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The Stallman Report

stallman-report.org

71–80 of 208 posts

Re: The Stallman Report

#71

Character assassination by anonymous cowards. The Free Software movement has been completely routed. MS owns GitHub. The farmers fighting for the "right to repair" their tractors are the "front" of the "battle" for user empowerment. But sure let's beat the shit out of the dead horse that's actually a real live old man with cancer who wrote fucking Emacs, see if that helps?

More charitably, perhaps people are looking at the movement foundering and asking if the reason is that its leader has too much baggage to talk to the people with political power to move free software forward?

Re: The Stallman Report

#72
post #63
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

How do we know that there are no powerful men behind anonymous accusations?

This seems like an irrelevant tangent. Powerful men can hold other powerful men to account, that is still holding powerful men to account.

(In fact, one change desired by is for powerful men to stop reflexively responding to allegations like these by protecting each other and being more skeptical of unsubstantiated pleas of innocence, given the statistics that we know on the nature of sexual assault allegations).

Re: The Stallman Report

#73
post #46

The anonymous authors of this website have instructed people on other websites to come here and downvote any and all comments that speak in favor of RMS: https://mastodon.social/@report_press/113305688857205037 This is telling. They don't want discourse, they want to silence and bully everyone who disagrees with them so only they are allowed to speak. All they have is anonymous accusations with zero proof, an off-con…

The link provided doesn't mention that.

They did in another post ask for people to "Don't necessarily upvote it -- just "vouch" for it if you think it's on-topic."

By the way the report is pretty solid.

https://mastodon.social/@report_press/113306313558293261

Re: The Stallman Report

#74
For once doesn't seem like a hit piece, the arguments are pretty solid and well documented.

Very thorough job and if RMS was smart he would gracefully step down.

The only argument I find here against it is the question of whether someone's personal opinions should be a reason to be removed from a leadership position.

Edit: Oh wow just read the recommendations. Can't agree to most of it, sorry.

Re: The Stallman Report

#75
GNU kind communication guidelines the report purports to be transphobic:

"Please think about how to treat other participants with respect, especially when you disagree with them. For instance, call them by the names they use, and refer to them using words whose meanings (as you understand them) cover those participants' stated gender identities. Please also show tolerance and respect for people who do that using different words from the words you use."

Also strongly disagree with stopping support FSF, in particular from an anonymous group.

Recommendations are quite of, despite the generally accurate and reasonable report.

Re: The Stallman Report

#76
post #52

The man has weird views on non tech issues. Some are thought provoking, some are plain bad hills to die on. But I don't see how this is something I should be getting up in arms over. The FSF has largely failed to garner political/public influence to prevent the enshittification of the digital world. What is there to be gained from a putsch like this? If these people truly cared about the mission RMS set out to achiev…

If you look at the history of the NAACP trying to fight legal discrimination, one of the things they were quite focused on was ensuring that the cases involved people who are as clean as possible. The messenger matters as much as the message does; the more imperfect the messenger it is, the more it allows those against the message to turn the conversation from the message to the messenger.

Stallman, even without the stuff mentioned here, was already a pretty poor choice for messenger. His tendency to focus on semantic nitpicking gave his arguments a kind of tedious quality to them (GNU/Linux, anyone?). The outspoken political views can turn off people who are not politically aligned. And he's always given off this sort of skeevy vibe to me personally--and that sentiment has seemed to be shared by lots of other people. Long before any of the stuff being complained about here happened!

The negative influence of Stallman isn't purely theoretical anymore. We now have a couple of stories of people saying that he made them personally uncomfortable with unwanted seemingly sexual advances. Apparently, these have continued after being explicitly told by several people to knock it off. Several organizations have suspended their funding and involvement with the FSF over his reinstatement. Whatever you think of the accuracy of the accusations against him, the general perception of him is clearly negative, and to be frank, it doesn't seem like he brings any positive qualities that would make letting him go be a tough call (consider Elon Musk, who is obviously a pretty effective salesman for the future and props up Tesla's share price even as his outspoken political views are causing real problems for his companies).

Re: The Stallman Report

#77

Character assassination by anonymous cowards. The Free Software movement has been completely routed. MS owns GitHub. The farmers fighting for the "right to repair" their tractors are the "front" of the "battle" for user empowerment. But sure let's beat the shit out of the dead horse that's actually a real live old man with cancer who wrote fucking Emacs, see if that helps?

More charitably, perhaps people are looking at the movement foundering and asking if the reason is that its leader has too much baggage to talk to the people with political power to move free software forward?

I am being charitable.

The uncharitable take is that the people who wrote this incredibly uncharitable and obsessive character assassination of an old dying guy are working for Microsoft et. al.

Re: The Stallman Report

#78
post #65

Puberty was considered the adulthood age for mellinia, that is suitable for marriage (and is still considered so in several places). Why is this a very controversial topic?

Taboos are often controversial. And if he were a sociologist or anthropologist, published in the field with any reputation at all in it, who could speak on that complex dynamic over history and the interplay between environment, tradition, human biology, and social context, he might have a prayer of using reason to move the needle on the taboos in his own culture. But he's not. He's a professor in another field speak…

But does he have a right for his personal opinion in a free country?

Re: The Stallman Report

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't. It intentionally gives quotes retracted or out of context.

Care to elaborate and put them in the proper context? ...and as far as I understood, that comment was not completely retracted, but amended to change the "age bar" to 14?

This: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41847507

Re: The Stallman Report

#80
post #52

The man has weird views on non tech issues. Some are thought provoking, some are plain bad hills to die on. But I don't see how this is something I should be getting up in arms over. The FSF has largely failed to garner political/public influence to prevent the enshittification of the digital world. What is there to be gained from a putsch like this? If these people truly cared about the mission RMS set out to achiev…

If you look at the history of the NAACP trying to fight legal discrimination, one of the things they were quite focused on was ensuring that the cases involved people who are as clean as possible. The messenger matters as much as the message does; the more imperfect the messenger it is, the more it allows those against the message to turn the conversation from the message to the messenger. Stallman, even without the…

> Whatever you think of the accuracy of the accusations against him, the general perception of him is clearly negative

Which is why we should support him even more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22299156

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