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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: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday September 23 2019, @11:45PM (1 child)
Nobody is making you defend anybody.
We can say, instead: "RMS was right about software, but wrong about pedophilia, sexism, and how to treat people. Therefor, we're going to hang onto his viewpoints about software and his work on software and rightly remember him for those contributions, but remove him from positions where his comments on pedophilia, his history of sexist behavior, and general curmudgeon demeanor are liabilities."
People are messy. If you think that somebody you admire never made a mistake or did something they shouldn't have done, you're almost definitely wrong. Your favorite larger-than-life figures, living or dead, were/are people who eat and poop and put their underwear on one leg at a time just like everyone else and also managed to do something interesting in the meantime but also probably have serious flaws in their personality just like everybody else. We can keep Michael Jackson's music and oppose his alleged pedophilia, we can keep Woody Allen's movies but oppose his marriage to his step-daughter, we can keep Plato's dialogues and oppose his pederasty, we can keep Apple's technical innovations and reject Steve Jobs' attempted disowning of his daughter Lisa, and so forth. It's all you can do when you have standards of morality and quality that are separate from what someone you consider a "leader" or "hero" tells you those standards ought to be.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Tuesday September 24 2019, @08:19AM
well said, +1, dave chappelle also talks about this, he's the only celebrity I know though who has dared.
I think people like us who think this way should note that our way of thinking of this is under attack in a very prejudicial, anti-intellectual way and concerted-propagandy manner. I find it terrifying and I am legitimately scared for what this means for my future and those I care about. Like I just wrote to buzzard, totalitarianism is a restaurant where you can't order anything off the menu and while the manager is ordering everything off the menu in plain site, your menu is shrinking and if you make one mistake, you're the one that is going to be on the menu, as a dish.
How could you raise a child in a world like this? (you'd have to ask someone who lived under Stalin or some such)
On one hand, associating with epstein if you are a billionaire is considered 'oh he probably didn't know' but if I say what you suggest, that I am not ready to throw the free software principles out the window because of some dubious behavior of the guy who first wrote them, there is an industry out there ready to cancel me, or I may be in some way blacklisted, or put on an investigation list, who knows. The people behind reddt, twittr and fb are definintely in on this, adn it is a conspiracy in the literal sense. Like I said, Stallman's 'daily beast' article with tons of vindictive manipulative commentary was on the front page of r/news for a really, really long time, and without even that many upvotes.
This is not a moment where intellectuals should go with the flow, we need to be loud, which is what I am trying to do(and I know it is a little annoying for people who may have heard it before, but the alternative is in my opinion worse.)
The hypacrisy is absolutely staggering, I have never read of anything so mendacious as the epstein scandal being redirected at MIT/stallman, it's shocking, I know few people more skeptical than myself and I never would have thought they could get away with this much.
They still won't, if I have anything to say about it.