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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, Interesting) by Thexalon on Monday September 23 2019, @03:13PM (1 child)
Because there's no documented ongoing pattern of discrimination against men on the basis of sex that has been rampant for decades.
There was a major effort in the 1950's and 1960's to turn computer software from being a primarily female profession into a primarily male profession, in an era when professional consequences for things like racial identity and gender were perfectly legal, specifically because computer software had gone from being seen as a low-status occupation into becoming a high-status occupation and there were lots of men at the time who believed women shouldn't be in high-status positions. It plainly had nothing to do with women being unable to do the work that they'd been doing for 3 decades before that.
My own experience at another university, one that has a reputation for liberal politics and policies, and was run by a woman and had a majority-female student body and faculty: Our computer science major track started with quite a few women interested in the field coming in with a strong background in mathematics and science. Some of those women that I have every reason to believe reported significant sexual harassment (e.g. guys pressuring them with various cajoleries and threats to expose their breasts while they were trying to work on their code in the computer labs), some experienced what they reasonably believed to be grading discrimination, and all of them ended up changing majors to related fields like math and physics before graduation. And this wasn't in the 1950's, this was in the early 2000's.
And when I graduated and went into the world of work, I observed plenty of other cases of fairly overt discrimination against women in technology. For instance, I worked with a woman who was a top-notch coder with a particular knack for finding and fixing security issues, and she was all but forced to do UI design instead of coding because she was presumed to have more artistic sensibilities solely because she was a woman.
You want to pretend there isn't a problem. You want to pretend that men are the real victims. I know better.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @07:48PM
Bad things were done by others, so you must suffer because of my bs logic.