Forty years of GNU and the free software movement
fsf.org
fsf.org
Free Software in general contributes significantly to keeping the environment I live in more trustworthy, friendlier, and less threatening. That's no small feat and I can only express my sincere gratitude to everyone involved.
I'd like to extend your thanks, by explicitly thanking Richard Stallman for his important role in creating both those organizations. The man deserves a lot of praise and respect.
No, he really doesn't.
- https://youtu.be/R2SKenHRhMg
- https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/03/richard-stallman...
What has been happening in these four decades is that ever more segments of society (whether individuals or private enterprise or public sector) got into this mode of using and developing a shared resource (a common good). This is just an unprecedented positive development that gets lost among the avalanche of bad news. I can't think of anything remotely comparable in any other domain. We need to celebrate this more.
Now, of-course when something succeeds to grow beyond childhood it may evolve beyond recognition. A mass adopted religion might be quite different from the original prophet's visionary preaching. It may split into lots of heresies. These heresies might become more popular than the "orthodoxy". There is simply no way to avoid money and politics when something becomes mainstream.
Imho, the challenge today is not to rekindle some pure and true faith but have leaders of equal clarity of vision and purpose that will champion the underlying cause in new and specific contexts that are becoming relevant as the movement expands. The corporate world outside big tech is still largely absent from open source. Digital public goods from public entities still nascent even though they are extremely congruent with the philosophy.
Over the years, I can't help but feeling that while the FSF's core message is still relevant and true, their tactics have more or less pushed them outside of the mainstream conversation on technology. This is a tragedy and I'm not sure what lessons to draw from this but I would have liked to see a larger role for the FSF in the modern tech. discourse.
Big names like React, Angular etc. are MIT licensed, for example.
It's like the FSF invented "free 1.0", and then others came along with "free 2.0" and it's a genuine improvement. The difference here is very much one that strikes at the FSF's core message.
Regardless of the license chosen, sustainability of open source is a problem. (I'm still baffled by the absence of government sponsoring; why do governments around the globe continue to spend billions on proprietary IT infrastructure, databases, and desktop computers?!)
Not sure if yet another license is the answer, but yes we could do with a new model of what "free" and openness entails.
For some time this was acceptable to all parties. But then companies not competing in Linux contribution started competing in the support contracts, certification and consultancy business, by giving away RedHat's free beer.
Wouldn't it be great if Oracle, Amazon (and Rocky, Alma) could continue to rely on RedHat's efforts but share / contribute / upstream revenue profits made consulting, certifying, supporting rather than freeloading on commons like RedHat? Forcing a distro fork the way RedHat IBM seems to want seems like an unwanted technical solution to a mere business/money problem.
It's not a project that's talked about very much because it's not the trendy flavor of OSS dev that people generally have in mind when they refer to sustainability problems—which I suspect for most people means funding their favorite niche devops packages that are of dubious merit to begin with (and that we might very well be better off for not having in the world)—but it is pretty incredible that there isn't e.g. any well-known effort by at least one US government agency to put a fraction of what they pour into Microsoft into ReactOS instead, especially after the Windows XP crisis—and even if only to the extent that it should be made stable enough for that org's own narrow use e.g. with a particular piece of equipment/application. I never hear of anything like this. Not even a hint of trials or experimentation. Why?
This is the difference between GNU and the modern, GitHub-centric open source movement. For all the criticism about barriers to entry for non-technical audiences that have been leveled at GNU and GNU-adjacent projects, GNU has always been focused on users and the types of things that humans could conceivably actually want to use, and not the sort of devops shovelware that gets chucked into a repo and inexplicably chugs along with much fanfare because it's used by several dozen enterprises on the backend despite being of no real interest to an ordinary person. GNU userspace directly empowers millions of people (including many of those working on the uninteresting flash-in-the-pan shovelware) to do their computing (for work or for play) every day.
IBM just have to pay more than the stockholders believe the stock is worth. It has nothing to do with if the owners believe in the company or not.
