user-hostile than they were in the past. There's a lot of discussion we ought to have about why they're contributing, whether that leverage was real, whether we could have predicted the rest of what they did, etc.
For IoT in particular, given that the processing power on-device is limited, I think it's pretty common for the serious risk to one's freedom/autonomy to be the fact that the data is being held and processed remotely and you have basically no idea over what happens with it, let alone any control. The GPLv3 does not include a requirement to release the source for the server component, so the best you can do is reimplement the entire effective functioning of the product from scratch. Also, because the GPLv3 has no such requirement and probably couldn't, that effectively is a motivation for the manufacturer to move as much processing server-side as possible.
(And at that point, you may have a better time building the device yourself or more practically buying it from a more friendly hardware manufacturer. Even for the TiVo, if you're going to have to implement a DVR yourself, the video capture card and the hard disk are the easiest part of it.)
I can see a limited use case for things like smart TVs to just sort of prevent them from communicating with the network at all, but a firewall can do that just fine - and it's a lot more practical for most people than hacking the device firmware.
My claim isn't that there's no use for freedom on consumer devices with on-board software - quite the opposite. My claim is that the specific thing the GPLv3 tried to save us from hasn't been the priority it was made out to be, and in the process it just made free software worse. I am totally open to a counterargument - is there a device you have where a) it does run some GPL (any version) code and b) there is some meaningful change you could make to the code it runs?
"My claim is that the specific thing the GPLv3 tried to save us from hasn't been the priority it was made out to be, and in the process it just made free software worse. I am totally open to a counterargument - is there a device you have where a) it does run some GPL (any version) code and b) there is some meaningful change you could make to the code it runs?"
I would like to say that v3 addressed much more than just tivoization. Lets not overfocus on just that one point.
While I gather you are looking to get a response about IoT devices, I am a heavy proponent of gpl, and v3 specifically, and have worked for years to make almost my entire daily stack gpl. I don't have a apple-tv or a chromecast, nor even a smart tv. I have a linux box dedicated to my dumb tv. Tons of gplv3 on it I can modify at any time.
Now practically, on much bigger projects, I tend not to modify anything, but I have found that on smaller projects/repos I find I am much more willing and able to make a few modifications here and there, and have, mostly because by sticking to the do one thing well principle, I can then chain together tools in ways I want.
"I can see a limited use case for things like smart TVs to just sort of prevent them from communicating with the network at all, but a firewall can do that just fine"
This is a great example, because TV's being user hostile means that a firewall doesn't actually mean that much. For example, there are smart tv's found to connect to any random open wifi to transmit their user data... completely outside the owners knowledge (or firewall). Being able to actually control the devices you own is a key factor, and no amount of "well the user could or should do this" neverending arms-race fixes that, but fixing the fact that I cant root a smart tv would.
That's why I think the Apple case is relevant. Apple is a user-freedom-hostile company. (I actually think they're great at certain things like privacy that are necessary components of user freedom / digital autonomy, but certainly I wouldn't say I've particularly got autonomy over what happens on my iPhone.) And Apple (or well, their precursor, NeXT) decided to contribute to GCC because licensing compelled them to. And now Apple is deciding to contribute to LLVM with no compulsion, which is really kind of strange given that we thought we needed a licensing lever to make that happen, and also there seems to be no licensing lever we can possibly pull to get them to open up the actually interesting parts of any of their devices. The GPLv3 cannot possibly prevail against Apple, because they can and empirically did just reimplement things to avoid it.
This is the difficulty with licensing as a weapon, and it's something that the free software movement needs to seriously struggle with. Did the strategy make sense in the past and it no longer does? Did it never make sense, and we were just lucky? Are we not trying hard enough?
And to be clear, I'm not saying that he FSF needs to be pragmatic instead of ideological. The FSF always was pragmatic as a means towards being ideological. That's why it built GNU, an entire coherent OS that people could actually use, and didn't just write licenses. And that's why a lot of the early FSF focus was on redeveloping parts of UNIX that had no immediate free replacement, instead of writing free software in general.
Quoting RMS:
> As the GNU Project proceeded, and increasing numbers of system components were found or developed, eventually it became useful to make a list of the remaining gaps. We used it to recruit developers to write the missing pieces. This list became known as the GNU Task List. In addition to missing Unix components, we listed various other useful software and documentation projects that, we thought, a truly complete system ought to have.
I argue that the reason that RMS / the FSF had leverage over NeXT/Apple in the past was that it was ruthlessly pragmatic: they built an amazingly high-quality compiler compared to all the alternatives that existed at the time, such that the obvious thing for a for-profit, user-hostile company to do was to comply with the terms of the license. That pragmatism gained them an ideological victory.
The GPLv3 is very ideological, but it was only ideological. There wasn't a plan for how to actually get anyone (except the FSF themselves) to use it; there wasn't even a plan for how to get the actual GPL'd code running on actual TiVo devices to use it.
So - I don't know what modifications to v3 would have accomplished the ideological mission, and my tentative answer would be it couldn't be done. But that just brings up the question of why it couldn't be done - what could they have done to have enough power/influence to cause a mass switch to GPLv3?
Or was there some other way that they could have addressed the threat of user-hostile devices other than through writing a new software license?
I'm not really sure how you define "software freedom" or "digital autonomy". What I do know is that the majority of phones sold today run Android. Despite being technically "open source" and therefore free software, it is impossible in practice to replace the software due to "secure boot". This is what GPLv3 was intended to combat. I agree that it was a failure (it turns out corporations _really_ don't want us choosing our own software).
