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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 meustrus on Monday September 23 2019, @03:10PM (2 children)
It's going to take a movement of men seeking honestly to expose and remediate harassment, abuse, and discrimination against them. Unfortunately, there are a couple of unique problems facing men who would start such a movement:
1. This kind of movement requires a level of open vulnerability and emotional awareness that men are culturally discouraged from displaying. This is similar to, but opposite, one problem facing early feminists: this kind of movement also requires a level of outspokenness and ambition that women were culturally discouraged from displaying.
2. This kind of movement also tends to attract reactionaries that rant about pseudo-scientific biological differences between the sexes and seek to re-establish "traditional" gender roles. This is similar to another problem still facing feminists: some women are so pissed of by The Patriarchy that rather than creating a just system for all, they would like to replace men in all positions of power and flip the power differential, giving them the opportunity for vengeance.
These are not impossible problems. They simply make the movement more complicated. Men seeking to end the victimization of men have to contend with broader cultural forces and keep the extremists from corrupting their messaging.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @05:49PM (1 child)
You forgot #3. The femnazis.
(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Tuesday September 24 2019, @07:59AM
No, that was point #2.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.