On the one hand, I agree, but on the other hand I am relieved that I don’t have to deal with people calling my OS “ObamaOS” and unleashing a barrage of hateful spam towards maintainers because of misguided political nonsense.
GPL came after MIT (https://nitter.net/humphd/status/1112747178685026304)
> and it's a genuine improvement
How?
The problem with the GPL is that its "infectious" nature does not play nicely with how the B2B world works, where you might link against your client's in-house proprietary libraries, which even though they're never planning to distribute them, they very much don't want their own IP to become GPLed as a result.
So if you want to bring in a library to make pretty graphs or something, it very much matters what the licence is - MIT is generally fine though.
(How and whether a FOSS library author should be paid for the fact that one corporation used their library to develop software for another corporation, is an entirely separate matter.)
Standard GPL FUD. Firstly, linking against proprietary libraries is fine as long as you don’t distribute the result to any third party. Secondly, no IP can “become GPLed” unless anybody chooses to make it so.
well, just proves how hypocritical it is
This is not how copyright works. No license can magically turn other code into GPL.
You can choose between using GPL libraries in internal proprietary products, or use LGPL libraries in published products or release your product as FOSS.
The choice is yours. There is no "infection".
Individual freedom is easy. The King has always been free to do as he wishes. It's freedom for the entire community now and forever that matters.
GNU only took off due to AT&T wanting back the money they weren't allowed to charge for UNIX during its early lifetime, thus BSD uncertain future.
> see vmware
from https://lwn.net/Articles/696936/: "The court ruled that he had not provided enough specificity about the code he was claiming had been used by the company. The merits of the GPL and whether the two main parts of VMware's product constitute a derived work of the kernel were not even considered."
That doesn't seem to prove anything.
> various chinese companies
HiSilicon (https://github.com/hisilicon/linux-hisi) releases its fork.
It's... not a good time.
Not that many of us can then watch it fold, as we belong to the same generation, however that won't change the evolution of computing world.
There are certainly issues with GPL software, either from the "you can't run modified software on your hardware" or "saas isn't distribution" get-out, or from the "small company X develop free software and charge for support/hosting/etc, so large company Y take that free software and charge for support/hosting/etc without giving back"
The former has attempts to tackle things with gplv3 and agpl, but the latter is a problem. A bunch of people make something cool like elsastic, or terraform, or which is free software, funded from hosting and support, then large beomouth with a near-monopoly on computing offers it with a different label as part of their provision. Companies prefer to buy from amazon/google/microsoft than random small company, and that seems somewhat wrong, but I don't see the FSF approach to marrying
1) how to keep software free 2) how to keep developers fed
When you have parasitical cloud companies
On the one hand you have people motivated by the ideal of software "developed specifically for the sake of users' freedom".
On the other hand you have dystopian corporate whose biggest dream is slave labor and locked-in cash cows from which value is drained 'til the last drop.
There is no tactic for obtain reconciliation of two world views in direct and systematic opposition. If engaging in a tactic lead to compromising on ends for a local success, these ends are betrayed and longer justify any action.
An therein is the problem I, and I know many others, have with the FSF and it's followers. This language is just not compelling - in fact, it's a massive turn off, even if you think it's true. This comes off as the ravings of a crackpot! Consider "On the other hand, there are very real concerns about some corporations, with evidence that they are prioritizing profits over ethics, potentially leading to exploitative practices and consumers feeling trapped in long-term commitments.". IMHO says exactly the same thing, conveys the same gravity and prompts engagement.
I don't (and never wanted) the FSF to dilute its message but I do think they'd benefit from someone who can communicate their ideas in a more palatable way. Perhaps it's too late anyway.
(Android is almost there, software wise, but closed vendor firmwares are still rampant).
If anything, when an audience is unease with what is obvious caricatures which overstate the usual median traits, there is all the more concerns about the situation.
I suppose it depends on who is talking and what is being said, but the FSF message can be very direct:
We are already living it due to the rise of non-copyleft licenses, return to the shareware model only with another set of marketing names for newer generations, return of timesharing with thin clients only with newer set of nomenclature for newer generations, most relevant FOSS projects are sponsored by big corps for their own purposes as PR don't buy food and shelter, ....