This is how disparaging internet rumors are spread. You know someone that allegedly experienced this. Do you know them well enough to know the account is factual, or maybe they were just piling on because they had a bad experience with him and decided to frame him in this negative way because it was the 'cool' thing to do at the time?
Quit proliferating unsourced 3rd party accounts.
I would just say what the project was but he's basically the sole maintainer of the GNU side of it.
I know pretty much nothing about this Stallman person, does he actually dislike people with children?
Apparently this argument only subsided because it was noted that rms is not vegetarian
"He was kind, attentive, and has a loving core. In simple language, he patiently explained to my son, then around 12, about the virtues of the GNU/Linux operating system"
https://whoisylvia.medium.com/richard-stallman-has-been-vili...
He doesn't deem "having children" as some sort of special accomplishment though, which might rub some parents the wrong way.
You're mixing things here. :) meritocracy and decentralization are completely orthogonal to free software. They [edit: s/are/could be construed as a/] part of the open-source ethos as explored in CATB & explained by esr, not a sine-qua-non of free software.
Whatever we want to call that, and whatever the origins of the problem, it is a bad thing.
Edit: clarification
We can agree the discussion could be handled better, and the accusations were unwarranted in context; I happily chalk that up to a misunderstanding (rms not seeing other people's lack of awareness of value framework incompatibility as a massive obstacle to conversation, instead assuming interlocutors had better information than they seemed to, in which case their behavior could have been construed as being in bad faith) - which implies 2015 rms should probably dial it down in the strength of his accusations among other adjustments. Communication is _not_ easy.
If a farmer and a forest ranger go into a patch of land, they will see the same scenery, but may have heated discussions about what to do with it. Unless they understand that one of them wants to produce food, and the other to protect the forest. And if one of them has decision-making power over the terrain, even if they have not been in there personally for a while - the argument about how what they want to do fits with the decision-maker's values needs to be made.
Of course, nobody is stopping the developers from going and doing the stuff they want to do in the first place, distributing it and, if the change is as technically important as it seems and the cards are played just right, even becoming the de-facto standard distribution of a piece of software; their changes just won't be merged into the main product for the foreseeable future.
e: Also, it's hilarious to jump to Apr 2021 and see a thread titled "How to make Emacs popular again: Use monospaced fonts less".
(Personally, I thought it's used mostly for coding, so idunno if proportional fonts will be a popularity panacea.)
Sometimes I lost my temper because I didn't have the social skills to avoid it. Some people could cope with this; others were hurt. I apologize to each of them. Please direct your criticism at me, not at the Free Software Foundation."
This is such a great argument for why he shouldn't be in a leadership position. These social skills are crucial in this role.
For better or worse, a huge number of very successful leaders have had problems with losing their temper. Not that we should idolize poor anger control, of course.
Absolutely not. He is a theorist (if not the theorist) of Free Software. His role is paramount, he is literally the only human completely implacable regarding the degrees of freedom that should be guaranteed to algorithms and software.
The whole movement he started has as well spurred the Creative Commons movement, that is an application to the same principles more specifically to art.
In most organizations, "theorists" aren't the people in charge, no matter how cogent their theories.
Even if it's true that he's the "only human" who's capable of doing the job the best possible (in which case, as some other commenters noted, what happens if he drops dead tomorrow??), that doesn't justify allowing someone with a long history of abusive management and no apparent understanding of what made it abusive back into a management position.
If his prior pedophilia apologism were the only issue with him, then this more-or-less-apology might at least passably address that. It does nothing for his terrible personality in general and his tendency to be ableist, racist, misogynist, and just overall an asshole, any of which should disqualify him from such a public leadership role in the software community.
Keeping him there does so much harm to the image of programmers and software developers of all kinds worldwide.
[1] http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2019/10/15/fsf-rms.html
[2] https://twitter.com/paulnivin/status/1377079987950395393
Not only is this assuredly false, but it's also the last thing we need in a position of leadership or even as a consultant.
Understanding nuances is paramount for these positions.
On technical matters, you are correct; on moral matters it's a different story.
Think about the moral tragedies of history; we didn't need someone saying "maybe we should not be so evil; let's be less evil - not stop, because that's disruptive and I am not an extremist, but maybe dial it down a bit?"
On moral battlegrounds we need someone capable of saying "we have to stop, and no price is too high to pay in order to stop being evil". Someone who is willing to pay the price themselves, and make the price as low as possible for anyone that wishes to follow through. Nothing less than that suffices; "They enslave their children's children who make compromise with sin", to say it poetically.
They are intertwined. His moral positions have done incredible damage to GCC at a technical level, and lost huge amounts of marketshare to LLVM as a direct result.
(Stallman thought that making the compiler more modular and extensible was totally unacceptable because it might be possible in theory to write proprietary tools that used GCC to dump intermediate representations. Thus preventing any FOSS tools from using GCC, also).
We can take this as a given for the purposes of the discussion.
> They are intertwined
But which has priority?
The main issue with this topic is that it's sometimes hard to see things from an angle we're so unaccustomed to.
The FSF and the GNU project are accidentally technical, morally-driven organizations. Technical superiority is never the argument for Free Software. You may be thinking about Open Source and mixing them up.
Try to see it from that point of view: if an organization exists to prevent "some evil" from happening and make it as easily as possible for "good people" to not commit and not be subjected to "that evil", it makes sense that the organization will sacrifice things that don't seem to make sense because they are avoiding as strongly as they can to make "some evil" easier to commit.
The goal is not market share; the goal is not technical superiority; the goal is not profit; the goal is to "not be evil", help others "not be evil" and not make it easier than it ever needs to be to "be evil".
