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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, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @05:45PM (2 children)
That's right, and the abolitionists in the 19th century United States were wrong to call for an abolish of slavery of blacks. They should have called for the abolition of slavery of all peoples. It was naked discrimination to non-blacks. What were they thinking?
...do you understand why your post is absurd? Nobody is supporting oppression and mistreatment of men, explicitly or implicitly, in this discussion. The point is that RMS and people like him were not making a hostile environment for men but were making it for women, so to pursue equality and safe and fair environments for all MIT has to focus on improving their current treatment of women.
Now when evidence is presented that men are treated unfairly in a way that is not affecting women, your argument would have a point. Until then, it's ridiculous.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday September 24 2019, @02:31AM (1 child)
Modded up! You're putting your finger on the unspoken assumption these people are making, that all interactions are zero-sum or worse: that if women (for example) gain something, it must come at the expense of men (for example). What a sad way to think. This is the kind of thing that makes people reflexively respond to "Black lives matter" with "ALL lives matter."
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Fishscene on Tuesday September 24 2019, @09:59PM
"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."
"that if women (for example) gain something, it must come at the expense of men (for example)."
But it's not paramount to balance interests?
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For Black lives matter... Nobody was saying they *didn't* matter. Especially NOT me. So when I say "All Lives Matter" - I'm calling attention to get to the root of injustice problems and not focus on creating special laws or procedures based on whether you're black or not. Special rules based on ethnicity *IS* racism as the privilege it creates cannot be enjoyed by those with a different color of skin. And yea. I'm against that.
I'd rather we treat All people as equal. The "Black Lives Matter" movement is calling for special treatment based on skin color and specifically calling out one skin color to give free and expensive stuff to another skin color because *skin color*. Screw that noise.
Think I'm off my rocker? https://www.leoweekly.com/2017/08/white-people/ [leoweekly.com] This is the leader of the BLM movement.
I know I am not God, because every time I pray to Him, it's because I'm not perfect and thankful for what He's done.