The problem is, that nowadays manufacturers and big tech giants can or do lock down their devices much more than when the Free Software movement started out. Also the hardware is way harder to reverse engineer, if possible at all. It is difficult to imagine "a new <word for freedom> Software movement" to be initiated in our times. What hardware can they rely on? How would they break the shackles of proprietary software and hardware?
Right to Repair just about covers it, IMO. You can't repair something if you can't either have access to the source code or flash the source code, or otherwise access the internals.
Nah. The wheel of enlightenment has been set in motion and is beyond stoppable.
The issue I see is corporate involvement. They (corps) like free stuff too, and has helped enormously in the adoption (most code FLOSS on most servers, AND on most mobiles!). But corps has different agenda's than activist individuals, leading to BSD/Apache/etc over (A)(L)GPL(vX) and hosted opensource-derived services like what the cloud corps offer. Patents, non-copyleft-licensing and hosted are some big obstacles to the GNU/FSF end goals.
The battle between copyleft and "more permissive" licenses is going to be long and slow. There is a place for MIT/BSD licenses, but there is way too much software moving that direction IMHO. Some big popular projects will need to get consumed and effectively hijacked by commercial interests before anyone sees this as an actual problem rather than a hypothetical. But first there will need to be such a project under one of those licenses.
The original underpinning of the Four Freedoms is "I own this hardware; how dare someone else dictate how it operates?" That assertion falls flat in the Cloud era, yet Cloud services are way too convenient and useful to just ignore them or try to tell everyone the One True Path is up the mountain to the hermitage of traditional desktop, offline, disconnected software.
I look to the Fediverse as a potential next good model: the idea that if you run a part of the cloud, you have a vested interest in it, it's yours, and how dare someone else dictate etc.
... but it's a fundamentally different challenge than the original pioneers of the movement fought against corporations and monopoly manufacturers and sellers.
Over in Europe we got the GDPR, which does actually address a lot of data related issues quite well. But as far as Free Software licenses go, there still isn't any equivalent or even much discussion on how to attack the problem in the first place.
FSF feels stuck in solving 1980s problems, while having little to say about 2020s problems. "Don't do it", "self-host" or "run locally" doesn't cut it when a lot of software fundamentally has to be distributed in some fashion.
Meanwhile the GDPR has the concept of "Data Portability" and requires every service to allow users to export their data, so that they can move it somewhere else. As far as I know, there is no Free Software license with similar requirements. They all stop at the source code, which just isn't enough in a modern SAAS based world.
The irony is that most cloud computing infrastructure is powered by free and open source software.
Linux, bash, docker, Kubernetes, Golang, and so many others make it happen. Even Microsoft has come around to open source with GitHub and many projects released there: https://github.com/microsoft
>> FSF feels stuck in solving 1980s problems, while having little to say about 2020s problems.
What 2020s problems are not being addressed?
Edit: Looking at your comment in another reply concerning users controlling their own data, this essay addresses the topic:
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...
I think it comes back to trust, transparency, and the laws where you live.
Users should have choice of how their data is handled and what can be done with it. In order for that to work, they must 1) have a way to legally challenge entities who would use their data without their permission and 2) alternative ways to accomplish the work that they want to do with their data.
Laws where users live must address 1). Free software can help with 2).
Sounds to me like they are more relevant than ever. :)
They always have been on the outside. There has always been, and will always be, a concerted campaign by those who benefit from closed software against the FSF.
There's so much they _could_ be doing. Where's the grant program for startups working on free software? Where's their shop reselling used computer hardware with free software preinstalled, with discounts for low-income communities or libraries? Where's their work with labor unions in tech[1]?
The FSF never adapted once thought leading and making free alternatives stopped being enough to support the ideals of their movement. They just kinda exist now.
[1] Workers' rights may seem orthogonal to user's rights for software, but the power imbalance between workers and the companies they work for is deeply tied in with why companies can demand their workers product software that doesn't respect user's rights, and there's interesting work that could be done here in the long term.
