Why not to sign the anti-Stallman petition on GitHub
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While the petition doesn't quite get it right, RMS's behavior has been problematic for decades, particularly his behavior towards women. He doesn't get when he's being offensive or ineffective and won't listen when well-meaning people try to work with him to do better. He wants to control language, not just on matters like saying "GNU/Linux", but also on how trans people are referred to, against their repeated requests, which isn't so much hate as obnoxious control-freakery we don't need. And for years he's defended sex with "consenting" underaged people. These things don't make him a monster, but they do make him an impediment to the FSF's mission, if the FSF sees their mission as the advancement of free software principles and not just as RMS's personal hobby horse, providing the software needed for computing circa 1995 and rejecting the new.
RMS's defenders often say that the free software movement is RMS. If so, it's in trouble; the guy is 68. They should give him some kind of honored emeritus status, take him out of the work flow that GNU contributors must deal with, and work on growing the movement.
Show the source or "it didn't happen", as they say on image boards. I want to make my own conclusion given the evidence.
I place this obligation on you because previous anecdotes or attacks by other people turned out to be unsubstantiated or outright fabricated when investigated, and because I hold HNers in esteem not become part of a mob.
Tl;dr: trans men are men, trans women are women, non-binary people are fine too; singular “they” is ambiguous and it would be better to use a non-ambiguous word, so he plans to use a non-ambiguous word, though others are welcome to continue using “they” if they want to.
(As a non-binary “they” myself I’m fine with this ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It’s like if somebody hated how the word “one” breaks so many rules of pronounciation and decided to always use the spanish “uno” to refer to 1 of anything - good point, weird solution, I’m not going to try and get anybody fired over it...)
Good for you.
> I've known RMS since the 90s and have been with him in person in small groups back then. I'm an eyewitness to RMS repeatedly creeping out women, but I don't have video.
Well, me too, and I saw him behaving respectfully with women. He was a hugely shy person with made huge efforts to keep us entertained.
I'm still waiting for someone to produce a single police report.
And I think you don't know him. The only thing you said about his character is the crap the hit pieces mention. Nothing more. And there is a lot more. Pity.
I want to live in a world where being "offensive" is not a crime, considering that being offensive to who is really subjective. There is a large difference between a man's character and his own work. Jobs is idolized by the US while at the same time being recognized the worst asshole one can have worked/lived with (he even denied recognition to his own daughter). Just label RMS another asshole and move on if you don't like the man. I wonder how many of his critics live a real life, with real bosses, colleagues, even family members and friends they don't agree with. The road to hell is paved with attempts to please everyone.
Also see the current woke ideology. Language is everything to these people.
edit: To further expand on my comment. I agree with you that he is wrong to control what people say, but I don't think he should be cancelled for it.
Maybe you don't need such language control-freakery. But the world definitely needs more obnoxiously uncompromising people like RMS, who go out of their way to "harass" people at airports because their noise-cancelling headphones are running on non-free software! There's already enough corporate drones who "just call it open source", while literally kneeling [0] to Microsoft; we need more Stallmans, not just him.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20210318230618if_/http://techrig...
Stallman fired a trans employee of the FSF who was being harassed by a fellow employee. The employee who did the harassing talked to Stallman about the matter and Stallman chose to fire the trans person..
We have a really hard time existing in the tech world (and the world in general), and I just can't stand the fact that this type of behavior goes without consequence.
- https://www.reddit.com/r/transgender/comments/539x50/breakin...
In fact, the person who made the accusations has a page from a couple weeks ago calling for people to defend RMS and specifically saying that he is not transphobic [1].
I still am in awe at some of the things he has said with impunity. Including comments he made about child pornography that are verified and abhorrent. That's incidentally another topic that is kind of sensitive for me, being the victim of sexual abuse as a child.. so perhaps I'm not without bias here, but I feel like the people who idolize this person are willfully unaware of his true character.
Like I said, trans women (and women in general) have a really hard time existing in the tech world and people like stallman are entirely the problem. So many people enable this kind of behavior and it makes me deeply sad to see that happen.
Which comments? As an aside, I'm too a victim, but I think people should be reeducated, not punished (that American obsession with punishment...) for what they do, not for what they say. Crazy about how many people want to punish another people for what they say, in the land of freedom of speech. I must be missing something, honestly.
Of course there is, but that room stops when you are in a leadership position at an unwillingness to protect members of the community of from predators. It makes him unsuitable for the role.
