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Thomas Bushnell, former maintainer of GNU Hurd until his dismissal by Richard Stallman, has opined in a biased blog post that the forced resignation of Stallman from MIT and the Free Software Foundation is deserved.
https://medium.com/@thomas.bushnell/a-reflection-on-the-departure-of-rms-18e6a835fd84
So Richard Stallman has resigned from his guest position at MIT and as President of the Free Software Foundation. You can easily find out all you need to know about the background from a web search and some news articles. I recommend in particular Selam G's original articles on this topic for background, and for an excellent institutional version, the statement from the Software Freedom Conservancy.
But I'll give you a personal take. By my reckoning, I worked for RMS longer than any other programmer.
[...]4) RMS's loss of MIT privileges and leadership of the FSF are the appropriate responses to a pattern of decades of poor behavior. It does not matter if they are appropriate responses to a single email thread, because they are the right thing in the total situation.
5) I feel very sad for him. He's a tragic figure. He is one of the most brilliant people I've met, who I have always thought desperately craved friendship and camaraderie, and seems to have less and less of it all the time. This is all his doing; nobody does it to him. But it's still very sad. As far as I can tell, he believes his entire life's work is a failure.
6) The end result here, while sad for him, is correct.
The free software community needs to develop good leadership, and RMS has been a bad leader in many ways for a long time now. He has had plenty of people who have tried to help him, and he does not want help.
MIT needs to establish as best it can that paramount are the interests of women to have a safe and fair place to study and work. It must make clear that this is more important than the coddling of a whiny child who has never reached the emotional maturity to treat people decently.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday September 23 2019, @01:33PM (16 children)
I worked with a relatively bright mechanical engineer who had self-destructive people skills. He seemed to not grasp that he was being personally offensive in any particular moment, but, having lived for 4+ decades with this flaw in his awareness - after the fact he just "owned it" with a basic: "yeah, I said that, deal with it."
While he may have structural differences in his brain that make it difficult, or impossible, for him to model and process social interactions from the perspective of others in real-time, like the vast majority of people do, he could have been helped, counseled, coached and basically remedially taught to deal with this disability in a less self-damaging way. Instead, most of his life indirectly rewarded him for his offensive behavior, promoted him into a private office, gave him a good salary for his non-people skills, and allowed him to make some pretty bad decisions which ended up costing him his marriage, children, and career path in his early 40s.
Sometimes, all it takes is a little discrete openness with people to help them through things like this. Nobody told my grandfather that it was rude to hang up the phone without saying goodbye until he was in his 60s. He was never exactly smooth about it but he did learn, in his late 60s, to say goodbye before hanging up - things like that can make a huge difference.
It may have been too late to help the self-destructive mechanical engineer in his 40s, I don't know, I was in my early 30s when I interacted with him and, having the option to maximize my personal and professional distance from him, that's the option I took - as most people did. He seemed relatively happy with himself most of the time, but that had to be hard moving cross country leaving wife and young kids behind - then they never followed - then the new job dumped him after about a year and the wife didn't take him back...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Thexalon on Monday September 23 2019, @02:43PM (4 children)
Bad behavior can be adjusted, but that is opposed by inertia: The longer someone has made their life function well by doing what they're doing, the harder it is to convince them to change. Sometimes, it takes serious consequences to give them the proverbial kick in the pants that they need to make changes, and at the very least those flaws are doing less damage to others in whatever organizations they're a part of.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday September 23 2019, @02:52PM (3 children)
Alcoholics "hit bottom" - though whatever bottom you hit, there's usually a lower one if you keep digging.
Both RMS and my ME acquaintance may have been too long trained to be who they were to change. The summary mentions: "He has had plenty of people who have tried to help him, and he does not want help." and that's probably true.