So one of the core things for the FSF has been the GNU tools. Recently it's become trendy to rewrite stuff in Rust, and overall it seems like an excellent idea to have the core tooling of an OS being much harder to exploit, and often much more performant.
For instance ripgrep is a nice improvement on the classical grep, nushell is a better shell, exa is a better ls, and none of those is under the GPL.
There's also a project to do a straightforward rewrite of coreutils in Rust, and that is MIT licensed.
Where's the FSF's effort to modernize things and remain relevant?
Individual GNU projects are doing fairly well on the technical side (toolchain, Emacs, Guix, Mes), but there is little to no coordination across GNU, much less with the FSFs.
FSF Asia seems to have fallen off the earth, even though India appears to have a fairly active free software movement.
I don't think rewrite in Rust is a solution to "modernize" GNU tools. Maybe another memory safe language, but Rust has severe bootstrapping issues which is a hard sell for distros that care about source to binary transparency.
That IMO is of lesser importance. It's a technical problem that's of little relevance to most end-users. It's still a problem, but one that I think can be solved.
The point though is that the world keeps on moving, and the FSF and GNU should be keeping up. If things are going to Rust, or Java, or Go, or whatever then the FSF should do its best to follow and to assert its influence there. Otherwise it'll be left in a sort of museum curator position -- taking care of old tools that few need anymore. That may be a valuable thing to do in many contexts, but is not what you want to be doing if you want to influence where the world is going.
Apologies to anyone who had to endure my display of contempt.
I agree with the parent comment that FSF (and friends) needs to step up their game to have any influence on the tech scene of the future.
> Otherwise it'll be left in a sort of museum curator position
I think we actually need this; somebody should already be doing it. I wrote about this several years ago:
> Maybe in an alternate universe there exists an organization—or some sort of loosely connected movement—that focuses on software comprehensibility as a gift to the world and for future generations. The idea is that once software approaches doneness, the org would pour effort into fastidiously eliminating hacks around the codebase in lieu of rewrites that presents the affected logic in a way that's clearer. This work would extend to getting compiler changes upstream that allows the group to judiciously cull constructs of dubious readability so that they may be replaced with such passages, which may have previously been not as performant but that now work just as well as the sections being replaced, without any penalty at runtime.
> For example, one of the cornerstones of the FSF/GNU philosophy is that it focuses on maximizing benefit to the user. What could be more beneficial to a user of free software than ensuring that its codebase is clean and comprehensible for study and modification?
<https://www.colbyrussell.com/2019/05/15/may-integration.html...>
And like I said, I agree that this is a good and valuable thing to do, but not for the FSF. The FSF is trying to change the future, not to preserve the past.
GNU tools used to be the high end, full of features versions compared to what commercial Unix had, which is why they caught on. But you can't sit on your laurels, or others will catch up.
Eg, what do they offer as a shell? Bash. Okay, that was a great shell once upon a time, but honestly by modern standards it's painful. Even a couple decades back I was already reaching for Perl if I had to write more than about 10 lines. Since then the situation has only gotten much worse, and meanwhile we have things like PowerShell and nushell that suggest a new approach. The FSF seems nothing to offer in response.
It is possible to bootstrap rustc from just GCC relatively easily, although it's a little bit time consuming.
You can use mrustc to bootstrap Rust 1.54: https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc
And from then you can go through each version all the way to the current 1.72. (Each new Rust version officially needs the previous one to compile.)
https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2018/bootstrapping-rust/
I was thinking about the fact that building Rust requires cURL, Python, CMake, and more, which makes the "bootstrapping graph"[0] very complicated if coreutils is rewritten in Rust.
0: https://guix.gnu.org/en/manual/devel/en/guix.html#Full_002dS...
