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posted by martyb on Tuesday September 17 2019, @05:11AM   Printer-friendly
from the resign:-to-sign-and-sign-again? dept.

Richard M. Stallman Resigns as FSF President and from its Board of Directors

https://www.fsf.org/news/richard-m-stallman-resigns (emphasis from original retained):

On September 16, 2019, Richard M. Stallman, founder and president of
the Free Software Foundation, resigned as president and from its board
of directors.

The board will be conducting a search for a new president, beginning
immediately. Further details of the search will be published on
fsf.org.

For questions, contact FSF executive director John Sullivan at
johns@fsf.org.

Copyright © 2004-2019 Free Software Foundation, Inc. Privacy Policy.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 license (or later version)Why this license?

Computer Scientist Richard Stallman Resigns from MIT Over Epstein Comments

Computer Scientist Richard Stallman Resigns From MIT Over Epstein Comments

Famed free software advocate and computer scientist Richard Stallman has resigned from MIT, according to an email he published online. The resignation comes after Stallman made comments about victims of child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, including that the victims went along with the abuse willingly.

"I am resigning effective immediately from my position in CSAIL at MIT," Stallman wrote in the email, referring to MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. "I am doing this due to pressure on MIT and me over a series of misunderstandings and mischaracterizations."

[...] Last week, Motherboard published the full email thread in which Stallman wrote that the "most plausible scenario" is that Epstein's underage victims in his campaign of trafficking were "entirely willing." Stallman also argued about the definition of "rape" and whether the term applies to the victims.

[Ed.'s note - just because Vice say things in the above blockquote does not mean that SoylentNews or its editors consider it a demonstrably provable representation of reality. We're just reporting that they are reporting, nothing more. At least this Ed. finds out-of-context quoting of short inflamatory phrases to be particularly disingenuous, and perhaps even a warning sign that manipulation of a quote has taking place. -- FP.]


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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by barbara hudson on Wednesday September 18 2019, @01:30AM (9 children)

    by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Wednesday September 18 2019, @01:30AM (#895457) Journal
    First, outside the open source world Stallman is a virtual unknown. He didn't invent open source. And the GPL isn't as free as the BSD licences, which impose no restrictions on use.

    His influence since the turn of the century has been nil in practical terms. He's been the source of multiple embarrassments, and, as in this case, he's shown, like most zealots, no common sense. He has once again shown that he's a misogynist, and this time it's not going to be brushed away.

    Ultimately history will probably show that his license enabled surveillance capitalism's worst excesses. Companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon wouldn't have been able to scale up if they had to pay licence fees for each operating system copy, web server, database server, and other software.

    The world would be a better place without Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Stallman. And for those who cannot see this at first blush, why not try to use your imagination of a world without social media corrupting democracy, no Trump tweets (and no president Trump), and an ecosystem with all sorts of software and a marketplace to support it, and where developers don't have to pass the begging bowl.

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 18 2019, @02:22AM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 18 2019, @02:22AM (#895472)

    And the GPL isn't as free as the BSD licences, which impose no restrictions on use.

    The BSD offers more freedom to the developers, whereas the GPL ensures freedom for the community as a whole. So, you can't take GPL'd code and just make it proprietary, which protects the freedoms of the community. And the community is almost always larger than the number of developers, ensuring more freedom for a greater number of people.

    The standard of 'You can do whatever you want!' does not always result in the most amount of freedom, as confusing as that might seem.

    Ultimately history will probably show that his license enabled surveillance capitalism's worst excesses. Companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon wouldn't have been able to scale up if they had to pay licence fees for each operating system copy, web server, database server, and other software.

    So your solution to the evil actions of these companies is to make all of the computers and software we depend on proprietary? Allow users no freedom, while they're controlled by their proprietary masters? None of them are stopped by the BSD you just advocated for, either.