These posts keep saying there is nothing to it, so here is the bit that convinced me there is:
His comments (from https://web.archive.org/web/20210325013844/https://stallman.... ):
> Due to the vagueness of the term "sexual assault" together with the dishonest law that labels sex with adolescents as "rape" even if they are willing, we cannot tell from this article what sort of acts Maraj was found to have committed. So we can't begin to judge whether those acts were wrong.
> I see at least three possibilities. Perhaps those acts really constituted rape — it is a possibility. Or perhaps the two had sex willingly, but her parents freaked out and demanded prosecution. Or, intermediate between those two, perhaps he pressured her into having sex, or got her drunk.
This is discussing a specific case of statutory rape. He seems to take the position that children should be able consent to sex with adults, which fundamentally makes contributors less safe, and in my opinion is worthy of removing him from positions of leadership.
It is fundamentally dangerous to offer abusers the opportunity to claim it was all willing, which is why the law makes it always rape. If you choose to break that law, that's on you and you deserve to be treated as an abuser.
This position of regarding the ability to sleep with under-aged people as more important than defending under-aged people from abusers is one incompatible with keeping a community safe, in my opinion.
It was awesome. I wish I could have done a lot more of that.
I bristle intensely at your suggestion that I was being abused, or that I was incapable of consenting.
The adult you had sex with broke the law, and endangered people. Just because you actually consented doesn't change the fact that minors are easy to abuse and predators can do so easily, and proving that can be very hard.
Because of that, we have laws that place the responsibility on adults to not have sex with minors. If they break that, they face the same punishment as an abuser. That's the law, and not following it places minors at risk by giving abusers cover.
The person you are talking about was guilty of statutory rape, yes, and they did harm even if it wasn't directly to you.
16 is the age of consent in the majority of US states. The law in my state is simply wrong.
"they did harm even if it wasn't directly to you" - that's rubbish. There were two people involved here, and frankly what they do in private is none of your business. I did not want or need your paternalism. I already have parents.
I'm not sure what the proper age of consent is, but I am very comfortable saying that 16 is within safe bounds. We're biologically wired for sex long before then. This puritanical religious drive to "lock up the children" needs to end.
How right you are. It's similarly dangerous to offer traitors the opportunity to claim they were engaging in protected political speech [1]. Which is why any such acts should be referred to only as "sedition", instead of anything more specific such as "urging resistance to the draft".
This way, by re-defining words using legal categories, and resisting any pressure to be more precise, we can make sure the bad guys can't fool us into thinking they're not the vile monsters the prosecution accuses them of being. If a hypothetical law said it's theft, they shouldn't get to claim "it's only copyright infringement" - that would be fundamentally dangerous!
At least journalists should be responsible enough not to repeat such claims, and only describe the alleged crime as "theft" or "sedition".
Adults in countries with statutory rape laws have a responsibility placed upon them by the law not to have sex with minors, if they do so, they are breaking the law and—at least—endangering minors by giving cover to abusers.
Having sex with a child is not equivalent to protected political speech. It is an action we have specifically placed restrictions on because of the potential harm involved.
Your response might as well be applied to driving licenses, or basically anything else, to equate all restrictions or responsibilities in the law to censorship. It's absurd.
If an act is wrong, it should be clear to the public it is wrong on its own terms, without misleadingly categorizing it as something else.
He has explicitly taken the position (no mere “seeming”) that children are both capable of consent and unharmed by sex with consent.in response to a news article about a Dutch pedophile group seeking to eliminate age of consent entirely, with the first step being reducing it to 13.
He did recant this position during the 2019 controversy
https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2021/04/12/faceboo...
This is the interesting part:
> we are updating our code of conduct to ensure we can consider circumstances where a person's behavior outside of a project can harm the project or its community.
Indeed. These words have just become the "heretic" of the endless neo-puritan witch hunt. They don't mean anything other than "we are labeling you as the outgroup, you are to be shunned".
The recent wave of action against bigotry, on the other hand, is specifically about stopping behavior harmful to others. E.g., I generally don't care what the white suburbanites of Georgia get up to. Godspeed, godbotherers. But when they turn to suppressing the vote of black people, I'm going to have some things to say about it.
Ditto with RMS. I don't care about him being a toe-chewing weirdo. I care a lot about the number of women he's alienated from open source. I care about his poor treatment of employees. I care that his self-aggrandizement and self-centeredness is harming an important movement.
I don't have a right to harm others. If I am, I should change. Why is that hard for some people to figure out?