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Looks like he moved it to the archive section and dated it 2006 to show it is a very outdated view. Stallman is a very honest person and won’t try to hide the past. This comment used to be on one of the main info pages of the site.
That quote has been at that url since 2006 https://web.archive.org/web/20060821211348/https://www.stall...
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…
Exactly this. I love and support open source[1] , but I don’t support all software being “free of cost”. [1] Not the OSI definition of it.
Note that I said above:
> but I don’t support all software being “free of cost”
Does anyone really support all software being free?
That means developers would have to live like saints / monks, with donations to support themselves (and forgo the the 250k income that's become the standard/median in Silicon Valley today...).
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This is just the same excuse as the age old "Boys will be boys" excuse. Just because somebody is different doesn't mean they can be a creep and general unpleasant person to work with, without there eventually being repercussions.
I am not sure if you or a lot of the posters here really understand autism . This is someone with an extremely low emotional iq and an extreme emotional difference.
A lot of the internal-to-the-free-software-community frustration with RMS was how he had basically stopped contributing code to GNU but still felt entitled to overrule maintainers. He is a talented coder! He could have continued to use his skills to write free software and delegated the work of being the face of the movement to others. He could have listened when people suggested to him that he'd be of greater service to the movement that way. He didn't do any of that.
Not everyone is ideally suited for every role. That's part of being understanding of neurodivergence.
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Apologize for what? What in his statement should be apologize for? It's an op-ed that the author himself qualifies with a fairly clear sense of wat exists "on the ground" and his opinion about it, both positive and negative. Frankly, Stallman has been a boat-anchor to his own cause more than much else for a while, and he is IMHO a vile little imp; his poor hygiene, both physical and emotional, and his chronic id-salv…
>his poor hygiene The social hygiene movement represented a rationalized, professionalized version of the earlier social purity movement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_hygiene_movement
People here think he must be autistic and hard to work with because he's ugly and old and dirty.
Maybe you (the collective you) should actually stop assuming that dirty people are incompetent.
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>thoughtless / mean / an ass This is precisely what people with autism tend to be like because of the difficulty people with autism have empathizing with others and seeing things from other people's points of view.
I know a lot of autistic people and they're all scrupulously kind and emotionally intelligent. The idea that autistic people are assholes is an artifact of every other gamer on the internet self diagnosing themselves with aspergers in the 00s and then using that as an excuse to be un-introspectively cruel to each other.
If I appear scrupulously kind to you, it is because I am compensating. If I appear emotionally intelligent to you, it is because I had to learn what is literally instinct to most people. At least for me, I am able to compensate effectively and pass in most social situations, but it is exhausting.
When I read RMS's writing that lead to the conflict in question, it struck me as an entirely reasonable piece. When I read the responses to it, the message I got, loud and clear, was "my thought patterns are not welcome here"
For those who do not know RMS personally: "I worked for RMS longer than any other programmer. ... This was an own-goal for RMS. He has had plenty of opportunities to learn how to stfu when that’s necessary. ... I can confirm the unfortunate reality that RMS’s behavior was a concern [in the 1990s], and that [Marvin Minsky's] protection was itself part of the problem. He was never held to account; he was himself coddle…
>and that [Marvin Minsky's] protection was itself part of the problem So if your friend was accused of heinous crime, the right thing to do is to distance yourself as far as possible?
For those who do not know RMS personally: "I worked for RMS longer than any other programmer. ... This was an own-goal for RMS. He has had plenty of opportunities to learn how to stfu when that’s necessary. ... I can confirm the unfortunate reality that RMS’s behavior was a concern [in the 1990s], and that [Marvin Minsky's] protection was itself part of the problem. He was never held to account; he was himself coddle…
>and that [Marvin Minsky's] protection was itself part of the problem So if your friend was accused of heinous crime, the right thing to do is to distance yourself as far as possible?
If you believe your friend has committed a heinous crime (assuming this isn't just a quote "crime" but actually involves heinous harm to others), the right thing to do is support your friend as a human being and support and encourage them to take accountability for the harm they've done and try to repair it, and either way support what is necessary for them to be taken out of a position where they can continue to do harm, while trying to make sure your friend is okay too (as far as still having a roof over their head and food to eat and emotional support and dignity etc).
I know this isn't the way our society works right now. It is the right thing to do.
Come to think of it, it's the right thing to do even if the harm is less heinous.
Part of the problem is that our society has taught us that the only choices are a) total abandonment of someone, throw them away completely or b) that "supporting" them means helping them deny the harm they've caused avoid any consequences and continue to do harm.
Neither one will work to reduce the amount of harm done or build a culture where we can be human.