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Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)

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Re: Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)

#71

Post by hinkley »

cat_plus_plus wrote: post #3

That's what makes me so furious at the morons who deplatformed RMS over some silly devil's advocate defense of Minsky on an internal mailing list. The guy has an important idea that he put most of his life into developing. In the process, he made programming much more inclusive than anyone could dream about in the days of proprietary operating system with compilers that sold for thousands of dollars. So even if havin…

Until the latest stink I wasn't even aware that RMS still had a platform. I haven't heard from him in probably 15 years.

That may be a good thing. FSF isn't about Richard Stallman.

And some of the "kids" that ran him out of town know to keep plants at their desks because it turns out he's kind of a creep around young women, and also afraid of plants. None of that information has anything to do with mailing lists. There is always some reason that gets people to deal with a problem and that reason is often objectively kinda shitty. People overlook it because the problem is finally being addressed.

One of the things that's going on in the current political climate is that it's no longer enough to be a great developer but a horrible human being. Development in the 90's was punctuated by some truly titanic man-children that everyone had to 'put up with' because they were just so good at the rest of their job.

Gates seems to have grown up (I'm curious what Ballmer has been up to). Jobs, god bless him, died of his own stubbornness. They keep Ellison out of the spotlight, as they seem to have done with Stallman. Until he retires that leaves Torvalds (who I hope outlasts Ellison).

I am sure there were points in my life where I could be painted with that brush, and I can say with a bit of authority that we don't need that kind of behavior. And if behavior is tolerated at the top then it's effectively tolerated everywhere.

Re: Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)

#72

Post by 4bpp »

mav3rick wrote: post #60
4bpp wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you believe he has alienated more women from FOSS than he has inspired people to contribute to it? Considering the frankly extremely low percentage of female contributors, it seems that he would have had to personally (considering that all of the creepy behaviours listed seem to be limited to his meatspace circles) alienate multiple women for every one woman who did wind up working on in free software, which seems…

You are okay forgiving people as long as their "net impact" is positive? Is it okay for someone to murder a person if they saved more than one life before ?

In general, yes. Murder is a very peculiar case that is hardly suitable to be the benchmark for building our intuitions about trading off harm in general: human lives are not fungible, murder is not reversible, the victims do not generally get a meaningful way of influencing how the murder impacts them etc., all properties that do not apply in the case of being put off a pursuit like FOSS. (Even then, we're sometimes okay accepting murder to save more lives: e.g. the Allies' actions in WWII are considered a heroic even with nearly a century of historical distance) Arguably, the progressive argument for {affirmative action, inverted burden of proof in Title IX, ...} also amounts to "accept some harm if the net impact is positive"; few people claim that these policies will not result in some people being rejected from positions they deserve or punished for crimes they did not commit.

Some countries are more explicit about this and actually constitutionally single out matters of life and death as being prohibited from being traded off against each other (e.g. Germany), i.e. the state is not allowed to play in trolley problems. The corollary is that the state, and most everyone, finds it okay to trade off other harms: you can for instance choose to build an airport that will drive down the value of some people's homes and expose them to considerable noise in order to give convenience and good business to a large number of people. I think discouraging some women from participating in FOSS is much closer in quality of harm to "your home is now worth half as much and you have to put up with the noise of planes flying overhead everyday" than "you die a painful and untimely death".

Re: Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)

#73

Post by norcalli »

ariabuckles wrote: post #55
sprafa wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn’t know about this. Where can I read more about his behaviour around women?

https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman and https://medium.com/@selamie/remove-richard-stallman-appendix... are good starting points; I also saw threads about it from women MIT alumns on twitter.

It would be horrifying to have meticulously documented notes on every thing you ever said that may or may not be true, and may or may not have been a joke. If his career had been a comedian and not a FOSS advocate, then would he still be crucified for saying the same things or would he simply be an awful comedian?

I would be dollars to doughnuts that the author of that site and the editors of that "wiki" have made or thought worse things at some point, but because they have not reached a certain level of celebrity, there's no dossier on them. It's truly ridiculous to me the amount of effort spent on trying to claw others down.

I accept that inequality exists and perhaps RMS has some awful opinions, but if that's the case then just ignore him.

If there are people who are choosing to make it incumbent upon themselves to take down these "problematic" individuals, then it must be because they think that all of the systems that have allowed a person to continue to exist despite those opinions must be unreliable in adequately judging them. If that's the case, then wouldn't it be more practical to fix the endemic problem rather than destroy a single person? I'm guessing that the latter is just easier to do and more profitable as well. You gain "credibility" by attacking someone else, so it's difficult to believe that they are doing it for altruistic means.

All in all, I'm pretty sick of this nonsense. A world where everyone is constantly being watched by eachother and reported on is already too authoritarian for me to want to continue living in, not to mention the already authoritarian governments doing the same.

Re: Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)

#74

Post by [deleted] »

mav3rick wrote: post #60
4bpp wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you believe he has alienated more women from FOSS than he has inspired people to contribute to it? Considering the frankly extremely low percentage of female contributors, it seems that he would have had to personally (considering that all of the creepy behaviours listed seem to be limited to his meatspace circles) alienate multiple women for every one woman who did wind up working on in free software, which seems…

You are okay forgiving people as long as their "net impact" is positive? Is it okay for someone to murder a person if they saved more than one life before ?

[deleted]

Re: Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)

#75

Post by ariabuckles »

4bpp wrote: post #53
ariabuckles wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't just this incident. RMS alienated so many women from open source and free software over the last 30 years, and we've lost all of those potential contributions. He's been getting breaks for 30 years. That he has also done some very good things isn't a good argument for continuing to tolerate his harmful behaviour after he's been asked to fix it for literally decades, and hasn't.

