RMS addresses the free software community • Hacker News Board

Re: RMS addresses the free software community

#231

Post by NoImmatureAdHom » Mon, Apr 12, 2021, 5:08 PM UTC

solosoyokaze wrote: post #220

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.

This is not his field of study. He's defending a friend of his who is credibly accused of raping a minor. It's not philosophy, it's personal interest and serves no value to the community or anyone other than RMS and Minsky.

Defffffinitely fair game at a university, then. I thought we were talking about the more abstract investigation of why it's wrong to have sex with minors. This sort of direct political stuff is regrettable but totally within the realm of acceptable.

Re: RMS addresses the free software community

#232

Post by bitwize » Mon, Apr 12, 2021, 5:09 PM UTC

No real accountability, no addressing the decades of bad behavior that drove people -- particularly women -- from free software in fear and disgust, no whiff of an attempt to substantively do better on the issues of inclusion and representation plaguing the movement. Just excuses and playing the autism card, which goes over about as well as it did for Christian Weston Chandler. Typical RMS.

Judgement made.

The FSF should remove Stallman from its board and publicly distance itself from him. Otherwise judgement will come for the FSF too. They've already lost the good will of Red Hat, which was the organization driving actual development of the Linux ecosystem. It's hard to run a foundation, or a movement, without money.

Imagine if RMS lived to see the FSF go bankrupt, and its assets purchased by hostile corporations who then go on to make GCC and Emacs proprietary? They could do this because of the CLA they make contributors sign. A bitterly ironic end to a noble movement.

Re: RMS addresses the free software community

#233

Post by pseudalopex » Mon, Apr 12, 2021, 5:09 PM UTC

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #203

davexunit wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's mistreated many FSF staff members, many LibrePlanet attendees, many GNU project contributors, etc. The fact that the public discourse is focused on the Epstein-related comments does RMS and the FSF a huge favor by pointing the spotlight away from the real issue which has been happening for decades .

It seems to me that the discourse was very deliberately focused on the Epstein-related comments by people who felt that'd be a good way to achieve the outcome they wanted. It's undoubtedly true that RMS is often rude and offensive, but this has long been widely known and publicly discussed, so a pressure campaign on those grounds would almost certainly have flopped.

It seems to me the discussion of his Epstein related comments encouraged other people to come forward with their own grievances. I don't think most people knew he defended adults having sex with children. Or he hit on much younger women at conferences. Or the FSF unionized because of him.

Re: RMS addresses the free software community

#234

Post by simion314 » Mon, Apr 12, 2021, 5:09 PM UTC

koheripbal wrote: post #207

simion314 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is one of the reasons I believe social media sites should enact age-based voting. I am not sure this works, on HN for example is easy enough for a small mob to disappear articles by flagging them, on top of that we get no reason why things were flagged or any way to undo it. Account age or karma is not enough, we need much more, make it harder to share/downvote or flag , like by making someone type at least 60…

Accounts that act poorly, usually do so in multiple ways. Banning accounts for bad behavior will likely curb other undetectable bad behavior. HN is a bit unique. I suspect it is less influenced by bad behavior because it is small enough to fly under the radar.

You would think so because is hard to notice, I would not have believed it until I seen it with my own eyes, it was an article about RMS and there was a good discussion in the comments , in 5-10 minutes the entry was gone from the first pages, it was flagged, I think there were around 2-- comments in the end but most readers missed the article and instead they could see more then one day old stuff.

My proposal is to have people do a bit of work not just click a button, write an intelligent argument, it would at least filter the lazy ones out. It is similar when you know someone will review your code you double check your commit first and clean things up, someone might decide that the reason might not be as defendable so maybe a discussion should happen on this topic .

Re: RMS addresses the free software community

#235

Post by Jon_Lowtek » Mon, Apr 12, 2021, 5:10 PM UTC

sheepdestroyer wrote: post #30

The constant mischaracterization of what he really meant, by reposting the same misquotes of his emails, was really shameful for a lot of 'journalists'.

Sadly in recent years a new generation of "activist journalism" has taken hold that favor stories over facts

Re: RMS addresses the free software community

#236

Post by dahfizz » Mon, Apr 12, 2021, 5:10 PM UTC

underseacables wrote: post #47

b215826 wrote: post #10

Now, would the journalists who wrote articles with titles that are a variation of "RMS defended Epstein" [1,2] apologize or at least correct their articles? Also, now that RMS has explicitly clarified his position on these issues, can the people who leveraged his "silence" and "bad behavior" to oust him from the FSF at least admit that their motive was less about making the free-software movement welcoming and was mo…

No, no that’s not how journalism works. They report the FACTS as they see them. /s There’s no such thing as a retraction anymore, it’s just clarifications. I would have more faith in the media if they admitted when they were wrong, or at least presented, thoughtfully considered, opposing viewpoints. My faith in the media perhaps really took its first hit with Nick Sandman. I just felt weird that all these people were…

Yeah. Anytime "the media" reports about things I personally know about, it becomes obvious how much they get wrong. Too many journalists believe they are on a political crusade. They get enraged by their own stories and actively try to enrage everyone else.

