John Sullivan resign as executive director of the Free Software Foundation

Perhaps my grammar was too ambiguous, but the question was intended as an either/or, not a continuation clause. I listed real harm first as a higher priority too. Committing a crime was if anything, a secondary concern - if someone had claimed he was guilty of stealing a loaf of bread to feed his family I wouldn't be up in arms against him.

> I find that we spend precious little time, considering such trivialities as Honor, Integrity or Honesty, when looking only at the legal code.

True enough - codification is treated as a very Holy concept under modernism. If the letter of the law doesn't explicitly state so, then it's OK. I consider that one of many of modernism's failings.

> As to "harming someone," I suspect that we may not be the best judge of that. I deal with highly traumatized people, several days a week, and am quite aware of the grievous harm that can be done by folks, not intending to do harm.

This is not a useful measure because people can claim harm for nearly anything. The best thing that can be done for highly traumatised people is to help them get over their trauma and successfully begin navigating society again. Wrapping victimised people up in cotton wool does nothing to help anybody, especially if doing so requires that wider society constrict itself. I say that as someone with complex PTSD myself.

> In my extracurricular world, I also spend a lot of time, running around with baby wipes, and a pooper-scooper, cleaning up emotional and physical damage, caused by the careless words of folks with authority that refuse to take Responsibility for their positions of influence.

Emotional and physical damage are not equivalent. If I say something in innocuous innocence and you take offense or it triggers an unreasonable response from you, it's not on me to navigate your issues. If I do physical harm to you, I should be in prison. Of course there's a line between being accidentally and intentionally hurtful, and the line is intent.

> I get rather peeved at people that have achieved some position of influence, then disregard the considerable Responsibility that comes with the trappings of power. Like I said, a bricklayer can spout off a bunch of guff, but their bosses are morally (and sometimes, ethically, and even legally) Responsible to watch what the heck they say.

Of course that is true, and why I don't believe RMS should steward the FSF: he's just not socially capable of the position, too abrasive. But that doesn't make him a toxic person or worthy of cancellation or whatever - it's just not his wheelhouse. This entire thread is about me asking if he's actually done anything bad, besides being socially inept.

> I really wish that society did a better job of teaching simple ethics, courtesy and logic.

That's what parents, personal experience and community are for. Unfortunately, community is dead in the city, so parents and personal experience it is.

Most people in my experience get stupider as they become more logical. HN is a perfect example of this.

This doesn't cause an issue though, the software is still licensed under v3. A more restrictive v4 can be ignored, an issue would only arrise from a less restrictive v4.

If the last few years have proven anything, it's that people are far too easy to manipulate. Otherwise we wouldn't have successful political campaigns built on outright lies.

I honestly don't have a solution for that - i don't think there's a way to filter information so that individuals susceptible to misinformation don't get anything but truth ( actual facts, not whoever's in charge today's version of it), but i also think that it's the only way to have a fully functional society ( i don't think that a society that believes the Nigel Farages, Marine Le Pens, Donald Trumps and Jair Bolsonaros of the world is functional, it's really trivial to see through their shit and lies, yet far too many people don't).

> You are right in that propaganda is a very powerful weapon (I openly admitted that on my previous comment) but, then again, we are all adults that should be able to navigate the ocean of misinformation to find out what is true in order to form our own opinions

Ideally, yes, we should, but sadly not everybody does.

> Having all the Nazi propaganda available today is an invaluable tool to prevent it from happening in the future

In theory, but in practice most people have very vague notions of WW2, often with plenty of misinformation sprinkled in ( e.g. Holocaust deniers, people thinking the US won the war singlehandedly, people who deny there were collaborators, etc.). I absolutely think that had Nazi propaganda been limited, they wouldn't have gotten as successful. It took years of Nazi propaganda in people's homes for mass deportations and mass murder to become somewhat acceptable.

>As you say (and this might be a bit far fetched, but bear with me) in this instance, voicing their hatred was beneficial for them, at that time, but not for "genocides in general", as now (thanks to how public their whole ideology became) we have data to fight it, were something similar to happen in the future

Plenty of people have taken pages of the Nazi handbook on dehumanising, violence, exploiting democracy and freedom to sow discord, and i really don't think it has helped - if anything, the comparisons to Nazis are usually portaid as overexagerations.

You favor limiting the spread of misinformation today to prevent major issues *now* (because, as you pointed out, it has been demonstrated that people can be manipulated).

I favor open access to all type of information (even factually incorrect one) to prevent censorship and make it impossible for any particular government or group to control what citizens have access to (who decides what is good? Maybe, in 500 years, the "world government" decides that people with green eyes must be exterminated and that any opposing voice must be silenced).

You want results "now" and I aim for results in the "next hundred years".

But I can perfectly understand your point of view as other popular questions can also be reduced to a similar disjunctive (ex: "should our generation give up some commodities to leave a better world to our grand-children?").

It's a difficult question... and I think it is safe to say that it's OK for us to agree that we disagree :)