I guess the lesson here is: if you see someone in their youth heading down this kind of path, you just might improve a lot of peoples' lives by helping them to integrate better with mainstream society - certainly try not to reward bad behavior, even if it seems profitable in the short term.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Bot on Monday September 23 2019, @07:40PM (2 children)
If mainstream society means you can't have wrong opinions, it is better to be an outcast. Now, I am well aware of the overton window open on pedophilia but I have actual arguments against it. Censorship is bad and the indirect censorship operated by the ones who shout louder is even worse.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday September 23 2019, @08:07PM (1 child)
Mainstream society, to me, means not being an asshole - insulting people, sometimes right to their face, as if it's nothing. (Unfounded) prejudice, (unjustified) abuse... I don't think Linus Torvalds crosses the line, he seems reasonably self-aware, but people who go around ignorant of just what jerks they are being - should at least receive counselling to ensure they understand the ramifications of being the way they are, and if they are in positions of power over others, they do deserve to lose that power if they chronically abuse it. As seems to have happened here.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday September 24 2019, @09:41AM
Ok I got what you meant then.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @06:11PM (8 children)
Thank you for sharing your experience. I am at this stage of life right now, I am 37. I lost most of my friends, everyone in my family hates me and I have a feeling my wife may leave me anytime in a year. I am just lost.
Everyone around me thinks I am really smart but I personally feel I am the dumbest person I know. I fit the mechanical engineer you described 100%. I will be grateful if you have any advice or tips to improve myself from this situation. Thank You!
Also about the brain wiring - I took many online tests and read a few books, and according to them I am severely dyslexic and have ADD.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @06:52PM (1 child)
Still as valid as ever
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influence_People [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @07:09PM
LOL, Buddy Bears: The Book.
We are the buddy bears, we always get along, and if you ever disagree, then you are surely wrong...
(Score: 5, Insightful) by McGruber on Monday September 23 2019, @08:10PM (1 child)
Forget the online tests and self-diagnosis. Get a therapist for yourself and ask your spouse if they would like to try marriage counseling with you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @08:38PM
Thank You!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @09:09PM
Just like with substance abuse, the first step is admitting you need help. Sometimes it is the hardest.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday September 24 2019, @04:40AM
Not much to offer here for advice, but what have you done to try to keep them? Relationships are give and take.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday September 24 2019, @11:42AM
Maybe sign up and ask about your experiences in a journal here. It's difficult to give generalized advice when it will be likely thousands of specific situations that give rise to what you're experiencing.
My social skills aren't the best either. One thing that took me a while to learn though is that if someone says something to you it's OK to just say nothing--and many times silence is infinitely preferable to putting your foot in it saying something awkward. Sometimes you can't always tell in advance if it would be awkward--I guess, if in doubt, wait. I suppose it's a version of the old proverb:
It doesn't mean you have to sit there in silence like a freak for half an hour. Maybe you'll gain some time to think through how what you were going to say might be perceived, or the other people may say more things that make a friendly response easier to judge.
Take anything I say with a pinch of salt however, as I'm a pretty asocial nerd myself.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday September 24 2019, @12:24PM
Sorry for your condition, and the life that has led you to this point.
Find a friend, someone who has the time and emotional capacity to listen to you, learn about your life, and give some good advice about how to proceed to make things better. Your mental challenges may make it difficult to judge who would be a good friend - don't be afraid to try again if you choose a bad one or two at first.
I suspect many of your most challenging situations can be improved by "coming clean" - just get it out in the open between you and whoever that you don't always "get it" and sometimes are going to need to be told things that an average six year old might figure out on their own. Because you appear otherwise smart, people may feel you are arrogant or intentionally being a jerk - show them you aren't.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 24 2019, @05:20AM
Those skills are learned by practice, if your brain wiring permits.
Hyper-bright people are at risk of not learning them due to the isolation of having so little in common with the people around them.
Leta Hollingsworth a hundred years ago and Miraca Gross in this century have documented with extensive study that it improves the socialization of the profoundly gifted to accelerate their education radically.
I think there's no question anywhere that rms is profoundly gifted. I don't know whether Bushnell is accurate.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jb on Tuesday September 24 2019, @07:39AM
Certainly personalities can be ``adjusted''.
A better question would be whether personalities should be adjusted.
``Adjusting personalities'' sounds a whole lot like the justification used in the USSR (and decades later in PRC) for establishing ``re-education'' camps.
Is that really the direction in which any thinking person wants Western civilisation to be taken?
Voltaire's famous line comes to mind.