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Libreboot – Defend Richard Stallman

libreboot.org

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Re: Libreboot – Defend Richard Stallman

#131

Post by yxhuvud »

lelanthran wrote: post #99
EdwardDiego wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...just because it's a minority doesn't mean it's inherently wrong. At the risk of the ghost of Godwin's, black people were a minority in the 1960s, yet still had a good point about their aims. And as for whether or not the board chooses to listen to the feedback, entirely up to them and their governance structure.

> ...just because it's a minority doesn't mean it's inherently wrong. At the risk of the ghost of Godwin's, black people were a minority in the 1960s, yet still had a good point about their aims. Another good point: if the cancel-culture we are currently suffering under now was practiced in the 60s, black people, women, minorities, etc would never had gotten equal rights. It's because everyone was allowed to speak th…

> It's because everyone was allowed to speak that the message came across and won minds.

Eh, you need to revisit your history lessons. There was plenty of cancel culture against blacks and there was also A LOT of violence used against them when the black protested against it and against their treatment.

Re: Libreboot – Defend Richard Stallman

#132

Post by prepend »

rbanffy wrote: post #89
prepend wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not RMS’ duty to educate you, me and others or to reword things for our benefit. I think it would be worse if he submitted to some struggle session and changed his posts to whatever language is approved for discussing Epstein/Minsky.

> It’s not RMS’ duty to educate you, me and others or to reword things for our benefit. Sorry, but it is. He's the front figure of the FSF. He appears in conferences and speaks about and for the Free Software Foundation and the more broad FLOSS community. Making things clear is pretty much his only job.

I disagree. He does what he wants, we listen or don’t. I think he’s trying to increase use of FLOSS and nothing else.

We can have preferences for what he should do, but he’s unlikely to do them. And I don’t get upset because he’s not doing what I want him to do.

Many technical thought leaders are “bad speakers” but that’s ok with me because tech concepts are hard and I’d rather have a bad speaker with a good idea than a good speaker with a bad idea.

I can always view source to figure it out.

I think it’s a false dichotomy that people must be perfect in every way to do something as simple as talk about how he wrote emacs at a conference. We take what we can get and the author of emacs is not very charismatic. That’s ok, I want to learn about emacs.

Re: Libreboot – Defend Richard Stallman

#133

Post by mustafa_pasi »

bjt2n3904 wrote: post #122

You want to know what will cause Free Software to die? It isn't RMS. The other day I told someone I thought this whole reaction to RMS was stupid. I was instantly labeled as "one of them", and "enabling harmful behavior" and blocked. This is nothing more than a witch hunt, guilt by association, McCarthyism. Ideological conformity -- march in lockstep with me, or you're the enemy. That is what will kill free software.

That's just the activist philosophy. They believe in turning every workplace in a political battlefield and they will conspire to get all those who disagree with them, fired, and consequently take over the establishment. Managers should take note to not hire these nutjobs.

Re: Libreboot – Defend Richard Stallman

#134

Post by koonsolo »

Latty wrote: post #25

Any article that just dismisses the issues with Stallman as a smear and tells you not to listen to them without showing why they are wrong instantly seems to have little intent to engage on the facts. This reads like an absurd conspiracy theory. Stallman had some good ideas about software, it doesn't mean he doesn't have bad ideas about other things (like consent), and if so we should continue to pursue the good idea…

Show me the text where he has a bad idea about consent. And then show me how his statements are false.

I guess you refer to this text:

On MIT's internal Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) listerv, Stallman had seen the description of a protest of Marvin Minsky which said Minsky was "accused of assaulting" one of Epstein's victims. Stallman argued that "the most plausible scenario" is that "she presented herself to him as entirely willing" -- even if she was coerced by Epstein into doing so -- whereas the phrase "assaulting" implies the use of force or violence, faciliating what he calls "accusation inflation... Whatever conduct you want to criticize, you should describe it with a specific term that avoids moral vagueness about the nature of the criticism."

So please explain to me how this statement is false.

