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posted by Fnord666 on Monday September 23 2019, @01:17PM   Printer-friendly
from the axe-to-grind dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @04:44PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @04:44PM (#897655)

    For many years, I've wondered why so few women are in STEM. One thing that smelled was that somehow, this question remained a great mystery for decades. All this stuff we can figure out, but not that?

    The answer is right there. Women just don't generally want to do it. The fact that liberals don't like that answer doesn't change reality. Whenever anyone tries to find some reason for it beyond that, it's just not there. Women must be harassed more than in other occupations! (nope.) They must be paid less. (nope, turns out they're paid more). They must be earning less respect at work (nope, turns out code is rated more highly when a reviewer knows the author is female). They must be discriminated against in college! (nope, actually most tech schools roll out the red carpet for female candidates). Maybe they're discriminated against earlier on! (studies can't find any evidence, but feminists love this because you can never prove that it didn't happen, so they don't have to worry about inconvenient evidence getting in the way of their victim narrative).

    Remember, if something happens because of what men do, it's men's fault, and if something happens because of what women do, it's still men's fault!

    It's funny how you never see feminists complain about women being underrepresented in construction or landscaping or the police (even though studies have shown that female police officers are less likely to be involved in a shooting or misconduct claim despite being just as effective). Dangerous, low paying jobs are men's work. Cushy, high paying jobs are women's work.

    Nowhere is this more obvious than in the military. Back in the 80s and 90s feminists complained that women were excluded from combat roles. So the military allowed women into combat roles. Now there are still hardly any women in combat roles because feminists realized that combat roles are dangerous and physically demanding. No more complaints, though... Wouldn't want to actually be equal, only complain about the stuff you want.

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