Look at the "about" pages in the FSF & Gnu project websites and you will notice that it is not a bad choice for them to avoid doing some things "for market share" or "to remain competitive" when those clash with creating free software, making it easier to create free software, and make sure (within the realm of possibility) that their work cannot be used to facilitate the building of non-free software.
From the FSF's point of view loss of market share is an acceptable loss, if the alternative is "be evil". That is why, odd as it may seem, the FSF needs someone who does not compromise on that.
Market share is absolutely a goal, even if it's only a part of the broader goal. GCC used to have significant leverage to advance free software, and now they have almost none.
>From the FSF's point of view loss of market share is an acceptable loss, if the alternative is "be evil". That is why, odd as it may seem, the FSF needs someone who does not compromise on that.
But it's not. Go look through some of the mailing list threads about LLVM, the whining is nearly unbearable. Despite LLVM having been offered to GNU in the mid 2000s (yes the whole thing, even extending to copyright assignment) and GNU having turned it down due largely to their opposition to modularity.
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00...
> It restarted, however, when Poimboeuf came back a few days later with another idea for solving his problem: recompiling all plugins when the GCC version changes. This was refused by Yamada, who noted that Ubuntu does not have the GCC mismatch problem, so the problem seemed to be specific to Fedora. Linus Torvalds also disagreed with the proposal, but for another reason. For him there is no technical reason to recompile everything when the GCC version changes, but he expressed his concern on the usage and design of the GCC plugins in general. In a followup message he explained his reasoning in strong words:
>> The kernel gcc plugins _will_ go away eventually. They are an unmitigated disaster. They always have been. I'm sorry I ever merged that support. It's not only a maintenance nightmare, it's just a horrible thing and interface in the first place. It's literally BAD TECHNOLOGY.
> For Torvalds, the right way to implement such plugins is at the intermediate representation (IR) level, but GCC plugins were designed differently for non-technical reasons (out of fear for non-free plugins, which LWN covered back in 2008). People who are interested in plugins should use Clang, as it has a clean IR and easily allows adding similar checks at the IR level, he said.
So here we have Torvalds himself annoyed at GCC's ridiculous plugin architecture.
I am very emphatically not making any statements about the technical aspects of gnu software.
The FSF is not the same as the gnu project, even if they share a lot of values - since they're being used mostly interchangeably in this post, let's roll 'em into one.
Whether someone is good or not for an organization can't be evaluated against arbitrary values: they evaluation needs to be made against the organization's values and their current state.
It's the same issue as when people were complaining about the AST not being available to make emacs _customizable_ into a better C++ IDE. Before even thinking about the technical merits of the solution, the questions that need to be answered unequivocally look like: "Are we making it easier to create non-free software from our work if we do this?" or "Are we eliminating leverage that incentivizes people to write free software in this are?"
From the FSF's standpoint, The crucial questions like "Are we enabling amazing software?" or "Are we going to gain market share from this?" are _secondary_.
And much of people's teeth-grinding is because they don't understand that; at least in the AST discussion I noticed that people arguing for the AST didn't appear to see that their priorities weren't the same as the gnu project's, and rms seems to not have noticed the discrepancy (or attributed it to plausible malice) and made some very strong accusations to people who just weren't arguing their side from the appropriate value framework. Appropriate because gcc is a gnu project, therefore its roadmap is decided according to gnu's values.
If you can't see this, you can't understand that some features, desirable as they could be, should not be (from their standpoint) implemented; from their standpoint, pursuit of technical excellence, usefulness, market share, beauty - any other feature that a software project may have - is subordinated to the value of software freedom.
You may or may not agree with that, and that's OK; but an org that has that kind of value framework sure needs someone - not rms specifically, mind you - who shares it, or at least understands it thoroughly and can commit to making organizational decisions based wholly on that value structure.
So he's the Emperor from W40K? Got it.
/s
https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hat-statement-about-richa...
I think there's a massive difference with RMS in that he excuses his actions, but doesn't show much intent or ability to change them. Another FOSS leader, Linus Torvalds, did a 180 when it became clear his behavior wasn't tolerable anymore, and I think Linus showed a level of leadership in that which RMS cannot.
I have my own issues, and I freely admit I probably don't belong in a leadership role. Stallman should do the same, and put himself in an advising-only capacity.
Jocking aside, perfection is enemy of the good.
Nobody is all those things, all the time, consistently, over a life time.
Being a leader in the real World is mostly about being in the political position of influencing the decision of the entity you lead, being it a small team of developers, the local sports team or a corporation.
Look at Steve Jobs, he was capable of being a terrible human being, but was also able to put a lot of money in investors' pockets and so they kept him.
Also, having no technical skill has never stopped anybody from being involved in technical roles. They simply end up working where the bar is lower or were management doesn't care.
If what you say was true, posts like this would not exist.
https://allarsblog.com/2018/03/17/confessions-of-an-unreal-e...
> I sometimes made others uncomfortable or even offended them -- especially women. This was not a choice: I didn't understand the problem enough to know which choices there were.
Did anyone explain him that he downplayed the role of women in the GNU project? Janis Johnson, Sandra Loosemore, and Dorit Nuzman, to name a few, all did extraordinary work. Did he ever correct his statements about no women volunteering to work on GCC? Did he even read the author lists?
Did anyone ever tell him the Emacs virgins thing is very inappropriate? I'm pretty sure someone must have done that and, if not, he must have read the account of one young girl about how she felt. The fact he did that routine for years indicates he didn't listen or didn't care enough to change. And no, it's not normal for adults to be sexually attracted to teens.
