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Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

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Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

#541
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a condition where you have trouble interacting socially with people, while also running an influential organization and acting as its figurehead, you need to be able to mitigate these issues. If this means you have an assistant who you run emails by before sending them, so be it. If your assistant also takes a look at your office (given to you as a favor by a respected educational institution) and tells y…

> If your assistant also takes a look at your office (given to you as a favor by a respected educational institution) and tells you that "Knight of Hot Ladies" is not appropriate, then you take it down The top-posted article/parent says this is exactly what happened to the Hot Ladies remark though! Someone else wrote it on his door, took a picture, and it was taken down! Yet here you are referencing it as if it was s…

We have one person (this article) claiming this, and others claiming RMS put it there. I'm not sure who to believe, but given the other allegations, it doesn't seem out of character.

But ok, let's assume for a second that the article is telling the truth, and that someone put that there to mess with RMS, and it was promptly taken down, unfortunately too late to prevent a photo getting taken.

So what? How does that invalidate all the other bad stuff RMS has done?

Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

#542
post #100
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a condition where you have trouble interacting socially with people, while also running an influential organization and acting as its figurehead, you need to be able to mitigate these issues. If this means you have an assistant who you run emails by before sending them, so be it. If your assistant also takes a look at your office (given to you as a favor by a respected educational institution) and tells y…

If he had the capacity to comprehend any of this he wouldn't be the sort of person who talked about the Knight of Hot Ladies at work. Unless Garrett somehow turned out to be a some kind of medical expert, his opinion on Stallman is about valid as Stallman's on anyone else.

Even if that's the case, so what? People seem to have been trying to help RMS fix his behavior for decades, and he hasn't. It doesn't matter if that behavior stems from a mental health issue or just him being an asshole. The behavior needs to stop. Ejecting him from MIT, the FSF, and the GNU Project are certainly drastic actions to remove him from places where he can do harm, but at some point, after literally decades, maybe you just give up on trying to change or moderate someone, and get them out of your life.

Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

#543
post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Being judged and vilified by people who don't know you is what happens to public figures Nope. I don't judge and vilify people that I don't know, I judge their opinions. In this case Stallman's opinion were completely rational, he's been judged for who he is and his past, by people that didn't know him super charged by people who knew him and held a grudge against him. It's called character assassination. Or mob. >…

We've banned this account for using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. That is against the site guidelines and destroys the curiosity that this site exists for, regardless of what you're fighting for or against. Please don't create accounts to break HN's guidelines with. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> We've banned this account for using HN primarily for political and ideological battle

WHAT?

FSF means Free Software Foundation, Free as in Free speech, IT IS POLITICAL!

What the heck are you talking about?

Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

#544
post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

source: Google employee. FTFY! That Google, the Ad company threatening user's privacy, abusing user's rights, collecting user's data. The company fined for 5 billion dollars in an anti trust case in EU. The company behind YouTube, fined for 170 million dollars for collecting kids data [1] The company behind Chrome, that recently proposed a change to stop ad blocking extensions from working (did I say they sell ads?)…

Yes, the Eben Moglen who is suing another free software organisation for trademark infringement, threatened to sue them for copyright infringement under a ludicrous misreading of the relevant license, threatened to ruin the life of an FSF board member, and who was fired by the FSF for briefing against the FSF's interests while being paid by Oracle.

So is it better to be paid by Google?

p.s.: can you provide the source that says that Moglen was "being paid by Oracle"?

We know that in November 2017 you were already working at Google, AKA "being paid by Google".

p.p.s.: You said at the time

> He later released this position publicly with little co-ordination with the FSF, which was used by (Ubuntu creator) Canonical to justify their shipping ZFS (a filesystem developed originally by Sun Microsystems and now owned by Oracle) in a GPL-violating way

And I think you did it to backup your thesis of Moglen "being paid by Oracle".

Fact is you either were wrong or lying, Canonical ships OpenZFS [1], which is not owned by Oracle.

OpenZFS was born after ZFS was releases as CDDL in 2005 by Sun Microsystems as part of OpenSolaris, Oracle bought Sun Microsystems in 2010.

[1] https://ubuntu.com/blog/zfs-is-the-fs-for-containers-in-ubun...

Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

#545
post #532
post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've clicked a fair few myself, looking for it... I read the story in 1994 or slightly later, but it was old already. I'm running the whole archive through pdfsandwich now to be able to grep.

Grep found it: Issue 121, dated long after 1994.

Thanks. Read it now. This is a great article and I laughed out loud several times. RMS is a true eccentric.