A big issue with the FSF is that the GNU project only really serves two groups of users: programmers and power-users/commandline junkies. I belong to both of those groups. You know who doesn't? Most people out there. 99.9% of people using a computer don't give a shit on if their stuff is compiled with GCC, musl or clang. That's a fight that only concerns programmers (and one the GNU project arguably lost). The FSF simply never adapted to the idea that there's gonna be a sizable portion of computer users that will not know how to program. Too much of their rethoric is still laden on the assumption that everyone who uses a computer knows how to program (arguably an RMS relic, given his advice on learning how to program is just... unsuited for a lot of users[0]).
If you want free software to matter, start by funding free software that your average Joe needs to use. The FSFe seems to have figured that one out to some extent - governments contract out their IT work, so if you can get in a FOSS clause on those contracts, then that's a big win for everyone.
Just look at Peertube and Matrix for successful examples (regardless of product quality -I think Matrix is fundamentally broken-, these are both tangible things a regular user can access that are a meaningful alternative to YouTube/IRC).
If we get down to brass tacks: things like how it's technically impossible to forcibly disband a room unless all parties agree to it/are manually kicked beforehand jump to mind as an issue that's not fundamentally broken per-se but is an example of "wait, that is supposed to work like that?".
Other than that, multi-room moderation is a total crapshoot. I've tried it, it just was a mess. You end up trying to plug in a moderation bot like Mjolnir onto your server and need to do the moderation through it instead of native clients. With the most common model for chats nowadays being closer to the discord model (where a subject might have many channels as opposed to the 2 or 3 you get on IRC), this isn't really workable.
Generally speaking, matrix doesn't seem to like many channel setups very well - there's been two attempts so far from what I can tell to solve it, but both just result in attempting to bolt existing channels into a "discord guild"-esque system with optional joining like it's an IRC channel list, which isn't how most people expect that to work. This is mostly a UX thing though - I imagine someone could write a client that just assumes the solutions on this in a better way.
The rest of it just amounts to some variant on "Element sucks" (which since it's the "main" client, makes it the most used one). The easiest example I can think of is that you need to use a GitHub PWA or send manual curl commands to say, set a server ACL on a channel or take server moderation actions on one of your users is absurd/unacceptable if you want to run a public service.
The main reason I call it fundamentally broken is because a lot of these issues seem to have been there for several years and the priority doesn't quite seem there to make the experience of using Matrix easier. Element lacking good moderation components for example is something I've noticed for years on end and updates never seem focused on improving any of it.
Sorry if this is all a bit disparate in terms of complaints/haphazard complaining about Element - they mostly come from running Synapse since ~2019 (+Element, back when it was still Riot) and in my experience updates to it never seem to have addressed many of the pitfalls/unexpected behavior that Matrix runs into compared to other chat apps I've used over the years.
Please stop enabling this with thoughtless license choices.
I long for the days when the basic unix system is unusable because everything has been "improved" and is "secure and written in rust".
To their credit, free software exists and there are many high quality examples, that outshine proprietary or big corp tech, when in capable hands. Those can be used by anyone anywhere on the planet, without having to buy a license from a shady company. We have Blender, Inkscape, Emacs, GCC, Linux kernel, Guix, and great things like Syncthing or whole OS that run on free/libre software. I dare say even Gimp is a solid choice in the right hands for many purposes, while surely not without flaws. Such projects I count as successes of the free software movement.
It is not really, that the FSF (and the GNU project) does not help at all. Without them we would be off much worse by now. However, your points about what they could do additionally still stand and you raise some perhaps good ideas.
https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/2/1/eu-chat-control-law-wil...
For the past 40 years all open source license terms have started WITHOUT WARRANTY, but today the governments have the idea that if someone uses your software for something they do not like, you deserve jail time.
It has all been a concerted effort to convince people that to be relevant they needed to use MIT license (so that they could be taken advantage of).
Really? Github? Owned by Microsoft right? I wonder why they like MIT licenses....
I consider it quite likely that Stallman and Torvalds will eventually be viewed as two of the most influential individuals in human history, at least on par with Marx and Engels, but arguably even more important, provided their foundational contributions actually end up turning the tide.