I am very sure he now has been informed his behaviour is unacceptable. Is he doing anything to change that? That he doesn't have the innate wiring to recognise those subtle cues makes it more necessary for him to listen and take action on his behaviour because he is seen as the person behind the FSF and his actions and opinions reflect on the entire community.
All these are clear indications he, and the FSF board, don't see any of these as problems and that, sadly, makes them unfit to lead the Free Software community.
He wasn't aware of women working on GCC. There's nothing to correct. I'm not aware of women working on GCC. GNU has thousands of people working on it, he's not aware of most of them. So much criticism of him is taking his comments out of context and misrepresenting them, including so many things that are just complete fabrications that it makes it hard to actually understand what "real" problems there are.
> Did anyone ever tell him the Emacs virgins thing is very inappropriate?
Yes, and he agreed and stopped.
> And no, it's not normal for adults to be sexually attracted to teens.
K. You totally lost me there. Ever been to a porn website?
As a father of daughters this stuff is really skeevy to me. But as for “normal,” society has a ways to improve. Remember that Britney Spears became super popular at 16 and 17 and had many fans who were not kids. The first time I saw “Hit Me Baby One More Time” I was in Best Buy and it was showing on the 100 TVs and I remember thinking “What the fuck is this, how old is that poor girl?” And the store, as typical for BestBuy, was full of like 99% adult males.
....
>Sandra Loosemore is the lead author of the GNU Library Reference Manual;[3] RMS is listed as her co-author.
~1 million years of human history disagrees with your statement.
This isn't about not understanding social cues or lacking intuitive empathy, this is about actively choosing to ignore victims telling you what you're doing to them because your position allows you to get away with it.
This isn't the first time I've seen autism (or the implication thereof) being used to reframe gross sexual misconduct as naïve ignorance and it's simply disgusting and insulting towards other autistics who can't read emotions and are socially awkward but understand consent.
What he did went well beyond "locker room" jokes like the Emacs virgins thing or "tonedeaf" postulating about the age of consent. The reason he didn't understand that it was wrong wasn't that he's bad at social cues, it's that he didn't think of women as human beings.
This is still downstream of his autism. One of the common attributes of people on the spectrum is that they struggle immensely in terms of having a theory of mind of other individuals. Basically all human interaction and interpretation of that interaction is grounded in self-reference. TLDR as a default he (probably) has a hard time thinking of anyone other than himself as "human beings" in the way you mean it. I imagine w/ women it's doubly hard for RMS, because he has no experience as a woman that he could bring to the table.
I understand it is harder for him than for other people to be nice to others, but he is intelligent enough to work around his own limitations. If he's not, then, again, he will hurt a lot of people and should reconsider his role with the FSF.
This was how it started and this was also what most news reported on so I do not believe that it misses the point.
>Did anyone explain him that he downplayed the role of women in the GNU project?
Did you ask him?
>Did he ever correct his statements about no women volunteering to work on GCC? Did he even read the author lists?
Did you ask him?
>Did anyone ever tell him the Emacs virgins thing is very inappropriate?
He changed it after someone complained about it.
>That he doesn't have the innate wiring to recognise those subtle cues makes it more necessary for him to listen and take action on his behaviour because he is seen as the person behind the FSF and his actions and opinions reflect on the entire community.
This is a very ableist/sanist view. I would argue that it is the neurotypicals that should put the extra effort to be more explicit and not assume stuff.
However, usually apologies in this context backfire. Everything that you say about this can and will be used against you. This has happened to various people before, who (I believe) have been well-meaning but offended the wrong people.
I sincerely hope the best for him, but I don't expect this apology/elaboration will help him.
As pointed out by other commenters, this is more of a defense, or an explanation, than it is an apology.
I suspect RMS is made of sterner stuff, given his track record, and while no doubt these events must have exacted a psychological toll (after all, he is a human being) he must also be aware that there remain today many of us who deeply appreciate his principled positions regarding matters that affect us all.
And one remains hopeful that future generations that are afforded the necessary distance from conflated matters that cloud contemporary judgment will reach a more balanced conclusion and give the man his due credit.
This isn't a 'oh, he said one thing one time about one person' situation, this is instead a lifetime of behavior that for anybody else would have had consequences long ago.
He stopped doing it once people told him that it made others uncomfortable.
>being a creep ('tender embraces')
In the business cards that he gave out to people of any gender. This is not really a creepy thing to do.
>being abusive (https://twitter.com/migueldeicaza/status/1174044770546659329)
Miguel de Icaza is not a trustworthy person, especially due to the way that he betrayed the community. I am curious though, did he just sat there being passive-aggressive or did he tell rms to leave? Since nobody seems to have asked him about what actually happened I am going to.
>https://twitter.com/mattblaze/status/1374460763910201350
I will also ask him about this because I am curious.
>being a jerk ("These birth announcements also spread the myth that having a baby is something to be proud of"),
Does not seem like a jerk thing to do.
>This isn't a 'oh, he said one thing one time about one person' situation, this is instead a lifetime of behavior that for anybody else would have had consequences long ago.
It would be great if the ones organizing harassment campaigns against him also agreed with you. So far they have been focusing on spreading lies about him (such as about epstein, the mattress, or his opinions) rather than actual repeated abuse by him after people expressed their dislike for it.
(I still don't believe this apology should have been considered necessary though)
It reads as "I'm sorry my own ways made you feel offended". The right thing to do would be to say "I'm sorry my actions offended you and I will not do that anymore".
