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Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF

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Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF

#101

Post by lawnchair_larry »

jolux wrote: post #71
lawnchair_larry wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t look like it did. Looks like another case of cancel culture and nobody reading what he actually said.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/09/richard-stallman...

I encourage you to read what he actually said rather than digest it through hit pieces, because it’s not even controversial.

He said that, hypothetically, if someone had sex with a victim of sex trafficking unkowingly - that is, the sex part was knowingly, but the victim of sex trafficking part was unknown, then it would not be fair to charge the man with rape.

If I kidnap a woman, sell her has a sex slave, and threaten her and her family that if she doesn’t walk up to you in a bar and act interested, and you mistake her for a willing participant, this obviously does not make you a rapist.

I don’t know if this is a willful distortion of what he said or what would motivate such a smear campaign, or if every is just shockingly bad at reading comprehension. But what he said was correct, and we all know it.

Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF

#102

Post by zeruch »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #8

I think it is strange that, on the one hand, the tech world has been advocating for the rights of neurodivergent people – society should accept that people on the autism spectrum are different and that’s OK. But at the same time RMS has been attacked for some statements very probably stemming from his autism that, while they may seem a bit shocking and at odds with the mainstream, were not illegal or intentionally of…

It's not just neurodivergence, but its that he recognizes where he jabs people and pretty much admits he doesn't care. I once had this conversation about with with ESR and I remember him saying "RMS doesn't care about the 'social overhead' of most person to person interactions" and so he kind of does his own normative preferences, thinking that because he finds them ideal, that others shouldn't be offended....but then he seems offended by an infinitely long list of things, and his intellect seems to treat this asymmetry as one big blind spot.

I've listened to him be rude to former co-workers (one seemingly on the basis that she was a woman in a technical role) and an absolute one man clown rodeo at various trade show events.

His philosophical brilliance has always impressed me, his personal presence is like rotting offal in the sun. He doesn't get the benefit of being remembered for the former when he puts in so much effort to broadcast the latter.

Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF

#103

Post by dralley »

creamytaco wrote: post #34

Stallman is a bastion of software freedom in a world turning progressively dark. The fact that he never ever compromised his ideals and principles, never sold out and has been repeatedly proven prescient and absolutely on the money on countless issues, makes him someone that we should strive to protect. There are many invididuals in the Free Software world that backstabbed RMS and tried to destroy him with malicious…

Why should they apologize? Everything they say is true.

GNU software absolutely has been stagnating for the past 2 decades under Stallman's leadership. It is a little known fact that in 2005, there was an offer to merge the LLVM project into GCC, and assign the entire copyright to GNU. The patches to do so were even submitted. [0]

They were rejected [1], because GNU wasn't interested in producing a modular compiler. They thought that if the compiler was allowed to be modular, then it might be used by proprietary software behind their backs.

But it turns out that modular compilers are generally quite useful, even for huge quantities of FOSS software. So the LLVM project continues, outside of GNU, and here we are 15 years later and essentially all academic research, and all new tooling development, happens in the LLVM ecosystem. Massive self-inflicted wound.

And yet, the stonewalling [2] and bridge-burning [3] [4] continued, long past the point of rationality. Continuing to object to development of useful tools even after the damage was done. At this point, just pissing off a lot of people who were interested in doing the work to help improve the usefulness of GCC.

And not limited to this topic, either. Such as when Stallman decided to leverage his "veto power" in opposition to removing an abortion joke from the glibc manual, against the consensus of nearly all of the glibc core team, despite not having contributed to glibc himself in years. [5]

And if I was interested in continuing to dig through mailing list archives, I could probably pull out a bunch more examples.

[0] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTU4MzE

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00...

[2] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-01/msg00...

[3] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-01/msg00...

[4] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-01/msg00...

[5] https://lwn.net/Articles/753646/

Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF

#104

Post by metalforever »

YorickPeterse wrote: post #16
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, maybe it was "hard to interact with him" only if one was unwilling to accept his difference?

This is just the same excuse as the age old "Boys will be boys" excuse. Just because somebody is different doesn't mean they can be a creep and general unpleasant person to work with, without there eventually being repercussions.

I am not sure if you or a lot of the posters here really understand autism . This is someone with an extremely low emotional iq and an extreme emotional difference.

Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF

#105

Post by r3856283 »

bigtones wrote: post #22
hYKdTfpa wrote: post #3

The attacks on him were dubious at best.

Are they.... here is a direct quote from him on a pro-pedophilia political party in 2006 that many that people took offence with: “I am sceptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren’t voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing.” https://thenextweb.com/dd/2019…

But after someone read it they spoke to him about it and he realized he was wrong and published a correction right along side it and that was many years ago. You should have mentioned that. If he hadn't said it publicly, and only said it in private to people, that wouldn't have happened. Is that better? I don't think so. Free speech creates counter speech and changes people's minds.

Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF

#106

Post by armchairhacker »

Some context I got from https://www.wired.com/story/richard-stallman-and-the-fall-of...:

Stallman was pressured to resign from the board and MIT because of some of these controversies:

- Jeffrey Epstein coerced one of his victims to have sex with Marvin Minsky. In an online thread, Stallman argued that this might not be sexual assault if Minsky didn't realize she was coerced.

- 10 years ago, Stallman claimed that 14 year olds are old enough to consent to sex and it's not pedophilia. He since retracted this claim

- He is generally very weird and doesn't have etiquite. For example, he was invited to a fancy restaurant and then pranced around the tables because he wanted to dance

Overall, Stallman is very unaware of societal expectations, so sometimes he says things ranging from non-PC to outright sexist, albeit unintentionally.

EDIT: Fixed some inaccuracies

Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF

#107

Post by mjgs »

mjg59 wrote: post #86
hntrader wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I don't care about 'intent' as much as 'outcome'" Accidentaly killing someone with your car is very different to negligent driving which causes death which is also very different to intentionally killing someone with your car. Clearly intent and context matters a lot.

These are all different things, but the end result is that someone has been hit with a car. If your goal is to avoid people being hit with cars and someone keeps accidentally hitting people with their car, then you probably want to considering whether that person should be allowed to drive.

You might also want to consider whether the people that have habitual contact with that accident prone person, should in fact be allowed to have contact with that person.

Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF

#108

Post by wmf »

For those who do not know RMS personally: "I worked for RMS longer than any other programmer. ... This was an own-goal for RMS. He has had plenty of opportunities to learn how to stfu when that’s necessary. ... I can confirm the unfortunate reality that RMS’s behavior was a concern [in the 1990s], and that [Marvin Minsky's] protection was itself part of the problem. He was never held to account; he was himself coddled in his own lower-grade misbehavior and mistreatment of women. He made the place uncomfortable for a lot of people, and especially women. ... RMS’s mere presence on the scene in this way has served to make it harder to deal with other cases of bad leaders’ bad behavior. It is time for the free software community to leave adolescence and move to adulthood, and this requires leaving childish tantrums, abusive language, and toxic environments behind." — Thomas Bushnell https://medium.com/@thomas.bushnell/a-reflection-on-the-depa...

Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF

#109

Post by hedora »

mrob wrote: post #25
varispeed wrote: post #9

I wish FSF also started caring about the developers. Free software was and is a great idea, but unintended consequence is that it also facilitates exploitation of software developers by big corporations who from the perspective of FSF are just users as regular people. This means they make billions off of a software who someone built in their rented flat, living a modest life, sometimes struggling with bills, meanwhil…

The goal of the FSF is "to promote computer user freedom". By "freedom" they mean the four freedoms of the Free Software definition: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html Your proposal contradicts freedom 0, so the FSF cannot support it without abandoning their mission. To do so is both undesirable and unnecessary, because the alleged "exploitation of software developers" is in most cases just people doing what…

> Your proposal contradicts freedom 0

Not true. The AGPL solves the problem elegantly. IMHO, the FSF compromised its principles by not closing the “running a binary for someone doesn’t count as distributing the software to them” loophole.

Their compromised ethical stance is what has led them to irrelevance.

As it is, GPL is functionally equivalent to BSD licensing for most of the industry (and essentially all of cloud computing).

Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF

#110

Post by ramraj07 »

cambalache wrote: post #64
bigtones wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they.... here is a direct quote from him on a pro-pedophilia political party in 2006 that many that people took offence with: “I am sceptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren’t voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing.” https://thenextweb.com/dd/2019…

Was he being an actual child-predator, was he sharing child porn? Suppose some guy (Stallman or not) argues that the age of consent should be lowered to 14. Now you are in your right to oppose to that proposal or even be disgusted by it. What you dont have the right to is to silence and ostracize the guy or even suggest that opinion must have any type of consequence , be it legal or moral.

I have the right to attempt to silence or ostracise anyone for anything. Whether or not it’s successful depends on the situation and climate of the world at that time.

He has the right to say whatever he wants to say as well. He wasn’t jailed for it just fired for it. Ask him to suck it up and then everyone here can also do the same thing instead of crying a river.

Also, please try to show a single example of a person who defended pedophilia and ended up not being one? Discussing age of consent with respect to reducing it below 18 sounds like tacit support of the same. Many countries have lower ages, sure, but its not clear to me that this is because they were morally thought through decisions, mere figments of history that people cling to in the name of culture (also many of the decision makers seem happy to have the freedom to have sex with 14 year olds as well I suppose).

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