    Or, we could just make mass surveillance illegal directly, rather than infringing upon people's freedoms in other ways. If you think that proprietary software wouldn't spy on people and that all of those companies wouldn't be engaging in mass surveillance without the GPL, you're batshit insane. Plenty of companies create their own proprietary surveillance schemes.

    • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Wednesday September 18 2019, @12:31PM (4 children)

      by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Wednesday September 18 2019, @12:31PM (#895603) Journal
      And just how much freedom of choice do users have today (anything with-1% market share is essentially not a real option - the market has spoken)? Web browsers are essentially a monoculture. Same with office suites. Operating system are a duopoly., same with smart phone operating systems.

      It's hard to compete with free, so you don't see investments of time and money by developers to come up with the next big thing. No new operating systems, word processors, databases (just new iterations of the same old stuff, like Mariadb uses MySQL documentation.'

      End users used to have a plethora of simple to use databases to run their businesses on. DBASE, Alpha4, Foxbase, Clipper, etc. Now? They're stuck using excel or "the cloud", cobbled together with php Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, MySQL or mariadb or rarely postgresql and a web browser for stuff that used to be local.

      Developers have no choice. Those are the tools available, and there's no money in making new tools or new ways of doing things. Users have no choice. The forest of software has been replaced by a monoculture. Heck, most users who might have been open to trying things like Usenet news groups to get interacting with like-minded people don't have an isp that supports newsgroups any more - they are stuck with Facebook and Twitter. Even their email gets done through a monopolist web browser and harvested for data. Your so-called choice no longer exists. Not when new ideas depend on a begging bowl culture or people working in their time off for free. Eventually everyone needs to eat. The free software movement destroyed that which it attempted to foster, while making the infrastructure cheap so that surveillance capitalism is now a threat to everyone. You have less choice than 35 - 40 years ago, when the PC wasn't ubiquitous and everything was new and exciting and not the same warmed over shit by yet another group of investors chasing unicorns by fleecing users.

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      • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 18 2019, @09:11PM (3 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 18 2019, @09:11PM (#895840)

        And just how much freedom of choice do users have today (anything with-1% market share is essentially not a real option - the market has spoken)? Web browsers are essentially a monoculture. Same with office suites. Operating system are a duopoly., same with smart phone operating systems.

        Not as much as they could have if more people knew about Free Software and supported it.

        But still, there are web browsers, operating systems, and office suites that are Free Software. Users of that software can take advantage of the freedoms available to them if they wish.

        It's hard to compete with free, so you don't see investments of time and money by developers to come up with the next big thing.

        This is a limitation that we need to overcome, and we can't do that by granting mega-corporations control over all of our computing. That surveillance capitalism you talked about? The same companies that will develop so much of the popular proprietary software are also responsible for that.

        Not when new ideas depend on a begging bowl culture or people working in their time off for free. Eventually everyone needs to eat.

        On the other hand, you can make massive amounts of money doing evil things, as we see with surveillance capitalism. The fact that you can make money doing something - such as by developing proprietary software - does not mean that it is ethical to do so. More people need to reject proprietary software so that it is no longer profitable to make it.

        The free software movement destroyed that which it attempted to foster, while making the infrastructure cheap so that surveillance capitalism is now a threat to everyone.

        Once again, you, without evidence, blame Free Software for mega-corporations violating people's privacy. They may or may not employ some Free Software to do so, but they would just make their own tools if that did not exist, given that they have so many resources.

        when the PC wasn't ubiquitous and everything was new and exciting and not the same warmed over shit by yet another group of investors chasing unicorns by fleecing users.

        If you're worried about surveillance capitalism, choice, and freedom, then you should be supporting Free Software.

        • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Wednesday September 18 2019, @10:44PM (2 children)

          by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Wednesday September 18 2019, @10:44PM (#895877) Journal

          Free software killed the market for innovative startups that worked in many spaces. You won't see another WordPerfect, ClarisWorks, FrameMaker, dBASE, dbFast, Clipper, Lotus 123, CorelDraw, Broderbund, etc. There used to be multiple computing architectures, multiple operating systems, etc.