It'd have been that easy, really. He just doesn't seem to understand that on any level.
Still think that reinstating him at FSF was net negative for free software movement
[0] https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html#14_September...
> Sometimes I lost my temper because I didn't have the social skills to avoid it. Some people could cope with this; others were hurt. I apologize to each of them.
This: > Some people could cope with this;
means: "some people could take my shit and were not hurt"
This: > others were hurt. I apologize to each of them.
means: "others could not take my shit and were actually hurt. I apologize to each of them."
You won't let the poor bastard find peace, right?
https://www.fsf.org/news/statement-of-fsf-board-on-election-...
He has sincere regrets, especially at how anger toward him personally has negatively impacted the reputation and mission of FSF.
However it's refreshing to see that people that are consistently seen as abrasive and negative, can introspect, even due to external circumstances, and try to correct their behaviour so late in life.
I feel like online we need to try to empathize a lot more with others that don't match the well established "disadvantaged" categories instead of piling on the negativity.
I sometimes feel the same way; that in order to not cause disruption in social situations, I need to engage my conscious brain at 100% and monitor my actions (and other people's) because if I don't, I might communicate something in a way that another person will misinterpret and which then leads to trouble. If I act abrasive or negative, it is not by choice.
You can relax a bit. Because what you're missing is that 75% of people just don't even think of being careful like this and are fine with frequently coming across poorly to other people. You're just introspecting more and being polite, as I think is usually better and respectful.
We the socially inept can and do learn to adapt. He’s a clever man, he can do it too.
This is such a weird concept to me. I have no problems getting social cues, it comes natural to me. Doing it purely intellectually? I wouldn't have a fucking idea how to. I think it's similar to doing pretty lame things like walking. It's a complex task that you can only do because you do it automatically. If we had a pill that would simply remove your muscle memory, you couldn't walk.
"Just do it consciously, lol" doesn't work, I think.
However, I don't feel autism should be used as an excuse for bad behavior. I take responsibility for my actions and words, and so should RMS.
I agree. I'm not suggesting that it should be an excuse, just that it's a weird recommendation.
Some people find it easy to acknowledge their difficulties, others have a very hard time with that. It seems to me like RMS alludes to his difficulties, but doesn't get diagnosed, or doesn't share his diagnosis. That's his right, obviously. Other people then figure "hey, that guy is totally normal, he's just an asshole". Coupled with the fact that some get very emotionally invested when certain topics are touched, it's a recipe for disaster.
I did it numerous times and it's not that hard, but I admit I am much more socially functional than RMS.
I can't help but observe that this type of organizational "put up" is reserved only for some. Some people commit the most minor of crimes, perhaps as minor as enjoying the "wrong" type of music and just like that, never get a chance to participate or contribute. While other people commit terrible nasty crimes with actual real victims and keep getting additional chances. I'm not saying rms is this case.
My reading of this in the context of the post is that he self-aware enough to strive to be better, and admits he has failed to do so in the past.
> We the socially inept can and do learn to adapt. He’s a clever man, he can do it too.
Your response touches on something I have been trying to articulate for quite some time. For context: I am a bleeding-heart lefty and I am very often one of the loudmouths who critizes bad behaviour, including RMS's many social faux-pas (to put it politely).
What do we do with people who are trying to adapt, but their process doesn't look like we expect/wished it did?
His apology only barely grazes the actual points he was critized for. But he does admit to failing in the past, and tackles head-on how insufficient his responses were when it comes to women and his defense of Epstein-adjacent topics.
As much as we would like people to grovel and apologize the perfect way... they rarely do.
Is this, however, a good enough response that we can round it up to _redemption_? We want people to listen when we give them feedback on social stuff, we want them to engage us and take our pleas to heart, we want them to deconstruct themselves and do better.
One thing that is missing from these discussions, and this is bigger than the RMS stuff, is a sense of nuance and perspective. The Internet makes it really easy to escalate what should be a complaint into a full-on unforgivable offense... in some cases this is exactly what should be done and I welcome it, but in some others this escalation feels out of whack to me.
It is very hard to constructively argue about the proper intensity of our collective blowback to these offenses, because I haven't found a way to build a constructive defense of lesser-punishment that doesn't feel like a defense of the person or offense itself.
Back to RMS: while I will listen with an open mind to any oposing arguments you have, my subjective position is that this apology (although imperfect) is good-enough for me to believe he is trying.
Just now? He hasn't changed for decades and has been informed his behaviour is something people have "to cope with" for his benefit and never seemed to make even a small effort to change.
> As much as we would like people to grovel and apologize the perfect way... they rarely do.
Then he's unfit for a leadership role, plain and simple. If he won't be fair, if he won't cease to make people uncomfortable and won't stop making inappropriate jokes, why would the board reinstate him?
I can't actually argue with your reasoning here. Although my personal take is that he deserves an additional attempt... I can also see why one wouldn't be willing to give him that role again.
An actual apology by him or the fsf involved rectifying the error of putting rms in a position of leadership.
With all that said, I don't think this is going to bring any of the lost sponsors back.
I’m not sure how relevant FSF is supposed to be. They seem more relevant than ever, but aren’t a huge deal. They just run GPL and promote open source. And they’re one of many groups. So it’s ok, I think, to just do your thing and not blow up and be huge.
They are small ($1M annual budget [1] and 14 staff) and think that’s ok when compared to stuff like Mozilla where their CEO makes more than the entire FSF budget. The ROI from FSF compared to Mozilla seems really good and impactful.
Also, RMS isn’t “in charge” he’s on a board that includes four other people.
