Bruce Perens: On Non-Judicical Punishment of Individuals

I said exactly that many times to girls when I was a teenager. It was a joke. Taken out of context, those phrases can mean anything good or bad.

Generally speaking, a blind person can't do anything to improve their vision.

A person with a social disability can learn coping strategies to perform better in social situations, in spite of their disability. In the literature on ASD, this process even has a name – "masking". They may never be as good at social stuff as someone without a social disability, they may find social situations draining, etc, but they can improve.

People with ASD [0] often have poor social intuition, but they can learn to think consciously about things which other people can identify intuitively. There's no reason why Stallman couldn't do that as well. Sometimes, given enough time, what first had to be learnt consciously can become more automatic, even intuitive.

Has Stallman been taking actions to try to improve as a result of this public controversy? No idea. But it is at least possible he has. Maybe he's been seeing a therapist. Maybe he's even shared that fact with the FSF board, and maybe they've taken that into account in their decision to reinstate him, but of course it wouldn't be appropriate for the FSF board to share that kind of private medical information publicly.

Of course, we also have to consider the fact that he is 68. Increasing cognitive rigidity is a natural consequence of ageing, and people can find it harder to change ingrained habits at 68 than if they were 20 or 30 or 40 years younger. Even so, I don't think being 68 makes change impossible, just harder.

[0] I'm not saying Stallman has ASD, simply that he may. Quite a few years ago he publicly expressed the opinion that he doesn't have ASD/autism/Asperger's, but I don't believe that was based on a professional evaluation, simply a case of "self-undiagnosis". Also, his comments demonstrate he doesn't have a good understanding of ASD, so I don't think his "self-undiagnosis" should be given a lot of weight. He obviously has signs of broad autism phenotype (BAP), but whether it is just BAP or whether it is ASD is something which only a professional can answer. BAP is not a clinical diagnosis, it is a very common subclinical condition. I don't think the BAP-vs-ASD boundary is important for this discussion – people with BAP have many of the same issues that people with ASD do, just to a milder and less disabling degree.

The question at hand is whether he's an appropriate person to place in a leadership position of an activism organization. And frankly, there's no "should" there - there's only the blunt question of whether he's helping the organization achieve its activism goals or not. If his personal beliefs or actions are making the targets of the activism not be interested in listening, then he's undermining the work of his fellow activists, whether or not he intends to. If his affiliation with the organization threatens funding, then he's putting the organization at risk, whether or not we think that ought to be a relevant factor for donors. (And it goes the other way too, of course.)

The goal of the free software movement is to convince people that software freedom is important and to produce free software. It is a hard enough task. Changing the goals to be to convince people that, first, they should stop caring about Richard Stallman's views, and then after that, that they should care about software freedom, just makes the task even harder.