Thinking about how your actions affect your coworkers and customers isn’t some giant imposition, my dude. It’s a minimum baseline of professional competence. Any barista in the country knows better than to act like that in a professional setting.
Programmers aren't baristas, broseph, and few if any baristas are as deeply on the spectrum as Stallman is. It's fundamentally ableist to hold everyone to a high standard of social functioning in order for them to be permitted to work. Especially if it's their life's work, at a nonprofit foundation they established.
If you were talking about Eich, he should be free as a private citizen to support the political causes he chooses to, even if those causes are disagreeable. He did not interfere with gay members of the Mozilla community, nor make his anti-gay-marriage contributions in a capacity of representing the Mozilla Foundation. He was literally as low-key about it as he could possibly be.
Using “autism” as an excuse is insulting to autistic people and ignores the autistic women who were forced to accommodate his behavior over the years. “Autistic” does not mean “asshole”.
It must be nice to imagine the rules of society don’t apply to you, but eventually society disagrees. If you are bad at your job, you might be fired from it, and “not making the entire industry a more hostile place” was at last part of the job description of an MIT professor.
Also note that there are actual laws about it in the USA, so not only is it part of the job description, it is a legally required part of the job description.
I wasn’t thinking about Eich, but that is another good example: it doesn’t matter how low-key you oppose some of your employees’ marriages, doing it at all still makes you a shitty CEO who makes it harder for your company to recruit and retain talent. Given that that is one of the core job requirements of a CEO, it made him unqualified for the position he held.
We don't know what Eich supports or opposes, all we know is that he contributed money to a campaign to oppose a particular law. Maybe he thought the law was unconstitutional or that, as written, it would cause more harm than good.
And even if he were opposed to gay marriage, if you cannot imagine how someone can philosophically oppose something, even if they are wrong, and yet still practice tolerance for that thing in their own life, then you cannot be reasoned with and should probably delete your account.