[0] https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2016/fall/the-role-of-lawsuits-... [1] 1.4M in 2017 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation
One would hope that he'd have an achievement at least once a decade.
> They also sue people [0] who break the license, so that’s good.
That's nice. No need to keep engineers around if they're just going to maintain a license then. Fire everyone and hire lawyers.
> I’m not sure how relevant FSF is supposed to be.
Very, I imagine. Very few organizations want to be small. Given that copyleft licenses are losing badly to more permissive licenses, I imagine that they'd prefer to be bigger and more effective.
> They are small ($1M annual budget [1] and 14 staff) and think that’s ok when compared to stuff like Mozilla where their CEO makes more than the entire FSF budget. The ROI from FSF compared to Mozilla seems really good and impactful.
I'd argue the opposite. Mozilla, for all of its faults, is actually trying to get open source and privacy respecting software into the hands of end users who aren't inherently ideological about this stuff. We can debate endlessly about their tactics and results, but in this decade at least they're massively more effective and important than the FSF.
I'd argue that the FSF is small in terms of staff and budget because the leadership has failed.
When I pointed out a few items they do to disprove your timeframe, you moved the goalposts and made statements as if the examples I gave were the only things FSF did.
You made an easy statement to disprove, I disproved it.
Feel free to research FSF and learn about what they do. You’ll certainly find examples of their impact “this decade.” I won’t look them up for you as I fear you’d then want examples from this femtosecond.
.. really sad for RedHat though ..
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/26/redhat_fsf_funding_ri...
I'm wondering if this last talent does actually require being on the spectrum, as he admits to in his first paragraphs.
https://www.aargauerzeitung.ch/amp/meinung/gastkommentar-ric...
"Es ging um unterschiedliche sexistische Übergriffe. An seiner Bürotür stand «Ritter für Gerechtigkeit (auch: heisse Ladies)»."
"The topic were various sexual assaults. On his office door there was a sign «knight for justice (also: hot ladies)»."
This has been debunked multiple times, in fact the photo shows it was most likely students making a joke:
https://www.stallmansupport.org/say-it-with-a-meme.html#door
Way to go, Swiss "Press Council" ...
I'm very glad he is around!
I really hope they get him out of FSF leadership ASAP. The damage he does to the free software movement is incalculable.
That's like saying the damage George Lucas has done to Star Wars is incalculable. Without George Lucas, there is no Star Wars. Did he fuck it up? Absolutely. Is the world a better place with Star Wars in it? I think so.
We're not going to change these old-timers. That's what makes them old-timers. We're only going to become old-timers ourselves someday (if we're lucky). Probably best to exercise as much compassion for them as we can, and hope the future returns the favor when our time comes.
> I sometimes made others uncomfortable or even offended them -- especially women.
If not, someone might need to explain to him that that too is customary in our society.
I feel similarly and wonder what this is called or how many others feel similarly. It’s curious to me as I try to solve problems and filter truth from false just in general everyday life so when someone says something that seems false it sticks out to me in my thoughts. I stopped trying to correct this as it seems most people aren’t very receptive, to say the least :) I’m not sure if people don’t care because being wrong isn’t the most important part, or they already know it’s false and don’t care.
It’s fun learning about how different people see the world and I think it’s cool how many different people there are in the world and people have really different world views than I.
> I stopped trying to correct this as it seems most people aren’t very receptive, to say the least.
Same; I have found it best to "keep my powder dry" so to speak, and have slowly, slowly learned to weigh my own sense of importance against various social values. I find it makes me more effective when it is indeed important.
A lot of people were offended by the theory that man descended from apes. Do you think Darwin should have apologised?
I used to be a vegetarian and had friends who would be upset and hurt when people ate meat. I don’t think meat eaters should apologize.
There’s lots of situations where someone says something reasonable, and someone gets upset and no apology is necessary.
Your claim that absolutely if opinions hurt people then the opinion haver should apologize , is wrong I think. And will lead to less discussion and a net negative to society.
Okay, let's try 'apologize' -> 1 result.
> Some people could cope with this; others were hurt. I apologize to each of them.
He victim-blames by saying that people 'couldn't cope' with him, and he's apologizing to them (because they couldn't cope??)
There are a billion apologies better than this. Simply "I made mistakes and I'm sorry" with some explanation that he feels remorse or is otherwise understanding of the pain he has caused.
This text instead reads like a spiteful, upset piece where he explains how misunderstood he is. That's not even close to an apology.
People were not wanting an apology to forgive someone afterwards. They were demanding total capitulation. Peace was not on the table.
I hope he can put this mess behind him.
Shocking in these comments how many people believe that people are not responsible for their own emotions. No one can "hurt another" emotionally. It is up to each person to take the mature (and logical) stance that "I am responsible for my emotions". If something someone does or says "hurts me" emotionally, it is because I have chosen to allow that emotion, or I have not sufficiently dealt with the circumstances that have caused it to arise such that I am unable to process it in a manner which does not put the responsibility for its arising on another.
I'm not saying that if someone shoots your mother you shouldn't feel angry or sad, but that the anger or sadness is not CAUSED by another. It arises solely within you. You can see that this is true because people react wholly differently dependent upon the individual. It is within human capability to positively act from a place of clarity rather than negatively react from emotion.
It seems clear from this short page that RMS understands this.
Putting the responsibility for one's emotional responses on another is the denying of culpability for one's self.
I find it is useful to be wary of those who find it useful to point a finger and say 'he/she did this to me' when they become emotionally hurt or even happy, knowing they will non-usefully invariably want me to be nanny or projection target for their other emotions when they arise in whatever manifestation.
