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Libreboot – Defend Richard Stallman

libreboot.org

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Re: Libreboot – Defend Richard Stallman

#171

Post by iocert »

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…

You are not forced to defend him, in fact Leah calls some of Stallman's statements "idiotic" herself.

But she is intellectually mature enough to see that most humans have had 5 stupid views over 30 years, and Stallman was just honest enough to write them down.

You don't need to defend the views (some of which have already been retracted), but you have to accept Stallman as flawed human being.

Stallman is currently still the only candidate who is uncompromising enough to drag the technological Overton Window in a good direction.

So I don't think the article is trash at all, it is a refreshing, honest, bold take on the current elephant in the room: Corporate influence on free software.

Such people inspire me to write free software.

Re: Libreboot – Defend Richard Stallman

#172

Post by Latty »

koonsolo wrote: post #168
Latty wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point was that this article makes no attempt to address those issues. However, I do happen to believe there is an issue, as I outlined in a sibling comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26646676 ). Statutory rape law is a trade-off because proving sexual assault is hard and we value protecting children from abusers more than we value letting people sleep with children. If you disagree with that, yes, I be…

First of all a "child" is defined as the age between birth and puberty, so you might want to update your own usage of that word. Secondly, the bigger part of the world seems to agree nowadays that 16 seems to be a reasonable age of consent. US is very conservative in this regards, depending on the state. So basically it's OK that a 50 year old has sex with a 16 year old in 1 state, but when you cross the state border…

Sure, replace the word "child" with "minor" or whatever, I'm not a lawyer here, it's clear what I mean from context.

The point is that once the rules are set, you follow them because to do otherwise means either you are an abuser, or you are willing to do things that are indistinguishable from an abuser, giving them cover and breaking the rules that are designed to protect minors. Either way, you are endangering minors.

Stallman didn't just talk about the numbers being different in different places and the issues with that, he talked about a specific case where someone had done this in a place where it was illegal, and claimed that it could have been OK.

There is no room for that if you want a leadership position where you need to protect those people, it endangers them by refusing to always hold those who break the rules accountable.

Re: Libreboot – Defend Richard Stallman

#173

Post by jaywalk »

Latty wrote: post #166
jaywalk wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> fundamentally makes contributors less safe Please explain the actual link between contributing to free software and sex with minors.

I contributed to plenty of open source projects as a minor, interacting with maintainers and other people in the communities around them. Grooming and abuse is a real problem. If Stallman thinks it can be justified to sleep with a child if consent is given, then he wouldn't act to defend a child in that situation if they were being preyed upon unless it was clear to him it was abuse. That's not good enough. There sho…

Why would Stallman, personally, be in a position where he's the only one who can defend a child in that situation? Your hypothetical doesn't make any sense.

Re: Libreboot – Defend Richard Stallman

#174

Post by no-s »

prepend wrote: post #130
sgt wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the thing, I have no problems with lifestyles, sexual orientations, but what is happening here is that a certain convention is being forced on us, whether we like it or not.

I don’t view it as being forced, I see it as people just expressing their preferences. Although I don’t agree with people spending effort on misuse of pronouns as I think that arguing with trolls is counterproductive. I’ve never experienced any genuine assholery in a professional sense with people not trying to use preferred salutations and in personal life, just ignoring idiots is already required. It seems similar…

> Calling people by their preferred handle seems simple to me.

Many people are taking offense at gender-distinctive forms embedded in the language. The argument is the accepted usage demeans whoever is not represented. So to solve this they've proposed more distinctions, and take offense at being implicitly excluded when the distinctive pronouns are not used. They also take offense at any criticism.

I don't think this is going to end well by just humoring people and moving on, especially if the slightest error or criticism results in bullying and ostracism.

Re: Libreboot – Defend Richard Stallman

#175

Post by iocert »

crispyambulance wrote: post #59
lelanthran wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So, you're either forced to defend Richard Stallman and accept what's going on over there, or __YOU ARE THE ENEMY OF ALL OPEN SOURCE__. Where did they say that, or anything that implies that?

They plainly state their irrational opinion that the resignation was the result of a smear campaign by anti-open-source entities and even list them. That's just hysterical garbage. RMS did this to himself by being an abrasive asshole and failing to curb his autistic tendencies. As a major thought leader, he ought to know better.

This isn't true. Many signatories of the anti-Stallman letter are known, smooth careerists who have been climbing the OSS corporate ladder for the last decade.

The don't care about the actual issues at all, otherwise they'd sign anti-Clinton and anti-Gates letters.

Which they won't, because their careers would suffer.

Re: Libreboot – Defend Richard Stallman

#176

Post by DetroitThrow »

caslon wrote: post #162
DetroitThrow wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's hardly an arbitrary purity test" I never said it was, I said it was one which seems to have been created on the spot as a convenient way to demonize "others" given that the moral movement has never been morally bankrupt enough for the last few decades to exclude individuals based on their participation in proprietary projects. And no, I'm very explicitly talking about the free software movement, not open source…

> I never said it was, I said it was one which seems to have been created on the spot as a convenient way to demonize "others" given that the moral movement has never been morally bankrupt enough for the last few decades to exclude individuals based on their participation in proprietary projects. Free software has always been a moral movement; it's those who promote proprietary software that are morally bankrupt. > A…

>Free software has always been a moral movement; it's those who promote proprietary software that are morally bankrupt.

