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).
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...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.)