I suspect you arrive at this conclusion because this is the way you have always operated and so it must be 'how it is'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%ADch_Qu%E1%BA%A3ng_%C4%9...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pboh0Q0Z3DI
https://universe-inside-you.com/buddhist-monks/
And these are only Buddhist examples.
Considering he was sleeping on a mattress in a MIT office, hopefully he saved a good portion of that in a bank account. He will also be eligible for social security and Medicare at his age, assuming he had enough working years in the social security system to qualify.
There are a lot of people with significant contributions without which the world wouldn't be in its current state.
For example, Linux depends on gcc and binutils and other GNU software, and many other software does.
Fortunately, most of us aren't in that category.
It's that defence of Minsky that's a huge problem.
The victim stated Epstein asked her to proposition Minsky, but she did not say he accepted.
Stallman’s defense was a hypothetical that probably would have been very similar to a courtroom defense of Minsky, that said since Minsky is both dead and not actually accused of the crime, no such courtroom scene would ever take place.
I always cringe when I see people engage in apology grading. I may be in the minority here but I rarely find it appropriate for leaders in any sense to apologize. It's your job to lead, whether that be in thought, action, or both and I expect that over the course of thousands of decisions for an increasingly ballooning pool of people to represent that you will make mistakes, even large ones, along the way. What I do expect is that leaders are accountable. That doesn't mean to say that leaders should be bound to write out formal apologies to people they hurt, because for every decision on an important issue you will end up hurting someone.
For instance, the ideals of free software (as defined by RMS and others) from time to time will likely offend and hurt others. This was relevant when people were trying to modify free software licenses to prevent their software from being used by certain government agencies or authoritarian governments while attempting to continue to benefit from the term "free software". Unfortunately, as pointed out, that very act violated the principles of free software, which exist in their purity to ensure access to even the most oppressed societies across the world. I am sure the people who championed the purity of this access were viewed as hurtful and oppressive by some in the moment. I do expect that these folks will stand up in the face of fierce opposition and will confidently answer their intent and mitigating circumstances and take note for improvements into the future; the same way we would RCA good software.
I have a hard time understanding why RMS spends so much time openly espousing his thoughts on a wide range of subjects. I do this in my personal time with friends but I constrain that to people I know because they understand me and my principles. On the other hand, saying that he isn't allowed to comment on other things or classifying that activity as "distracting" is interesting. I feel the same way when I find out developers I like and follow have edgy opinions about race and gender, but I also draw a line of distinction that acknowledges that their experiences in life may just be different from mine, even if they occasionally offend me, and that's okay. The world does take all types, and things I've taken offense to have been done in good faith a good amount of the time.
The last notion I'll touch on is that we often expect that leaders will be fully invested in advancing our goals and the traits of the organization. We champion leaders who can take an organization that has lost its way and turn it into something, but do we make the same expectations of ourselves to leaders. Is there a point where we start to invest ourselves into organically growing RMS in certain facets? Free software has grown and evolved, but it sounds like RMS hasn't - should we really cast him aside and decide all of his investment in us is now worthless that he requires investment? That's not to say that people haven't tried to course correct him, because they likely have, but sometimes in order to grow people need things to get worse in order to get better. That's where our investment, as a community, in him starts. That could mean that he seeks therapy, it could mean he gets a publicist, it could mean a wide variety of things, but I'm favorable to treating leaders like the humans that they are.
In short: He harmed the cause of free software by making public statements on unrelated, controversial issues.
I'm still not sure why people consider it appropriate to exclude someone like Stallman from serving on the Board of the FSF while continuing to allow Mr. Rafael Reif, for example, to remain president of MIT after sending a personally signed "thank-you note" to one of the most notorious alleged sex-traffickers and convicted child-rapists in US history:
https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2020/01/12/after-epstei...
Nor would it be any more appropriate to allow Mr. Seth Lloyd back onto the MIT campus with just a slap on the wrist:
https://thetech.com/2021/02/25/mit-administration-epstein-op...
Or Mr. Martin Nowak for that matter either:
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/03/26/metro/harvard-sanctio...
This hacker news thread on Nowak is worth reading again:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25442060
So why has nobody drafted petitions to cancel Rafael "Thank You So Much Mr. Epstein -- And Don't Forget to Show My Letter to Federal Prosecutors" Reif, Benedict "Epstein is an Ideal Donor for Harvard" Gross, Alan "Dershbag" Dershowitz, Martin "Punishment Serves No Noble Purpose" Nowak, Steven "Using the Internet to Entice a Minor into Prostition is A-Okay" Pinker, Seth "So What If I Make Female Undergraduates at MIT Feel Uncomfortable "Lloyd, Neri "Epstein was Always a Reliable Supporter of Israel" Oxman, Frank "I Never Saw any Girls that were Underage" Wilczek, and all of the other pedophilia-tolerating two-faced phonies that attended EDGE Foundation dinners hosted by the convicted child rapist and/or visited him on "Pedophile Isle," where FBI reportedly found instruction manuals that Mr. Epstein had ordered on Amazon that describe how to create a so-called "sex slave," in addition to video tapes containing child pornography that he allegedly recorded using secret cameras that were installed throughout his various residences?