          Why can't your bank supply a banking application that runs on your laptop or desktop? Why does it require an insecure web browser? Because developers are shit, and most couldn't write the networking code in c if their jobs depended on it. And yet they have the fucking nerve to call themselves "full stack developers." They wouldn't know a network stack if it bit them.

          Even using a framework that supplies the primitives for networking, user interface, and event handling in a platform-independent fashion is beyond them. Which is why they keep proposing shitty browser-based "solutions." Shitty management hire shitty project managers farming it out to shitty 3rd world companies who hire shitty developers because that's perceived as the safe way - building it in a browser doesn't take much beyond monkeys and some "designers" with photoshop for "concepts".

          The browser is part of the problem. So is the lack of experience by most people today of a time when computing was much more diverse and inventive, and when independent developers stood a chance of coming up with the next big thing without buzzwords like Web 2.0 and unicorn of the week and cashing out and IPO.

          Free software has killed the goose that laid innovation, because you can't compete with free even if you're 10x better, because people would rather spend months looking for free software and bending it to mostly fit their needs, even when that approach ends up costing more.

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          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 18 2019, @11:54PM (1 child)

            by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 18 2019, @11:54PM (#895898)

            And the fact that you don't know that lowers any respect I had for you from some of your more balanced previous posts.

            Barbara, you read like a BSA/ESA/RIAA/MPAA apologist.

            Thanks for the disappointment.

            • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday September 28 2019, @01:19AM

              by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Saturday September 28 2019, @01:19AM (#899761) Journal
              Microsoft didn't destroy all the competing web browsers - google did- even destroyed Microsoft Edge: -

              The reason starOffoce, OpenOffice, and LibraOffice aren't everywhere is because they are shit (I don't use any Microsoft products, so the only shill here is you). Open source is not inherently better than, or worse than, closed source. The problem is that we are seeing that open source has a funding sustainability problem. Systemd is a good example - most users don't see a need for it, but there it is because businesses want it and are willing to pay for developing and maintaining it.

              Most software is shit. Doesn't matter whether it's open or proprietary. Zealots have to come up with an answer to sustainable funding for open source, or more people are going to develop for closed source. Take a look at all the closed source apps. Vastly outnumber the open source ones. Same with games, and games are the biggest financial revenue generator in computing today.

              Those games have a sustainable revenue model that has produced competition and sequels. Can't say the same for open source games, can you? Lincity, Pingus, Etc,... not anywhere in the same league.

              Devs need to eat. Proprietary development pays, so proprietary developers can eat. I would love if there were some magic way to make open source make as much economic sense for devs, but it's not happening. Same as I would like world peace and an end to corruption, but that's not happening either.

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  • (Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 18 2019, @06:57PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 18 2019, @06:57PM (#895777)

    Better than being known as a blundering lazy do nothing all talk erroneous bullshit artist in yourself barbara hudson as you're known for fails on C\C++ null-terminated string buffer overflow security issues slower string performance they have pascal doesn't https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=33430&page=1&cid=889635#commentwrap [soylentnews.org] You blundering idiot caught red-handed stalking apk by unidentifiable anonymous posts proven in you quoted tranny (as tomhudson whom you really are loon). Apk destroyed you in that link easily!

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 18 2019, @09:12PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 18 2019, @09:12PM (#895841)

    " And the GPL isn't as free as the BSD licences, which impose no restrictions on use. "

    omg, stfu with your whores' licenses. the licenses that let corporate scum leach off of FOSS devs who can barely afford to provide for themselves or their families.

    • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Wednesday September 18 2019, @10:52PM

      by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Wednesday September 18 2019, @10:52PM (#895879) Journal
      What you said applies equally to the GPL. Stallman and his bullshit "you can earn a living by selling support " is a lie - he couldn't even make a living out of it himself, spending his days squatting in the MIT lab or couch surfing.for years. At least now he's gone.
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