Re: Libreboot – Defend Richard Stallman

#136

Post by [deleted] »

happytoexplain wrote: post #23

The writeup begins, "known Thought Criminal Richard M Stallman was falsely accused". So, it immediately implies, using sarcasm, that there is not another potentially valid opinion on this topic, and makes sure anybody with another opinion feels antagonized. I'm not defending any articles with an opposite position - I'm just criticizing this writeup.

[deleted]

Re: Libreboot – Defend Richard Stallman

#137

Post by DetroitThrow »

rbanffy wrote: post #117
rzwitserloot wrote: post #2

From the linked article: > Our opponents wish to destroy Free Software > Our opponent’s true target is not Richard Stallman; their real aim is to destroy the FSF by thoroughly infiltrating it (like they already have with organisations like the OSI and Linux Foundation). These people even started an online petition calling for RMS’s forceful removal and for the entire board of directors at the FSF to resign from their…

> These people even started an online petition calling for RMS’s forceful removal and for the entire board of directors at the FSF to resign from their posts By reinstating Stallman the board created this controversy and deliberately sabotaged the FSF's mission of defending Free Software. It's ludicrous to imagine they didn't know what the consequences would be.

Yeah, just now reading the individuals in the petition list, so many are contributors of GPL projects.

If the goal was to defend or strengthen the free software movement, then turning every conversation about the subject into a purity test on the founder's actions instead of on, well, free software seems to run counter to that goal.

And given the return announcement happened at the end of Libre planet without any of their organizers being aware beforehand, which FSF clarified as such afterwards, it telegraphs their awareness that it would be a controversy.

Re: Libreboot – Defend Richard Stallman

#138

Post by prepend »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #46
prepend wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s multiple angles. I think RedHat is more for PR for IBM. I don’t think it’s binary in that RedHat is owned by a company that has other motivations than when RedHat was independent.

Red Hat is still largely independent of IBM.

True, but I think there’s “cancel risk” (or whatever you call it) to IBM were RedHat to do something like sell software to ICE or whatever is an action that people boycott/campaign on.

People were threatening Microsoft because of GitHub’s actions.

I think it’s reasonable that a lawyer at IBM identified this area to message whatever is supposed to be right and talked with RedHat to coordinate signing or whatnot.

I think it’s weird that corporations make these kinds of moral/ethical statements.

Re: Libreboot – Defend Richard Stallman

#140

Post by geofft »

caslon wrote: post #123
geofft wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I mean, the OSI is filled with people who work for proprietary companies So is GNU, though. For instance, https://gcc.gnu.org/steering.html identifies the affiliations of most of the GCC steering committee, and they're generally proprietary companies. (Several work for Red Hat, a subsidiary of IBM.) Also, if we're going to claim that working for a proprietary-software company means you're not a member of the free s…

> So is GNU, though. For instance, https://gcc.gnu.org/steering.html identifies the affiliations of most of the GCC steering committee, and they're generally proprietary companies. (Several work for Red Hat, a subsidiary of IBM.) Red Hat releases most things under free licenses and as far as I know everyone on the GCC steering committee from Red Hat was there pre-acquisition. That said, I don't love the GCC steering…

Pre-acquisition Red Hat was awfully excited about supporting proprietary software whose intended purpose is to kill people: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/article213676919....

My point here is that you can always pick a partitioning and then backsolve ethical principles that support that partitioning. "If you work for a company that sells proprietary software, you're ineligible to be a leading voice in the free software movement" has never been a principle - otherwise IBM and Google would never have had a seat. "If you work for a company that makes software that can kill people, your ethics don't line up with ours" hasn't been a principle either - RMS in fact has advocated for multiple militaries to use free software, see https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/programs-must-not-limit-freed... . (Garrett's employer, for what it's worth, makes software that kills people when it breaks, i.e., the better he does his job, the fewer people die. I don't think it's easy to claim that about a military!)

The only real established standard is that you advocate that free software is a matter of ethics/morality/liberty and not simply one of convenience, and as far as I can tell, all the coauthors do so.

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