There was a bunch of lay-offs in January, in July they announced the smart speakers would not use it, and AFAIU the only product using it (the Nest Hub) is supposed to be replaced by the Pixel Tablet.
https://fuchsia-review.googlesource.com/q/status:open+-is:wi...
Compared to when? Would the Android experience differ substantially if it included the GNU userland?
I'd argue no : the common man does not compile, write shell scripts or writes it's own software.
Or are you argueing that somehow GNUCash for example would be more popular?
You can look at Windows or OSX to see what is important to the common man. And it is not build tools / infra, and I think that is fine.
Compared to when? The web is only growing and growing and is 90%+ GNU/Linux.
All/most SaaS'es which are displacing 'conventional' software are running GNU/Linux.
The 'AI revolution' is running GNU/Linux.
To be able to reply without pause, click the timestamp.
That's the point. The only way to prevent the bad outcome is for GNU and GPL to make a comeback. People need to understand and care about it first if it's every to prevent the bad future.
And that’s exactly what disappoints me: everyone can benefit without giving anything in return. FSF didn’t find an approach to software freedom that incentivises participants to contribute. FOSS is not a business model, so we see what we see: https://xkcd.com/2347/
I believe there is a need to adopt more semi-free source-available licenses that will force corporations to finance the projects they rely upon, while granting the expected freedoms to individual users, tinkerers and contributors.
Citation needed here.
Free Software movement at this point is much, much larger than FSF, GNU and rms. Many of those communities (Like KDE which I've been involved with) have been very very welcoming and inclusive to woman. However, woman have always been under-represented there just like many other areas in Tech.
Not saying rms has not made GNU/FSF difficult for woman though. Just saying the reasons woman are under-represented go deeper than rms.
FLOSSPOLS 2004-05 found that "proprietary software" was around 28% female, whereas "free software" was around 1.5% female. A presentatation of the results can be found at [1].
I agree with you that FOSS is much larger than GNU/FSF, and that many places are actively welcoming to women - the linked slides reference Debian's efforts; the python community also seems to be fairly good at this.
[1] https://people.cs.umass.edu/~wallach/talks/flosspols.pdf
There are many more obvious reasons for the disparity that don't involve anything malicious let alone singling out one person and attaching the blame.
Anybody can make meaningful contributions to free software. Nobody has to interact with RMS or anybody else. I've made many anonymous and pseudonymous contributions just fine.
Given that there are essentially no barriers to entry to developing free software but there are significant barriers to being paid for it, I wonder why proprietary software is only 72% male when free software is 98.5% male. Are there any other fields that exhibit this disparity? Are there more/less paid male/female car mechanics versus car enthusiasts/hobbyists, for example?
It is repeated and repeated again that because there aren't as many women as men in IT, there must be some kind of badness going on.
I offer a more charitable explanation: Women don't want to, the same way Men don't want to go to yoga courses. No badness involved, just people making their decisions.
I've seen two explanations for the dearth of women in computing: engineering culture becoming dominant in the '60s (where it was more the domain of mathematics before) and the rise of personal computers that were advertised and marketed to young boys in the '80s. The latter is very noticeable in CS enrollment numbers.
Look at jobs like optician, where the reverse happened: It used to be a crafts job when glasses were hand-manufactured. Today glasses are produced automatically, so the consultation and sales part has taken over and it changed from a men-dominated domain into a women-dominated domain.
No badness involved, either.
That would suggest that countries in which that transition didn't happen (such as Germany: Informatik was and is a math-oriented field, the engineering side mostly ended up with electrical engineering) should see different trends. At least for Germany: no.
When tech jobs switched to requiring fewer humans, but ones with much more responsibilities and the ability to make operational/strategic decisions and to contribute to the design of the systems as part of implementing them, then companies moved to hiring men.
The underlying reason for the disparity can still be "group A people are somewhat less interested in that thing than group B people" and not "group B people actively drive out group A people." Everything else just follows because humans suck.
However, the accusation is more specifically that the proportion of women in the FSF and FOSS in general is (or at least was under Stallman) significantly lower than that of women in programming jobs in general, which suggests that there is something more going on.
