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RMS addresses the free software community

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Re: RMS addresses the free software community

#531

Post by artificialLimbs »

sumeno wrote: post #307
artificialLimbs wrote: post #274

It is great that RMS is trying to explore his emotional capacity and relate to others! Shocking in these comments how many people believe that people are not responsible for their own emotions. No one can "hurt another" emotionally. It is up to each person to take the mature (and logical) stance that "I am responsible for my emotions". If something someone does or says "hurts me" emotionally, it is because I have cho…

People aren't robots, they are emotionally connected biological beings. Emotions are a biological response. You can't just 100% control your emotions any more than you can 100% control your thyroid.

>> You can't just 100% control your emotions any more than you can 100% control your thyroid.

I suspect you arrive at this conclusion because this is the way you have always operated and so it must be 'how it is'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%ADch_Qu%E1%BA%A3ng_%C4%9...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pboh0Q0Z3DI

https://universe-inside-you.com/buddhist-monks/

And these are only Buddhist examples.

Re: RMS addresses the free software community

#532

Post by artificialLimbs »

wetmore wrote: post #290
artificialLimbs wrote: post #274

It is great that RMS is trying to explore his emotional capacity and relate to others! Shocking in these comments how many people believe that people are not responsible for their own emotions. No one can "hurt another" emotionally. It is up to each person to take the mature (and logical) stance that "I am responsible for my emotions". If something someone does or says "hurts me" emotionally, it is because I have cho…

This is like saying that when you shoot someone, it's the bullet that killed them, not you. Maybe it's technically true but it's not very useful, it's just pedantry used in an attempt to deny culpability.

It is not like saying that at all. The emotional world is connected with but is not exclusively the physical world.

Putting the responsibility for one's emotional responses on another is the denying of culpability for one's self.

I find it is useful to be wary of those who find it useful to point a finger and say 'he/she did this to me' when they become emotionally hurt or even happy, knowing they will non-usefully invariably want me to be nanny or projection target for their other emotions when they arise in whatever manifestation.

Re: RMS addresses the free software community

#533

Post by koheripbal »

beachwood23 wrote: post #518
koheripbal wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither of those things will happen. We would be better off if we could remove those dishonest people from our communities here and elsewhere. Dishonest reporting, and amplifying of dishonest posts on social media is not something you will ever get an apology for, because those efforts were never meant to survive scrutiny. They were meant to create "pressure" to cause reputational damage. You cannot convince or engag…

> We would be better off if we could remove those dishonest people from our communities here and elsewhere. How do you distinguish between dishonesty and honesty? Who gets to determine that? It sounds like you are attempting to block the people who blocked other people. It isn't a good cycle to get into. Listening to arguments we disagree with is going to be incredibly valuable in the coming years. Not everyone is ar…

> How do you distinguish between dishonesty and honesty? Who gets to determine that?

There are two types of communities, in my opinion. ...and most, like HN, fall somewhere in the middle.

There's the community that's open to all, doesn't censor anything, and is flooded with low-quality or manipulated content.

Then there are the communities that are private. They have groups of mature people who DO appreciate different opinions, and are able to engage in constructive discourse. Obviously dishonest content, as judged by older accounts or mods, are removed. Ideally older or high-reputation accounts have greater voting weight.

The danger in the latter is that the community loses the diversity of thought if those top accounts misuse their power to direct a narrative, but as these private communities are numerous - participants can simply leave. You could even make the argument that they could be paid communities, if the quality and analysis of the community is high. For example, I pay to belong to the Arms Control Wonk Discord channel because that community provides detailed analysis on international events on WMDs/conflicts that you cannot find elsewhere. It is low on advocacy, and high on analysis.

HN is in the middle. They ban poor quality accounts, but it's still a free and open forum. For now it works, but as it becomes more popular, I've noticed a decline in content quality and an increase in advocacy.

Re: RMS addresses the free software community

#534

Post by iajrz »

dralley wrote: post #529
iajrz wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> His moral positions have done incredible damage to GCC at a technical level, and lost huge amounts of marketshare to LLVM as a direct result. We can take this as a given for the purposes of the discussion. > They are intertwined But which has priority? The main issue with this topic is that it's sometimes hard to see things from an angle we're so unaccustomed to. The FSF and the GNU project are accidentally technic…

From a recent LWN article about a week ago. > It restarted, however, when Poimboeuf came back a few days later with another idea for solving his problem: recompiling all plugins when the GCC version changes. This was refused by Yamada, who noted that Ubuntu does not have the GCC mismatch problem, so the problem seemed to be specific to Fedora. Linus Torvalds also disagreed with the proposal, but for another reason. F…

And that's good and well - that's the way things are done: every project strives for their goal as well as they can.

I am very emphatically not making any statements about the technical aspects of gnu software.

The FSF is not the same as the gnu project, even if they share a lot of values - since they're being used mostly interchangeably in this post, let's roll 'em into one.

