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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: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @04:18PM (1 child)
RMS was not defending Epstein, he was saying that its possible that at least some of the women in his entourage were not coerced, and that his friend may not have known whether a woman was coerced or not..
And he's right about that.
It may not be politically correct in this era of a woman-can-do-no-wrong, and a-woman-is-not-responsible-for-anything-she-does (and if she "regrets" it later, it suddenly becomes 'rape'), but eventually this will all balance out (years?) later.. and RMS will be proven right yet again...
no matter what all the whiners, SJWs and professional-victims are all screaming about now.. heck, some woman "victim" kept going to that island over and over again (she was of age and was going for "monetary reenforcement" (i.e. she was being paid)), and now they are calling her a 'rape victim' in the news articles...sheesh..everything is "rape" these days.. ridiculous..
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @04:47PM
He was actually just saying the latter.