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posted by Fnord666 on Monday September 23 2019, @01:17PM   Printer-friendly
from the axe-to-grind dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by VLM on Monday September 23 2019, @02:41PM (3 children)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday September 23 2019, @02:41PM (#897560)

    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.

    Psychological projection is STRONG in the psyche of SJWs...

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  • (Score: -1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @02:45PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @02:45PM (#897563)

    Ah, another whiny man child angry about consequences. Don't worry little baby, one day you'll grow up and understand adult behavior.

    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @03:35PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @03:35PM (#897601)

      The consequences of what, though? Questioning the sanity of our current age of consent laws, or that the accused might not have known that the woman in question was being coerced? That's what RMS did according to the emails, and yet the media articles took what he said out of context entirely. So, I guess the "consequences" in this case are the consequences of daring to write something that can be taken out of context by malicious actors.

    • (Score: 2) by Demena on Monday September 23 2019, @10:39PM

      by Demena (5637) on Monday September 23 2019, @10:39PM (#897851)

      But you never will. It will always be someone else. Sexism is ugly whoever expresses it.