Following a 2009 FSF women's mini-summit in Boston, Bruce Perens acknowledged this difference, even offering an explanation: "... there are more women who hold technical jobs than there are women who so love the technology that they will work on it whether they get paid or not. That seems to be an especially male thing."
However, that was very much not the conclusion of discussions among women in tech at the time, who were more likely to cite the sexist behaviour of some prominent men as reasons they kept out of parts or all of FOSS/FSF. RMS' name certainly came up a lot.
Rachel Kroll also wrote a post back in 2018 with the title "Choosing to stay out of the community", talking about similar issues.
[1] A legal term that means more or less "plausible so far, but we'd need a full trial to get a definite answer".
Please read:
https://stallmansupport.org/richard-stallman-is-not-transpho... - Leah Rowe, who accused the FSF of being transphobic, defending Richard Stallman as not transphobic.
https://stallmansupport.org/nadine-strossen-hannah-wolfman-r... - Nadine Strossen, former President of the ACLU and a feminist icon, affirming Richard Stallman's support for women and her support for many of his positions.
Some of the original allegations that I think are proven correct are that RMS:
- defended Marvin Minsky on a mailing list when Minsky was accused of sex with an underage woman, and made similar comments in defense of Cody Wilson. I believe Stallman's quote on the MIT listserv was that "[it is] normal for adults to be physically attracted to adolescents" when referring specifically to an allegation concerning someone under the legal age of consent. I think "sympathetic to paedophiles" is a defensible interpretation of such comments.
- The accusations of sexism are also supported by evidence, such as the "EMACS virgins" incident in July 2009 which RMS himself admitted the basic facts of (while claiming it was meant to have been a joke). One version of the lines involved reads "The virgin of emacs is any female who has not yet learned how to use emacs. And in the church of emacs we believe that taking her emacs virginity away is a blessed act." @daringfireball (John Gruber) also quotes a Wired article claiming RMS had a card on his door at MIT saying "Knight for Justice (Also: Hot Ladies)". I think "hostile to women" is a defensible interpretation of these facts, especially as there is testimony from women in tech who say they find this sort of thing hostile.
I have come across multiple sources which describe Stallman's creepy behavior towards women, which I listed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21008835 .
One of them worked in the same building as Stallman. She writes software under an open source license and co-organizes an open source conference, so definitely "involved in free software."
You can't trust me though. Stallman said I'm an enemy of free software since I wouldn't say "GNU/Linux" to him.
Nobody is denying that rms is an exceedingly eccentric person, often to the extent of rudeness, but this does not justify the serious insinuations of sexual harassment
Nadine Strossen comments on this problem in one of the links I posted:
> So we see the term sexual assault and sexual harrassment used for example, when a guy asks a woman out on a date and she doesn’t find that an appealing invitation. Maybe he used poor judgement in asking her out, maybe he didn’t, but in any case that is NOT sexual assault or harassment. To call it that is to really demean the huge horror and violence and predation that does exist when you are talking about violent sexual assault. People use the term sexual assault / sexual harassment to refer to any comment about gender or sexuality issues that they disagree with or a joke that might not be in the best taste, again is that to be commended? No! But to condemn it and equate it with a violent sexual assault again is really denying and demeaning the actual suffering that people who are victims of sexual assault endure. It trivializes the serious infractions that are committed by people like Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein. So that is one point that [Stallman] made that I think is very important that I strongly agree with.
It's a bit humorous that you agree with the assessment "several layers of hyperlinks and "someone told me" just to find a vague claim" then don't even provide that much support for your own third-hand, fourth-hand, or higher comment.
We know from EEOC training that there are indeed ways to ask someone for a date and have it be workplace sexual harassment.
Scenario #1: "Wanna go on a date tonight? I think I can get you off night shift if you say yes." is straight-forward quid pro quo sexual harassment.
Scenario #2: Whenever employee X sees a new, young, female employee he goes up to her and, while staring at her breasts the whole time, asks her out on a date. The staff get annoyed about the continual sexual objectification and complain about X's rude behavior. Under EEOC guidelines, management acts to prevent claims they have a hostile workplace.