Re: RMS addresses the free software community

#237

Post by pseudalopex » Mon, Apr 12, 2021, 5:11 PM UTC

chc wrote: post #210

NotSammyHagar wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Woah, can you provide a citation for that?

From emails posted here: https://selamjie.medium.com/remove-richard-stallman-fec6ec21... > The announcement of the Friday event does an injustice to Marvin Minsky: > “deceased AI ‘pioneer’ Marvin Minsky (who is accused of assaulting one of Epstein’s victims [2])” [ ... ] > We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing.

Saying she presented herself as willing isn't the same as saying she was willing.

Re: RMS addresses the free software community

#238

Post by NoImmatureAdHom » Mon, Apr 12, 2021, 5:11 PM UTC

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #225

NoImmatureAdHom wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree with you that the discussion shouldn't be part of his job. But there should also be room for him to have a public discussion that isn't part of his job. I don't recall the details, were parts of this discussion on the fsf home page or something?

Not FSF's site that I know of, but there's mentions of these "consensual pedo" stuff on his blog. As he's a visible spokesperson, that means his blog content is part of his overall role, and not something that can be treated in isolation. I'd also push back on the post further up: It's not a particularly interesting philosophical question, and I don't think pure inquiry is RMS's goal here given his tendency to aggres…

"As he's a visible spokesperson, that means his blog content is part of his overall role, and not something that can be treated in isolation."

I agree this is de facto the case. It's kind of sad, though, and I don't think the world needs to be this way. There should be a way for an e.g. CEO or similar to have a life and persona outside of a job.

Re: RMS addresses the free software community

#239

Post by atomicnumber3 » Mon, Apr 12, 2021, 5:12 PM UTC

MrRadar wrote: post #119

Osmose wrote: post #49

The Minsky defense was not the primary, most important reason RMS can't serve as an effective, inclusive leader for free software, it was just the one that got the most attention. This does nothing to address the numerous complaints of harassment towards MIT students, the _other_ times he spoke out in implicit support of pedophilia, the public gaffes that are unacceptable as a public representative (e.g. the foot ski…

Not to mention how badly he mismanaged the paid staff of the FSF which prompted them to unionize: https://twitter.com/paulnivin/status/1377079987950395393 I think, if anything, this is the strongest argument for why he should not be in a leadership position at the FSF.

RE: that twitter thread. Wow. That's absurdly bad. Especially given that I suspect any software person there could easily go get a much higher paying corporate job without much trouble.

I feel like a problem that plagues software worse than other industries is that BigTechCo can pay multiple times more than what I'll call "greater good" kinds of places like:

* government

* education, especially in high school

* software freedom / open source / communal / etc types of places

The one that I mourn the most is high school computer teachers. How many startups were started by people with only a year or so of college? How important is high school in choosing your career? How often is curiosity suppressed in high school when students try to go off the standard curriculum into material the teacher isn't familiar with, and think of how easy it is to do that in programming?

But I digress. I want to call out an example of this kind of "clearly, obviously for the common good" done right: Let's Encrypt. I think their software people make ~200k the last time I looked? Which is pretty dang good. I think the main thing it might lack is the kind of comp you get to via equity in a startup or public company. But given LE isn't that kind of company, I don't think you can fault them too much for that. So while I wish LE devs were paid like senior google devs, 200k gets you pretty damn far anywhere but NYC and San Francisco.

Re: RMS addresses the free software community

#240

Post by solosoyokaze » Mon, Apr 12, 2021, 5:13 PM UTC

NoImmatureAdHom wrote: post #231

solosoyokaze wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not his field of study. He's defending a friend of his who is credibly accused of raping a minor. It's not philosophy, it's personal interest and serves no value to the community or anyone other than RMS and Minsky.

Defffffinitely fair game at a university, then. I thought we were talking about the more abstract investigation of why it's wrong to have sex with minors. This sort of direct political stuff is regrettable but totally within the realm of acceptable.

It may be acceptable to you but for me and a lot of people, it is not. The solution for me is to never associate or work with the FSF and advocate against this type of behavior from "leaders" in our industry and field.