Joint Statement on the GNU Project

Aren't sexist remarks statements like "a woman couldn't manage to do xxx as well as a man could", or "make me a sandwich"? The statement was (one might say, carefully) gender-neutral, and even if you can infer a gender it might have been referring to, what negative thing would it have been implying about said gender?

> consider that a comment like that would get anyone who made it fired from any tech company with an HR department and an employee base the size of that talk's audience

It could have, but I hope nobody would call it "sexual harrassment". "Inappropriate language at the workplace", maybe? It might not (since there's no single person it targeted, to report it to HR). It probably wouldn't cause any firing at any of the places I've worked, though. shrug

> I don't think it is unreasonable to hope for some positive impact out of all this

Let's hope so. And let's hope your comments don't end up drowning in people arguing about details, like a lot of us nerds like to do.

> there's nothing honorable or worthwhile in defending them or the people who, as in this case, persist in making them past all reasonable expectation or effort of curtailment

I hope you can see that, given the unfortunate circumstances, there really is something honorable in defending the person, at least to make sure that the accusations are valid and not overblown.

> I'd prefer it if someone like that were to understand why this is the case, and agree that it should be

BTW, you know you could email him directly, right? Before that all happened, or even now.

> he'd better learn to keep his mouth shut instead of saying things that hurt marginalized groups

Again this language of emotional escalation. It's manipulative.

Making someone uncomfortable doesn't always imply hurting them. Even if they're feeling entirely disgusted by a speech, like some of the women in the audience might have been.

You don't have to equate X with Hitler to prove to people that X is bad. X can be bad on its own rights.

> If their native empathy doesn't suffice them as cause to do so, I have no problem in principle or in practice with the fear of punishment taking its place

There is still such a thing as disproportionate punishment.

It was never Stallman's goal to "represent the future of computing". It was his goal to preserve the spirit of the past, specifically the 1970s AI lab at MIT where hackers could just log in and hack, and didn't have to worry about vendors locking them out from their data or equipment.

Look, I don't agree with Stallman, on a lot of things including software. But without his sort of lone-voice-crying-in-the-wilderness extremism, where would we be? Lots of people, including Gary Kildall, Chuck Moore, and Steve Wozniak could plausibly claim to have been at the vanguard of a culture of openness and sharing in computing. But it was Stallman who had the courage to come out and say, "these are the freedoms we demand, and you're a shithead if you abrogate them." We need more courageous voices like that. They are in short supply, especially as the loudest voices in open source now come from large companies who have much to gain by compromising the Four Freedoms.

That's harm, but it's not the only harm. It's not all that easy for someone to start a career in this industry, if they don't already "look like us" - the concept is typically treated under the name "culture fit": white, male, straight or at least nonthreateningly upper-middle-class gay, went to college for a degree in CS or a nearby discipline or else started programming at minus three years of age, laughs at our jokes and tells ones like them, drinks the same kind of beer we do, stuff like that. People who don't check those boxes, who don't exude the same ant smell, have a harder time. A higher standard is imposed. One way to meet it is to demonstrate both technical skill and ability to work with others via contributions to well-known projects - such as, for example, those that constitute the GNU project.

So it doesn't just hurt the project, when people are discouraged from trying to make such contributions by leaders making comments that, yeah, to people who look like us it's easy to mistake for just a joke, what's the big deal. It's easy for us not to see the problem, because people who look like us aren't accustomed to being the butt of jokes. For people who are, of course it's not "just a joke". It's the latest in a lifetime of "jokes" which, with enough experience of the sort that people who look like us are not likely to have, you learn are warning signs of a defect in the culture where such "jokes" are accepted. You learn that such a culture will not be kind to you, in the way it is to people who look like us. You learn you won't be welcome, that it'll be a constant fight to even try to establish and maintain yourself there. You learn there are better ways to spend your time, that piling that extra bullshit on top of the concerns that come with just trying to live a life in the world of the future is something best approached with great care and vast effort at self-defense, or maybe not at all.

So the project loses contributions, and you lose a chance to prove yourself to the higher standard imposed on you than on people who look like us, and our industry and our field of endeavor lose people who had the potential to be great engineers and, being not superhuman, needed encouragement and support to realize that potential - encouragement and support that people who look like us failed to provide, all while asking why's there all this fuss, anyway, over what was just a dumb joke, honestly, who even cares.

You're welcome to go on not seeing this as a problem, if you like. I don't know what more I can do to convince you. If you won't believe the stories women tell about experiences like this and the effect they have, if you won't listen when someone who looks like us corroborates those stories and says, yes, this happened, things like this happen every day, and they really do run people out of projects, out of jobs, out of careers, that if you take even a moment and look around just a little, you'll see it too - past that, I don't see what more I can do to convince you that this matters.

It's enough to make me understand why those who bear the brunt of this problem are getting past the point of trying to convince anyone of anything. It's enough to make me want to get behind them and push. If that means adding my voice to those demanding RMS, having so misused his platform for so long, now have that platform taken from him, then so be it. His work will stand forever as a legacy of what one person can do, and inspire others to do. That should be enough for anyone. And if the manner of his departure from that role inspires even one young engineer who looks like us to think twice about making some "dumb joke" that'll force whatever women or PoC or queers like me who hear it to consider whether they really want to spend their whole working life around people who act this way and worse toward them - well, there's a kind of legacy worth respecting in that, too.

Here's Sarah Mei declaring her intent to character-assassinate Uncle Bob and have him written out of programming history. And for what? Well, apparently Uncle Bob made some remarks that "C++ is like testosterone", meaning that C++ programmers take an overly "macho" attitude to their work and look down on other programmers. Sarah interpreted this as toxic masculinity.

This is where we are today. The old standards of discourse between speaker and audience have passed away. Instead, you must now assume that your statements will be interpreted in the least charitable way by the least reasonable person on earth -- and that person has the phone number of your current employer and every future employer you might apply to.

This is how Bolsheviks operate. The means of production (in this case, open source and the discipline of programming in general) belongs to the proletarian vanguard party (the social-justice left purporting to speak on behalf of women, PoC, LGBTQ, etc.) and any kulaks (old-time hackers, overrepresented by straight white males) still clinging to their piece of it must be crushed without mercy.

"But silly bitwize," you may counter, "You are comparing losing your reputation in open source with being killed or sent to the gulag. Surely a ridiculous comparison." Apparently Jon Sterling, one of the other thought leaders you admire so much, was "only 30% kidding" about sending his political opponents to real actual gulags: https://i.imgur.com/rlqa73W.png?1