Do you believe he has alienated more women from FOSS than he has inspired people to contribute to it? Considering the frankly extremely low percentage of female contributors, it seems that he would have had to personally (considering that all of the creepy behaviours listed seem to be limited to his meatspace circles) alienate multiple women for every one woman who did wind up working on in free software, which seems…

That's an interesting way of framing it—I expect that no, he hasn't directly dissuaded more people than he's encouraged.

But I expect that the second- and third-degree network effects have. MIT has had a huge influence on open source software. Keeping the number of women who contribute to FOSS lower has a snowball effect of discouraging other women from contributing—there are fewer leaders to look up to, and day-to-day misogyny in FOSS spaces goes unchecked more often.

As another commenter pointed out, I also don't think net impact is the bar. But besides that, it's very hard to measure, so I prefer to focus on having positive impacts and limiting/fixing negative impacts. I think the things he said on the CSAIL mailing list continue to contribute to a negative environment for women at MIT.

Re: Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)

#76

Post by 4bpp »

ariabuckles wrote: post #75
4bpp wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you believe he has alienated more women from FOSS than he has inspired people to contribute to it? Considering the frankly extremely low percentage of female contributors, it seems that he would have had to personally (considering that all of the creepy behaviours listed seem to be limited to his meatspace circles) alienate multiple women for every one woman who did wind up working on in free software, which seems…

That's an interesting way of framing it—I expect that no, he hasn't directly dissuaded more people than he's encouraged. But I expect that the second- and third-degree network effects have. MIT has had a huge influence on open source software. Keeping the number of women who contribute to FOSS lower has a snowball effect of discouraging other women from contributing—there are fewer leaders to look up to, and day-to-d…

> But I expect that the second- and third-degree network effects have. MIT has had a huge influence on open source software. Keeping the number of women who contribute to FOSS lower has a snowball effect of discouraging other women from contributing—there are fewer leaders to look up to, and day-to-day misogyny in FOSS spaces goes unchecked more often.

Surely second- and third-degree network effects occur on the encouragement side of the equation, too. Why would we expect any putative discouragement of women by Stallman to travel further in the social graph than his encouragement of both men and women?

> I think the things he said on the CSAIL mailing list continue to contribute to a negative environment for women at MIT.

Which things specifically, and in what way?

Re: Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)

#78

Post by crispyambulance »

michannne wrote: post #23
Frondo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The complaints about stallman aren't a matter of thoughtcrime, they're a matter of entirely inappropriate behavior, not just once but repeatedly, over the course of decades. This was the one that disturbed me the most: "Going to an RMS talk in the early 90s and meeting with him in person was among the worst of my experienced - I was fifteen, still obviously underage, and skipping gym class to hear him speak at a prof…

If I had a de-platformed individual every time they made a comment someone took offense to, I'd end up with an animal farm. Definitely, his comments should not be overlooked, but intellectually benching someone because of what they've said is not how you handle these types of situations. Furthermore, his leadership qualities depend only on his ability to lead a group towards a goal, which he was doing swell at.

He has many zingers on record. This last one finally caught up with him.

I almost feel sorry for him-- like maybe if he had someone who could just tell him: "Dude, Slow your roll!" he would not have gotten into this situation.

On the other hand, he's an adult, old and wise enough to know better, especially as a spokesperson and thought-leader. He did it to himself.

Re: Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)

#79

Post by schoen »

garmaine wrote: post #42
new_realist wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OSS predates Stallman, and will outlast him. His contributions are overstated, as is the benefit of Free Software, generally, as compared to more permissive licenses.

The term “open source software” was invented by Christine Peterson in 1998 (edit: thanks!) to distinguish from GPL-style free software. Open source (inclusive of both) never really had any traction outside a few limited domains until the GNU project.

> invented by Christine Peterson in the early 90’s to distinguish from GPL-style free software

Invented by Christine Peterson in the 90s, yes (though it was 1998); to distinguish from GPL-style, no. The Open Source Initiative immediately listed the GPL as an Open Source license, and the FSF had already described permissive licensing as free software (as distinct from copyleft licensing).

https://web.archive.org/web/19980119061702/http://www.fsf.or...

> The X Window System illustrates this. The X Consortium releases X11 with distribution terms that make it non-copylefted free software. If you wish, you can get a copy which has those distribution terms and is free. However, there are non-free versions as well, and there are popular workstations and PC graphics boards for which non-free versions are the only ones that work. If you are using this hardware, X11 is not free software for you.

https://web.archive.org/web/19981201223102/http://www.openso...

> GIMP

> Gnome

> Linux

> Open Source is a marketing program for free software. It's a pitch for `free software' on solid pragmatic grounds rather than ideological tub-thumping. The winning substance has not changed, the losing attitude and symbolism have.

Re: Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)

#80

Post by mav3rick »

4bpp wrote: post #72
mav3rick wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are okay forgiving people as long as their "net impact" is positive? Is it okay for someone to murder a person if they saved more than one life before ?

In general, yes. Murder is a very peculiar case that is hardly suitable to be the benchmark for building our intuitions about trading off harm in general: human lives are not fungible, murder is not reversible, the victims do not generally get a meaningful way of influencing how the murder impacts them etc., all properties that do not apply in the case of being put off a pursuit like FOSS. (Even then, we're sometimes…

Wow I've seen everything on HN to protect RMS. The Allies action was to counter gratuitous aggression and persecution of large swathes of people. Are you telling me RMS has had the same experiences in his life to warrant his egregious behavior ?
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