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Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF

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Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF

#131

Post by subjectsigma »

nicklecompte wrote: post #111
subjectsigma wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its strange to me that you think RMS has to "prove" that he's autistic (and therefore deserving of sympathy) - but decades of activism and writing about progressive topics (workers rights, trans rights, ending discrimination, improving IP laws, etc) can get undone in a matter of days by anonymous and uncorroborated accusations, and that's totally fine. You want him to get onstage with his therapist or something? Look…

Stallman himself said he wasn’t autistic[1], so this is really a case of his fans inventing a diagnosis to protect someone who doesn’t deserve it, smearing millions of innocent people in the process. It’s really indefensible. And one of the most frustrating things about bullshit like “RMS can’t help himself because of his autism” is that bullshit never goes away no matter how definitively it is debunked. I also never…

Well, that is pretty damning. If he says he's not autistic then people should stop saying he is. I don't think anyone here is trying to insult others with autism, though.

Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF

#132

Post by wsc981 »

bigtones wrote: post #22
hYKdTfpa wrote: post #3

The attacks on him were dubious at best.

Are they.... here is a direct quote from him on a pro-pedophilia political party in 2006 that many that people took offence with: “I am sceptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren’t voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing.” https://thenextweb.com/dd/2019…

I think this view of Stallman was quite widespread in the 70s, or at the very least much more widespread than it is today.

I read in The Netherlands in the 70s child porn was quite readily available. See also “Chick arrest”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_pornography_laws_in_th...

In this period there were even politicians openly advocating for allowing sex with children on television: https://youtu.be/nSMpAhQRDB8 (Dutch spoken)

It seems to me often the people advocating for allowing sex with children would be left-oriented.

https://timeline.com/children-of-god-5245a45f6a2a

However I believe most decent human beings these days realize sex with children can be very harmful to children.

Perhaps this is a background Stallman grew up in.

Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF

#133

Post by r3856283 »

armchairhacker wrote: post #106

Some context I got from https://www.wired.com/story/richard-stallman-and-the-fall-of... : Stallman was pressured to resign from the board and MIT because of some of these controversies: - Jeffrey Epstein coerced one of his victims to have sex with Marvin Minsky. In an online thread, Stallman argued that this might not be sexual assault if Minsky didn't realize she was coerced. - 10 years ago, Stallman claimed that 14…

Not quite. Someone vandalized his name card adding the hot ladies part and took a picture. That was never him. And you turned the quote "pranced around the tables" to "pranced around on the tables." ... why?

Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF

#134

Post by Sophistifunk »

ethbr0 wrote: post #98
nostrademons wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ribbonfarm called this a couple years ago: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/03/06/a-quick-battle-field-g... Specifically battlefront #8. He calls it consequential because the the neurodivergent/PC conflict highlights an inherent paradox in the PC worldview. Most applications of political correctness focus (at least on the surface) on defending a marginalized group against the verbal attacks of a privileged one. When a…

Honestly asking, what's the difference between someone being neurodivergent and just thoughtless / mean / an ass?

Wether or not you like them.

Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF

#135

Post by mdoms »

konjin wrote: post #90
colechristensen wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed autism poses a challenge for a person in a leadership position. One facet of autism is difficulty in certain social interactions and that difficulty can cause real harm to people. You shouldn't prejudge a person because of a diagnosis, nor should you pre-acquit. You can embrace acceptance that people are different and realize that differences make some people better and worse for certain things.

>You can embrace acceptance that people are different and realize that differences make some people better and worse for certain things. I find it astonishing that blatant abelism like yours is acceptable in polite society. >You can embrace acceptance that genders are different and realize that differences make some genders better and worse for certain things. >You can embrace acceptance that races are different and…

Is it ableist to suggest that blind people don't make good air traffic controllers, that paralysed people don't make the best bicycle couriers or that a deaf person is perhaps not a suitable music critic? Everyone works within the limitations of our abilities, and some people are dealt difficult hands - but reality doesn't care about your feelings.

Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF

#136

Post by lfam »

dralley wrote: post #103
creamytaco wrote: post #34

Stallman is a bastion of software freedom in a world turning progressively dark. The fact that he never ever compromised his ideals and principles, never sold out and has been repeatedly proven prescient and absolutely on the money on countless issues, makes him someone that we should strive to protect. There are many invididuals in the Free Software world that backstabbed RMS and tried to destroy him with malicious…

Why should they apologize? Everything they say is true. GNU software absolutely has been stagnating for the past 2 decades under Stallman's leadership. It is a little known fact that in 2005, there was an offer to merge the LLVM project into GCC, and assign the entire copyright to GNU. The patches to do so were even submitted. [0] They were rejected [1], because GNU wasn't interested in producing a modular compiler.…

Thanks for mentioning this. I think you missed the actual message where LLVM was offered to the FSF:

https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2005-11/msg00888.html

https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2005-11/msg01112.html

Even within active GNU projects, this egregious incidence of mismanagement is still not widely known, although many maintainers of active GNU projects have their own stories of when Stallman's ignorance of a subject led him to make poor decisions.

For at least a decade, his near-total ignorance of how people (billions of them!) use computers has been encouraged and deepened by the sycophantic acolytes who encourage him to ignore developments in computing, like the ostrich with its head in the sand.

All the while, the FSF and GNU can do less and less for the users who are stuck living in the dystopia that he predicted in the 80s and 90s.

It's as if, after the first time they booted a computer with a fully-free operating system, they declared the work to be complete, abandoning the future.

Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF

#137

Post by arp242 »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #8

I think it is strange that, on the one hand, the tech world has been advocating for the rights of neurodivergent people – society should accept that people on the autism spectrum are different and that’s OK. But at the same time RMS has been attacked for some statements very probably stemming from his autism that, while they may seem a bit shocking and at odds with the mainstream, were not illegal or intentionally of…

Neurodiversity – up to some point anyway, some people take it a tad too far – is great, but that also means that different people are, well, different, and are good at different things.

Stallman is good at many different things and he doesn't seem like e bad bloke overall. But he is not good at being a leader. At all. It's just not where his aptitudes lie. As a leader he is not only ineffective, but even counter-productive and harmful.

I feel the entire conversation about the statements surrounding Minsky are a bit of a distraction; what we should really be talking about is something like "is Stallman the best person to represent us as a community?" I'd argue he's not, and has never really been.

Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF

#138

Post by mssundaram »

bigtones wrote: post #87
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #8

I think it is strange that, on the one hand, the tech world has been advocating for the rights of neurodivergent people – society should accept that people on the autism spectrum are different and that’s OK. But at the same time RMS has been attacked for some statements very probably stemming from his autism that, while they may seem a bit shocking and at odds with the mainstream, were not illegal or intentionally of…

Selam Jie Gano, a female at MIT when he worked there wrote: “There is no single person that is so deserving of praise their comments deprecating others should be allowed to slide. Particularly when those comments are excuses about rape, assault, and child sex trafficking.”

Is something cut off in that quote? I don't understand how to read it

Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF

#139

Post by astrange »

AzzieElbab wrote: post #80
toiletfuneral wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah thats me, I don't care about 'intent' as much as 'outcome' All the well meaning in the world doesn't mean shit if you're creating hostility or demeaning others (that is not commentary on RMS, just in general)

I have never in my life seen so much hostility generated by good intentions as we are seeing now during this woke revolution. I repeat - never! And I lived through collapses of two failed states.

There's nothing new about wokeness. It's just what American Protestantism looks like; Americans have always been this way.

Even used to be called the same thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Awakes

Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF

#140

Post by the_af »

gruez wrote: post #30
varispeed wrote: post #9

I wish FSF also started caring about the developers. Free software was and is a great idea, but unintended consequence is that it also facilitates exploitation of software developers by big corporations who from the perspective of FSF are just users as regular people. This means they make billions off of a software who someone built in their rented flat, living a modest life, sometimes struggling with bills, meanwhil…

>FSF should start lobbying for royalty system for developers, so that big corporations using free software should have to pay % of revenue to all contributors of open source software they are using. Nobody's forcing them to license out their software for free. The reason why they do so is simple: they know they won't be able to make a buck off of it if it was commercial (even with the individuals/small company exempt…

> The reason why they do so is simple: they know they won't be able to make a buck off of it if it was commercial

That's not the reason why someone would choose a copyleft license of the kind the FSF advocates, like the GPL or one of its variants.

You choose a copyleft license because you primarily care about freedom.

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