Stallman blaming his "being on the spectrum" for all of the troubling statements cataloged on the website cited below may not entirely excuse Mr. Stallman for making them since there is no evidence that someone on the spectrum is more likely than the general population to hold similar views on child rape:
https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman
But the most important question today that Mr. Stallman needs to address directly, because many of his critics on this issue continue to hold him in the highest regard for his role in advancing the free software movement, is a very frank one:
Were his remarks in support of pedophilia designed to persuade Mr. Epstein to donate part of his $500 million estate to the Free Software Foundation, much like he observed role-models such as MIT president Rafael Reif do for Mr. Epstein when Dr. Reif sent Mr. Epstein a personally signed thank-you note for his donation to the Media Lab, or colleagues like Martin Nowak do for Mr. Epstein when Dr. Nowak created a web page on a university website and an office in his department for a convicted child-rapist in exchange for tens of millions of dollars in donations that were promised to his academic program at Harvard and hundreds of millions of dollars in donations, often laundered through Epstein's fellow billionaire pedophile friends like Les Wexner, Glenn Dubin, and Leon Black, to Harvard University, where Mr. Nowak is a professor?
I'm not entirely convinced by the naysayers on this one yet, but Stallman is most deserving of forgiveness thus far, and not because of his autism, but rather because of all of his contributions to free software in spite of it.
Some of the other dogs cited above deserve to spend time in the same jail cell where Epstein killed himself because he was too much of a coward to stand trial for all of the crimes that he knew he had committed.
And, sure, this is political in some real sense, but it's not just the politics of "the other side." A C-suite executive at Patagonia is likely to be not-so-politely asked to find other work if they start publicly pushing Trumpworld's stolen election propaganda; a C-suite executive at a Catholic hospital is going to face capital-Q Questions if it comes out that they've donated tens of thousands of dollars to Planned Parenthood. What you do "off the clock" matters to your employer if they feel it reflects badly on them. This is not some kind of brand new thing that wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for those angry millennials with their twitters and their social justices. What's changed over time are the specifics of Things Perceived To Reflect Badly.
With respect to RMS, there have been reports about his bad social behavior for decades. In the last few years, our attitudes toward harassing behavior has grown a lot less tolerant, and "Ha ha, that's just ol' creepy Bob, what are you gonna do, am I right" is no longer seen as a sufficient response. "Sure, Bob is a creep, but he's done such great work, so just suck it up, Buttercup" sends a message to prospective employees, customers, donors, sponsors, vendors, etc., that companies and organizations are increasingly deciding that they do not want to send. I understand that this sucks for the ol' creepy Bobs of the world, but is that really sufficient reason to default to taking Bob's side?
The pro-RMS thread that runs through these comments[1] is, and I am only barely paraphrasing here, Stallman's contributions to the free software movement are so important they excuse his documented mistreatment of others for decades. In other words: be a big enough name in free software and you can get away with anything, baby.
And maybe you're comfortable with that message. But I'm not at all sure you should be.
[1] There is also a pro-RMS thread running through these comments which I can paraphrase as "but he was only hypothetically defending pedophilia and it's so dishonest of the media to present that as if it were weird and disturbing in any possible way," which, I mean, look. There's a reasonable discussion to be had about how "Think of the Children" has become the third rail of all internet discussions, but this ain't it, chief.
Judgement made.
The FSF should remove Stallman from its board and publicly distance itself from him. Otherwise judgement will come for the FSF too. They've already lost the good will of Red Hat, which was the organization driving actual development of the Linux ecosystem. It's hard to run a foundation, or a movement, without money.
Imagine if RMS lived to see the FSF go bankrupt, and its assets purchased by hostile corporations who then go on to make GCC and Emacs proprietary? They could do this because of the CLA they make contributors sign. A bitterly ironic end to a noble movement.
RMS is not a good leader. The FSF should pay him for his work on GPL and leave him off the board. The FSF should also stop writing instructions for other people on how to treat the FSF, and should instead focus on earning the response they want to see from their supporters.
> False accusations -- real or imaginary, against me or against others -- especially anger me. I knew Minsky only distantly, but seeing him unjustly accused made me spring to his defense.
People aren't saying he's "just as guilty" as Epstein. They are saying that:
Minsky (71) had sex with a 17 year old who had been trafficked and coerced, in 2001. This was several years after (1999) rumours started spreading about "pedophile island".
In many places this makes Minsky a rapist, whether or not he knew i) she was trafficked or ii) she was coerced or iii) her age.
> Virginia Giuffre testified in a 2015 deposition in her defamation lawsuit against Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell that Maxwell directed her to have sex with Minsky among others. There has been no allegation that sex between them took place nor a lawsuit against Minsky's estate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Minsky
" The Minskytron or "Three Position Display" running on the Computer History Museum's PDP-1, 2007
In 1952, Minsky married pediatrician Gloria Rudisch; together they had three children"
I am assuming it was through sex.
"Minsky’s widow, Gloria Rudisch, denied he had sex with Giuffre or any other girls, telling the New York Post that the couple had visited Epstein a few times, but that she was always with her husband."
> Let’s presume that was true (I see no reason to disbelieve it).
You're doing the exact thing that journalists did when they condemned RMS. Virginia Giuffre testified that Epstein directed her to have sex with Minsky; however she has not said that they actually had sex. His ex-wife also claims that she was with him the entire time they were on the island.
Fabricated from whole cloth. Not even Virginia Giuffre alleges this.
Source: The depositions. Which clearly none of you have read.
What actually happened isn't particularly relevant. We're not talking about what happened, we're talking about the behaviours that RMS will defend.
RMS defended the concept of someone having sex with a trafficked coerced 17 year old girl.
In most places rape, like most crimes, require both actus reus (victim was coerced) and mens rea (perpetrator was aware of that). This is a complicated by the age issue (as a mistake of age is often an explicit exception to mens rea), but in general you cannot be thief, murderer or rapist without knowing that.