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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: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @03:21PM (4 children)
> "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."
If a safe and fair space for women were truly paramount, we'd keep them locked away at home where no one could harm them. Does anyone think that's a good idea?
MIT's purpose, and the reason women are there, is education and research. That is what's truly paramount. There will never be a useful space that is truly safe from other people's thoughts and ideas. Higher learning has always been dangerous because it exposes people to ideas and experiences that are well beyond what would be considered "normal" otherwise. Books are dangerous, science is dangerous, conversations with professors and other scholars are dangerous. If peripheral exposure to Stallman, and his complete lack of social skills, is the worst things to happen to a woman at MIT, then she has lived a charmed life.
Stallman's expulsion is another symptom of America's cultural polarization: "If you're not with us, you're against us." Social conservatives hounded Colin Kaepernick out of the NFL because he dared to challenge their sensibilities about proper comportment during the national anthem. Social liberals are now going after people and organizations that are merely linked to those who have harmed women, even if the people and organizations in questions did nothing untoward themselves.
Make no mistake, this is not about social justice, it's about power, pure and simple. Of course, if you have a genuine conversation with someone dedicated to pursuing social justice, they'll admit that those are the same thing.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday September 23 2019, @04:12PM
> even if the people and organizations in questions did nothing untoward themselves.
If you read TFA, the author alleges that RMS did do untoward things himself, although he is very unspecific in what they were.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Monday September 23 2019, @11:51PM (2 children)
Home is one of the most dangerous places for women to be, statistically speaking. For example, assuming today was a typical day about 15 American women were murdered and millions were beaten and/or raped by their current or former intimate partner. Workplaces and public places both have their security problems too of coursse, but don't think for a minute that home=safe.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 24 2019, @12:11AM
15 out of 200 million?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 24 2019, @02:09PM
In the original post, "home" was merely a metaphor for a safe space. Perhaps a better metaphor would have been an all-female spa, with empathetic female guards, filled with counselors, masseuses and aromatherapists, all paid for by tax dollars because women deserve it.
Is the need to virtue signal so intense that it caused you to go after a metaphor just so you could have a chance to present a scary statistic?