SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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 meustrus on Monday September 23 2019, @03:20PM (1 child)
I'm on your side, but I respectfully disagree.
RMS is an insensitive clod, but I've never gotten the impression he was more insensitive to women than anyone else. And this issue isn't really about what RMS thinks of women.
When MIT is weighing "the interests of women" versus "the coddling of a whiny child", they're not weighing founded allegations against RMS. They're weighing the PR burden of the scandal - which just takes basic research to realize has been greatly mischaracterized to the point where RMS might actually have the rare winnable USA defamation case - against the value of a man whom it turns out is not that great a leader, and who's probably retiring soon anyway.
When it comes down to it, it doesn't really matter to MIT where the pressure is coming from. RMS has earned enemies over the years for his broadcast insensitivity, and all they needed was ammunition.
I'm sure that if RMS didn't have those enemies and it wasn't so common for him to piss off lots of people for basically no point, MIT would be more interested in defending him.
---
As for why women are not in STEM, data shows that the bias happens before college so people like RMS almost certainly have no direct impact. Which is not to say there is no indirect impact of having all these man-children in FOSS acting as role models for the young men and boys that are interacting with the women who choose not to pursue STEM.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @03:40PM
No, they're coddling women like they are whiny children because this is in women's interests according to Bushnell's logic. Honestly, I'm more concerned about these misogynistic attitudes of "male feminist allies" than Stallman having made a point. Stallman was wrong and made the same argument that delayed proper investigation and prosecution of Muslim rape gangs across the UK. Explanation and moral argumentation are more constructive than expulsion but require good faith engagement which is elusive to third wave feminists.