Note the footnote:

>> Det skal iøvrigt nævnes, at RMS til daglig bor på sit kontor på Massaschusets Institute of Technology, hvor han engang har arbejdet, så det er måske ikke så mærkeligt, at hans sociale evner er begrænsede.

Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

#546
post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

source: Google employee. FTFY! That Google, the Ad company threatening user's privacy, abusing user's rights, collecting user's data. The company fined for 5 billion dollars in an anti trust case in EU. The company behind YouTube, fined for 170 million dollars for collecting kids data [1] The company behind Chrome, that recently proposed a change to stop ad blocking extensions from working (did I say they sell ads?)…

Yes, the Eben Moglen who is suing another free software organisation for trademark infringement, threatened to sue them for copyright infringement under a ludicrous misreading of the relevant license, threatened to ruin the life of an FSF board member, and who was fired by the FSF for briefing against the FSF's interests while being paid by Oracle.

Is it better to be paid by Google?

p.s.: can you provide the source that says that Moglen was "being paid by Oracle"? We know that in November 2017 you were already working at Google, AKA "being paid by Google".

p.p.s.: You said at the time

> He later released this position publicly with little co-ordination with the FSF, which was used by (Ubuntu creator) Canonical to justify their shipping ZFS (a filesystem developed originally by Sun Microsystems and now owned by Oracle) in a GPL-violating way

And I think you did it to backup your thesis of Moglen "being paid by Oracle".

Fact is you either were wrong or lying, Canonical ships OpenZFS [1], which is not owned by Oracle.

OpenZFS was born after ZFS was releases as CDDL in 2005 by Sun Microsystems as part of OpenSolaris, Oracle bought Sun Microsystems in 2010.

[1] https://ubuntu.com/blog/zfs-is-the-fs-for-containers-in-ubun...

Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

#547
post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

source: Google employee. FTFY! That Google, the Ad company threatening user's privacy, abusing user's rights, collecting user's data. The company fined for 5 billion dollars in an anti trust case in EU. The company behind YouTube, fined for 170 million dollars for collecting kids data [1] The company behind Chrome, that recently proposed a change to stop ad blocking extensions from working (did I say they sell ads?)…

Yes, the Eben Moglen who is suing another free software organisation for trademark infringement, threatened to sue them for copyright infringement under a ludicrous misreading of the relevant license, threatened to ruin the life of an FSF board member, and who was fired by the FSF for briefing against the FSF's interests while being paid by Oracle.

> suing another free software organisation for trademark infringement

Trademarks have to be enforced or you lose them.

> threatened to ruin the life of an FSF board member

Can you please backup this claim? I've found nothing to validate it.

> and who was fired by the FSF for briefing against the FSF's interests

According to every source I've found he resigned himself and voluntarily stepped down and left "on good terms" to take care of SFLC which he had recently founded.

It might be political jargon, but there is no way to prove he was fired.

> FSF's interests while being paid by Oracle.

AFAIK Moglen never worked or took money from Oracle.

Can you please clarify what you mean?

Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

#548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are excellent rationalizers -- smart people especially. Basically smart people can use reason as a cudgel to win any debate -- not because they've actually constructed a good proof or considered all relevant evidence.

Ok, but you can also "win" a debate by beating people to death with strong feelings. Ever watch a toddler throw a temper tantrum?

Similarly have you ever watched a teenager argue "logically" from their limited experience?

It goes both ways (can fail in both ways) because discourse isn't theorem proving. There is no universal set.

Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

#549
post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I guess we need to say that some people with a sexual interest in children will not commit offences against children, and so some pro-paedophile commentary is acceptable. this is just incredibly stupid to believe, pro-paedophile commentary is acceptable? why in the ever living fk would that be aceptable? because a pedo might not actually commit those acts? are you stupid?

We've banned this account. Posting like this will get your main account banned as well, so please don't. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

ok

Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

#550
post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if there was a group of mostly autistic/aspie men and they felt unsafe around one neurotypical woman, she should be the one to lose her position at a university Yes, if her behaviour was not workplace appropriate.

That's a different question. None of the stories about Stallman are from coworkers. They are from people who shared meals with him, people who attended talks he gave, or people who went to his office. In his position at MIT, Stallman did not teach classes. Anyone who didn't like his behavior was free to tell him off and/or leave. They would suffer zero consequences to their career or schooling. Also, I replied to som…

I don't see how "overt sexual advances to women" is by itself bad behaviour anyway. Sure, the appropriateness depends on the situation, but humans by and large do have sexual desire, often of heterosexual orientation. Is phrasing the "overt sexual advances to women" implying that covert sexual advances are better?

This way of phrasing it makes it seem as though "overt sexual advances" would necessarily be unwelcome, or part of a behaviour profile that constitutes harassment.

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