Ah, so those employed by proprietary software inherently promote it? You lack a grasp of those within the free software movement, then.

>Being against proprietary software is pro-freedom, and nothing I'm saying is ahistorical. You're pretty clearly conflating the open source movement (based around profiteering and not caring about freedom) with the free software movement (has always been about morality).

Again, you're inventing purity tests because you've never contributed to the movement and you clearly lack an understanding of the movement's history. The GNU Manifesto and Debian Social Contract are in direct contradiction to your purity test, and the former explicitly discusses the subject at hand.

My advice is to read more of the source documents about the movement or contribute to it before creating revisionist and anti-freedom purity tests.

Re: Libreboot – Defend Richard Stallman

#177

Post by Latty »

jaywalk wrote: post #173
Latty wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I contributed to plenty of open source projects as a minor, interacting with maintainers and other people in the communities around them. Grooming and abuse is a real problem. If Stallman thinks it can be justified to sleep with a child if consent is given, then he wouldn't act to defend a child in that situation if they were being preyed upon unless it was clear to him it was abuse. That's not good enough. There sho…

Why would Stallman, personally, be in a position where he's the only one who can defend a child in that situation? Your hypothetical doesn't make any sense.

The "only one"? It doesn't matter if other people might do the right thing, if he doesn't, he shouldn't hold the position.

If someone reads this, it makes them think they won't be taken seriously when they come forward if they are abused. That both makes them less likely to do so if they are abused, and less likely to even start engaging with the community.

If they do come forward, Stallman has indicated he may not take them seriously. Given that he's arguing about this with others in leadership positions, even more than that he might pressure others to do so as well.

Everyone in one of those positions should be taking such an allegation seriously, and if they don't, they shouldn't hold that position.

Re: Libreboot – Defend Richard Stallman

#179

Post by no-s »

inawarminister wrote: post #98
sgt wrote: post #14

"Clearly, they/them is commonly understood and will cause the least amount of misunderstanding." While I support this campaign and I support RMS right to free speech, I find it ridiculous that everyone is now expected to use they/them pronouns for non-binaries etc. Am I the only one or has the world gone absolutely batshit insane, driven by purple haired Twitter trans-extremists?

People thinking like that would be happy making New English and in fact is probably making one already. For me, as someone with no grammatical genders at all in his native language, I don't think there are any real differences between using grammatical gendered pronouns or not. In some real way, gendered pronouns help in parsing subjects much more easily than otherwise. We do use proper noun-as-pronouns by default mo…

Yes, the distinctive pronouns help in reducing ambiguity. However some people are taking offense at the insufficiency of gender specification and asking us to add more pronouns to remedy the insult. It might be simpler if we didn't need a gendered pronoun to avoid offense, especially if the distinction is irrelevant in the context.

Re: Libreboot – Defend Richard Stallman

#180

Post by caslon »

geofft wrote: post #170
caslon wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for pointing this out, I had forgotten this! Yeah, Red Hat has been rotten for a long time. I don't like it; I think it's been a terrible company for many years; but I do think it's never released non-free software, which was the bit I am mostly concerned about on this particular topic. I do agree that they have no real moral ground to stand on. Forgive me for pointing this out, but given they're one of the or…

Yeah sorry about the stealth-edit, I realize the first sentence by itself sounded kind of like a gotcha and I wanted to make a more substantial point :) I'm referencing the GCC steering committee - IBM (actual IBM, not just Red Hat, mostly because they support GCC on their mainframes) and Google (presumably for gold, gccgo, etc.) have been involved for many years. (I don't mean they have seats on the FSF board or any…

It's all good! I was just trying to avoid looking like I was only responding to half a post!

You're right about IBM & Google being there for a while, and I think their participation is largely innocent (ironically, one of the main reasons I dislike the committee enough that I went out of my way to note that I dislike the committee a few comments up was actually protested by as far as I'm aware most of the proprietary companies & Red Hat). I still don't believe that funding GCC development is really enough to count the organizations, though. It's something I'll think on for a while, if nothing else; thanks for bringing it up.

The argument is actually a pretty classic one (it comes up nearly every time autonomous computers of any sort come up, and was something I read for the first time in a book from...1998, I think, though I can't recall the name; something on cybernetics from some university press).

I agree that Red Hat is and has largely been in violation of free software principles since their move unto SaaSS. You certainly won't find me arguing they're a moral company. I do think it's unlikely they actually work directly on proprietary code, but that would lead the discussion into very murky territory trying to draw a line, and so I'll largely cede the point. Red Hat is antithetical to free software as a movement.

I don't think we've been fine with IBM for years as some steward of the free software movement; they contribute to free software, yes, but only tangentially. Their support is of open-source, and is orthogonal to the free software movement. It's still useful to the free software movement, but I don't think we're fine with IBM itself.

I, too, want to have that discussion at some point! And yeah, the JSLint story is incredible. It's less IBM's customers (though they are definitely by-and-large evil) and more...IBM outright, though. They did support the Nazis, after all; there's really no coming back from that.

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