Whether someone is good or not for an organization can't be evaluated against arbitrary values: they evaluation needs to be made against the organization's values and their current state.

It's the same issue as when people were complaining about the AST not being available to make emacs _customizable_ into a better C++ IDE. Before even thinking about the technical merits of the solution, the questions that need to be answered unequivocally look like: "Are we making it easier to create non-free software from our work if we do this?" or "Are we eliminating leverage that incentivizes people to write free software in this are?"

From the FSF's standpoint, The crucial questions like "Are we enabling amazing software?" or "Are we going to gain market share from this?" are _secondary_.

And much of people's teeth-grinding is because they don't understand that; at least in the AST discussion I noticed that people arguing for the AST didn't appear to see that their priorities weren't the same as the gnu project's, and rms seems to not have noticed the discrepancy (or attributed it to plausible malice) and made some very strong accusations to people who just weren't arguing their side from the appropriate value framework. Appropriate because gcc is a gnu project, therefore its roadmap is decided according to gnu's values.

If you can't see this, you can't understand that some features, desirable as they could be, should not be (from their standpoint) implemented; from their standpoint, pursuit of technical excellence, usefulness, market share, beauty - any other feature that a software project may have - is subordinated to the value of software freedom.

You may or may not agree with that, and that's OK; but an org that has that kind of value framework sure needs someone - not rms specifically, mind you - who shares it, or at least understands it thoroughly and can commit to making organizational decisions based wholly on that value structure.

Re: RMS addresses the free software community

#535

Post by iajrz »

jancsika wrote: post #519
iajrz wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That kind of disruption is at odds with every value FOSS devs claim to hold-- meritocratic, decentralized, etc. You're mixing things here. :) meritocracy and decentralization are completely orthogonal to free software. They [edit: s/are/could be construed as a/] part of the open-source ethos as explored in CATB & explained by esr, not a sine-qua-non of free software.

The problem in this case is an unspoken governance model where a participant from decades ago showed up, made public accusations about the trustworthiness of the other participants, then declared a time schedule of his own choosing during which he would consult his own private council to judge the veracity of all the public arguments given. Whatever we want to call that, and whatever the origins of the problem, it is…

Hey, I've been thinking and talking in another thread; I just made a comment that is completely relevant for this convo, too; the people in the discussion, as well as you, are looking at things from a different value framework as rms, the gnu project, and the fsf. Here's the relevant comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26809646

We can agree the discussion could be handled better, and the accusations were unwarranted in context; I happily chalk that up to a misunderstanding (rms not seeing other people's lack of awareness of value framework incompatibility as a massive obstacle to conversation, instead assuming interlocutors had better information than they seemed to, in which case their behavior could have been construed as being in bad faith) - which implies 2015 rms should probably dial it down in the strength of his accusations among other adjustments. Communication is _not_ easy.

If a farmer and a forest ranger go into a patch of land, they will see the same scenery, but may have heated discussions about what to do with it. Unless they understand that one of them wants to produce food, and the other to protect the forest. And if one of them has decision-making power over the terrain, even if they have not been in there personally for a while - the argument about how what they want to do fits with the decision-maker's values needs to be made.

Of course, nobody is stopping the developers from going and doing the stuff they want to do in the first place, distributing it and, if the change is as technically important as it seems and the cards are played just right, even becoming the de-facto standard distribution of a piece of software; their changes just won't be merged into the main product for the foreseeable future.

Re: RMS addresses the free software community

#536

Post by CRConrad »

rideontime wrote: post #418
jancsika wrote: post #98

That's great, but the problem seems to be RMS's disruption of development activities. This doesn't change that. For example: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-01/msg00... Imagine taking the time to publicly explain to an out-of-practice dev why some technical feature is needed, then being accused of a "pressure campaign" that requires the out-of-practice dev to consult privately, "with people I have…

Good lord, it's like talking to a brick wall. That thread is agonizing. Why do people still put up with that? e: Also, it's hilarious to jump to Apr 2021 and see a thread titled "How to make Emacs popular again: Use monospaced fonts less".

Well, at least they've wised up on one part: In the 2015 thread, most of them seemed to think Emacs was still popular.

(Personally, I thought it's used mostly for coding, so idunno if proportional fonts will be a popularity panacea.)

Re: RMS addresses the free software community

#537

Post by NoImmatureAdHom »

seoaeu wrote: post #444
NoImmatureAdHom wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think CSAIL mailing list qualifies as "work" for rms, if "work" is FSF. Maybe "professional", but it's a university, so that sort of inquiry is 100% appropriate and should be protected.

For a lot of people on that list it was work. And as for whether it was an appropriate for that discussion, the university in question has since unambiguously communicated that it wasn't.

Yeah, we're unfortunately entering a time of repression. I wonder how bad it will get.

The duty to resist it rests on our collective shoulders.

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