Both of these unappealing invitations are forms of workplace sexual harassment, which has a higher legal requirement than other uses of the phrase.
These laws have been in place for decades .. and you're right, the anti-abortion movement has been around for decades too. But it's not due to online rumors but part of a broader anti-feminist movement wanting "traditional" male power over women.
Can you dig through the hyperlinks and find a less vague account of your example?
Given the 100s of millions of men who have asked women out, this should be millions of times easier to find than the ones I found about Stallman. Examples should be everywhere, not just men's rights forums.
Given I know someone with a first-hand account about Stallman, and don't know anyone matching your story, tells me your scenario is rare.
The topic was the "reason [free software] has so few women involved", and the claim is that Stallman's behavior towards women was a non-trivial contributing factor.
That does not require sexual harassment.
The counter-claim is that such allegations are "a defamatory smear campaign which has falsely accused him of being transphobic, sympathetic to pedophiles and hostile to women. The attacks targeting him have largely come from people who aren't involved in free software and in some cases not even involved in the tech industry."
I've heard about his creepy behavior towards women since around 2003, from people working in open source software. Thus, that counter-claim cannot be the complete story.
https://stallmansupport.org/debunking-false-accusations-agai...
Regarding the "Cult of the Emacs Virgin" issue, here is Stallman's statement about it: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-women-list/2009-Novemb... - this was a reference to the Cult of the Virgin Mary. Along with references to the "Church of St. IGNUtius" he was parodying what he saw as cult-like elements of Christianity. Because Mary was female, he referenced females.
When he was informed in 2009 that some women found this joke offensive, he changed it to be gender neutral, because as he said in 2009, and continues to say today, he supports involving women in free software as much as possible.
Stallman has a long history of advocating for womens' rights and it's unfortunate for all women that a few women have decided to attack a supporter of womens' rights over a joke that probably didn't make anyone bat an eyelash when he first started using it. Standards have changed today, but he amended the joke 14 years ago....
Nadine Strossen's comments really hit the nail on the head about how poisonous this inability to forgive people for awkward statements made almost 20 years ago (and later recanted or apologized for) has become. If people on the other side are not allowed to apologize, reform and join your team, how do you ever win? If you brand them as enemies for life, short of your movement imprisoning, exiling or killing them, how does society as a whole ever make progress?
I 'd like to add that he regularly posts political notes on his website which make this pretty clear to anyone who cares to take a look.
https://opensourcetogo.blogspot.com/2009/07/emailing-richard...
Oh, and we don't say "women" anymore, preferring gender-neutral language.
Meanwhile, F/OSS zealots are busy subliming (^1) on github, bringing their tickets and clicks and those of their users, as generative and advanced AI takes over CompSci (what has been left by the attention economy anyway).
Seriously, today's problem is more that F/OSS is being used to exploit users and form monopolies. "Cloud providers" and other capital-intense approaches only exist as a direct reaction to F/OSS abundance.
^1: in memoriam of Iain Banks who died ten years ago
But psychology does acknowledge that an interest in people vs systems/things is one of the most pronounced measurable and replicable sex differences; depending on who you ask this might apply to babies from the day they were born, as measured by the time they spend looking at a photo of a face vs. one of some building blocks.
(Note, the research is about _interests_, not _abilities_. Big difference.)
If you plot people on a people/things interests scale, you might see a male cluster, a female cluster, and if you zoomed in, a "nerd cluster" a bit beyond the normal male cluster.
Female nerds and women with autism do exist, and as far as I can tell, they fit in just fine into any "nerdspace" that does not single them out based on their sex/gender or act too sexist. (Personally, I find the label "extremely male brain" particularly uncharitable for women with autism.) But they are numerically a minority.
But the glib answer is many women find nerds annoying. In particular, because of their desire to explain and even worse correct perceived errors without any regard for social niceties. As for why many women ultimately find those behavior patterns annoying, well that's where speculation takes over.