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: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday September 23 2019, @05:58PM (2 children)
I agree that they left out the "... while maintaining the safety and fairness most men already have."
I'm going to take some educated guesses here:
1. You're a cisgender man.
2. You don't regularly make plans regarding how to escape situations you are in or how to get from one place to another safely, and have never really tried.
Because every woman I've ever known well enough to have serious conversations regularly takes personal security into account with just about everything she does. For instance, one major reason women tend to go into bathrooms in groups of friends is to protect themselves in case a creep is waiting in there to attack them, which happens often enough that it's a real and worthwhile consideration. The vast majority of women alone with almost any man that she does not have really good reason to trust completely (yes, that includes you), has in the back of her mind a plan for what she'll do if you try to attack and/or rape her, again because it happens often enough that she needs to think about it if she wants to be safe. There is a level of constant fear that a lot of men just don't understand. If you have a sister ask her, or ask your mom, and if you can't have these conversations with either of them you need to ask yourself why you can't or don't understand the lives of the women you've known your whole life.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Demena on Tuesday September 24 2019, @02:35AM
I think that you have some misconceptions about men.
You have to be kidding me. You honestly believe that most men have safety and fairness in their daily lives? For the majority of men life is safe and fair? That has never, ever been true and is still not so today. To believe so is being in defiance of history and flies in the face of current affairs. Men are expendable and always have been. In the UK, of the men alive a thousand years ago only a few per cent (the elites) passed their genes through to today. Women may feel vulnerable to their core but men feel expendable to their core. Mostly they don't even mind being expended as long as the reason is good.
What qualifies your guesses as "educated"? You are asserting inherent knowledge. Always a sign of a weak argument and unclear thinking.
Do you actually know any men? What you are talking about is called situational awareness. It is the difference between life and death. Have you ever watched how men enter a men's room? From my observation it is usually carefully and slowly unless there is a crowd. I don't think you should be questioning how well a guy knows women without ascertaining that you do not have the same issue.
Remember that a liar will always suspect your veracity, a thief will always suspect your honesty. When someone suspects something about someone else it often is an indication of how that someone thinks.
Regards, Demena
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Tuesday September 24 2019, @01:50PM
> "... while maintaining the safety and fairness most men already have."
Unless they are gay, or muslim, or...
> fairness
Why is male life expectancy so much lower than female life expectancy?
Why is male suicide rate so much higher than female suicide rate?
Note, I'm not discounting what you say, rather I agree with the thrust of your argument. I just think we should strive for *equality*. Sometimes it sucks to be a woman, sometimes sucks to be a guy, let's make it better for *everyone*.
> fairness
If we do not strive for *equality* then we alienate the men (or whatever group we exclude) who we need to achieve "fairness". That's rather shooting ourselves in the foot.
> educated guesses
That's ad hominem; you should be ashamed.