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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: 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.
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(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.
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