RMS addresses the free software community

His blog clearly states: "This is the personal web site of Richard Stallman. The views expressed here are my personal views, not those of the Free Software Foundation or the GNU Project. For the sake of separation, this site has always been hosted elsewhere and managed separately. "

Both MIT and Harvard have admitted to helping Jeffrey Epstein avoid prosecution on federal racketeering charges for the sex-trafficking of minors after they were exposed by whistle-blowers at both of these institutions.

I'm still not sure why people consider it appropriate to exclude someone like Stallman from serving on the Board of the FSF while continuing to allow Mr. Rafael Reif, for example, to remain president of MIT after sending a personally signed "thank-you note" to one of the most notorious alleged sex-traffickers and convicted child-rapists in US history:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2020/01/12/after-epstei...

Nor would it be any more appropriate to allow Mr. Seth Lloyd back onto the MIT campus with just a slap on the wrist:

https://thetech.com/2021/02/25/mit-administration-epstein-op...

Or Mr. Martin Nowak for that matter either:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/03/26/metro/harvard-sanctio...

On the subject of Nowak's role in aiding and abetting a child rapist, this hacker news thread is worth reading again:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25442060

So why has nobody drafted petitions to cancel Rafael "Thank You So Much Mr. Epstein -- And Don't Forget to Show My Letter to Federal Prosecutors" Reif, Benedict "Epstein is an Ideal Donor for Harvard" Gross, Alan "Dershbag" Dershowitz, Martin "Punishment Serves No Noble Purpose" Nowak, Steven "Using the Internet to Entice a Minor into Prostitution is A-Okay" Pinker, Seth "So What If I Make Female Undergraduates at MIT Feel Uncomfortable" Lloyd, Neri "Epstein was Always a Reliable Supporter of Israel" Oxman, Frank "I Never Saw any Girls that were Underage" Wilczek, and all of the other pedophilia-tolerating two-faced phonies that attended EDGE Foundation dinners hosted by the convicted child rapist and/or visited him on "Pedophile Isle," where FBI reportedly found instruction manuals that Mr. Epstein had ordered on Amazon that describe how to create a so-called "sex slave," in addition to video tapes containing child pornography that he allegedly recorded using secret cameras that were installed throughout his various residences?

Mr. Stallman blaming his "being on the spectrum" for all of the troubling statements cataloged on the website cited below may not entirely excuse him for making them since there is no evidence that someone on the spectrum is more likely than the general population to hold similar views on child rape:

https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman

But the most important question today that Mr. Stallman still needs to address directly, because many of his critics on this issue continue to hold him in the highest regard for his role in advancing the free software movement, is a very frank one:

Were his remarks in support of pedophilia designed to persuade Mr. Epstein to donate part of his $500 million estate to the Free Software Foundation, much like he observed role-models such as MIT president Rafael Reif do for Mr. Epstein when Dr. Reif sent Mr. Epstein a personally signed thank-you note for his donation to the Media Lab, or colleagues like Martin Nowak do for Mr. Epstein when Dr. Nowak created a web page on a university website and an office in his department for a convicted child-rapist in exchange for tens of millions of dollars in donations that were promised to his academic program at Harvard and hundreds of millions of dollars in donations, often laundered through Epstein's fellow billionaire pedophile friends like Les Wexner, Glenn Dubin, and Leon Black, to Harvard University, where Mr. Nowak is a professor?

I'm not entirely convinced by the naysayers on this one yet, but Stallman is most deserving of the benefit of doubt thus far, and not because of his autism, but rather because of all of his contributions to free software in spite of it.

On the other hand, many of the other Epstein co-conspirators cited above who directly accepted money from the convicted child-rapist as a form of reputation laundering for an individual who they knew, or should have known, was about to face racketeering charges in federal court for the sex-trafficking of hundreds of underage girls over the past 30 years deserve to spend some serious time in the same jail cell where Mr. Epstein (allegedly) killed himself because he was too much of a coward to stand trial for all of the crimes that he knew he had committed.

I'm getting tired of seeing this second uninstallman dramatizations everywhere, FOSS blogs, Linux distros, Twitter, HN, but what do I know, the witchhunt will go on.

I disagree, I think you have to really contort your thinking and selectively quote the deposition to say this isn't an accusation.

If you take the assumption that the user device is actively user-hostile, there's a simpler approach: just add another microchip whose purpose is to run non-free code (or at least non-GPLv3 code) to report on what you're doing. You might not get the world's best networking stack by constraining yourself to non-GPL, but you can certainly get something that's enough to spy on the user. (Or, frankly, given the state of OpenSSL vs. GnuTLS, you probably actually want the non-GPL option :) ) Maybe the GPLv3 gets you the ability to ensure that you can modify the fancy UI on your TV because the best stack for that is GPLv3-based for some reason, but they'll just wire that to a non-GPL component to actually interface with the TV tuner, and then they'll know everything.

That's why I think the Apple case is relevant. Apple is a user-freedom-hostile company. (I actually think they're great at certain things like privacy that are necessary components of user freedom / digital autonomy, but certainly I wouldn't say I've particularly got autonomy over what happens on my iPhone.) And Apple (or well, their precursor, NeXT) decided to contribute to GCC because licensing compelled them to. And now Apple is deciding to contribute to LLVM with no compulsion, which is really kind of strange given that we thought we needed a licensing lever to make that happen, and also there seems to be no licensing lever we can possibly pull to get them to open up the actually interesting parts of any of their devices. The GPLv3 cannot possibly prevail against Apple, because they can and empirically did just reimplement things to avoid it.

This is the difficulty with licensing as a weapon, and it's something that the free software movement needs to seriously struggle with. Did the strategy make sense in the past and it no longer does? Did it never make sense, and we were just lucky? Are we not trying hard enough?

And to be clear, I'm not saying that he FSF needs to be pragmatic instead of ideological. The FSF always was pragmatic as a means towards being ideological. That's why it built GNU, an entire coherent OS that people could actually use, and didn't just write licenses. And that's why a lot of the early FSF focus was on redeveloping parts of UNIX that had no immediate free replacement, instead of writing free software in general.

Quoting RMS:

> As the GNU Project proceeded, and increasing numbers of system components were found or developed, eventually it became useful to make a list of the remaining gaps. We used it to recruit developers to write the missing pieces. This list became known as the GNU Task List. In addition to missing Unix components, we listed various other useful software and documentation projects that, we thought, a truly complete system ought to have.

I argue that the reason that RMS / the FSF had leverage over NeXT/Apple in the past was that it was ruthlessly pragmatic: they built an amazingly high-quality compiler compared to all the alternatives that existed at the time, such that the obvious thing for a for-profit, user-hostile company to do was to comply with the terms of the license. That pragmatism gained them an ideological victory.

The GPLv3 is very ideological, but it was only ideological. There wasn't a plan for how to actually get anyone (except the FSF themselves) to use it; there wasn't even a plan for how to get the actual GPL'd code running on actual TiVo devices to use it.

So - I don't know what modifications to v3 would have accomplished the ideological mission, and my tentative answer would be it couldn't be done. But that just brings up the question of why it couldn't be done - what could they have done to have enough power/influence to cause a mass switch to GPLv3?

Or was there some other way that they could have addressed the threat of user-hostile devices other than through writing a new software license?