I'm completely in awe with how a significant portion of this community believes (directly or indirectly) the accomplishments of a person makes being a decent human being optional. This leads to a "strong-rules-all" culture and I think what we're seeing is just modern barbarism.
Let me start by saying that most of my knowledge of this is from reading news posts and comments, I will not pretend to have an in-depth knowledge of this situation.
However, as a counterpoint, do you really want to live in a world where the leadership is not determined by how skilled you are at your craft, but how well you conform to a conventional morality? RMS has done some things that don't conform to that morality, and some things that go against my own sense of morality.
He doesn't lead a religious organization. He doesn't lead a political party. He was leading technical organizations, and seemed immensely successful in doing so. I have never once heard of him doing anything that was counter to the goals of those organizations.
Why do his personal beliefs even need to be brought into the equation? Do we really intend to digress back to some kind of Puritanical morality where your ability to do anything is first judged by your piousness, and secondly by your ability to perform the job?
Personally, this has somewhat diminished my interest in both the FSF and the GNU organizations. If witch hunts based on your personal sense of morality are going to be an entrenched part of joining that community. What I look for in a technical community is just that: technology. I'll save the witch hunts for organizations that purport some form a moral compass.
> Let me start by saying that most of my knowledge of this is from reading news posts and comments, I will not pretend to have an in-depth knowledge of this situation.
I'm in the same boat. I've been eyeballing things I've been seeing about him on HN as of late.
> However, as a counterpoint, do you really want to live in a world where the leadership is not determined by how skilled you are at your craft, but how well you conform to a conventional morality? RMS has done some things that don't conform to that morality, and some things that go against my own sense of morality.
I won't look at this in a binary way. True, I'd choose to live in a cave, rather than in a community where all leaders are selected solely on their social conformance. However, work or any other activity where it is done with a group, people bring merely more than their skills. They do bring their culture, their personal touch as well, and under circumstances where this social side is extremely irritating, it could override a decision on whether to include this person into the group. That being said, how much we should care about one's persona is a complex problem and I am refraining presenting an opinion about it. From the looks of it, in this particular instance, people think it was significant enough.
His resignations are going to be a net loss for everyone, but I refuse to believe this damage has been inflicted by the community. He is the sole responsible of his mouth. If you want to bring change, then the burden of being accepted lies with the individual, him, not the community.
What's "conventional morality"? Where's the line between a moral fashion and something more fundamental? If there's no one line, then isn't this all just an exercise in line drawing, and aren't the people who refuse to associate with Stallman simply drawing their own lines?
> aren't the people who refuse to associate with Stallman simply drawing their own lines?
It seems to me like he has enough allies to continue all of his organisations with some replacement of those who wont associate with him, so it seems to me like people are drawing lines for other people.
I have mixed feelings about his running of the organisations on a technical level, but I have more reservations about organisations after such a social coup. Similarly, I find Brendan Eich's political views distasteful, but I am more inclined to draw a line against interacting with Mozilla than Eich over people drawing lines for other people, and I would definitely shun Mozilla had they removed Eich for expressing political thoughts without making actual monetary donations.
I've worked with people far more distasteful in far more areas of their belief and behavior than those two, and I would rather the nonsense stop than empower one more moron on the web to bring someone to "justice". How is this mob going to sleep at night in a few months?
I'm not sure how they're meant to draw lines for other people; if they don't have a critical mass, Stallman can simply ignore them. If they do, he can't lead effectively, and it's their own personal lines that are the problem.
So you think a critical mass of people who actually work with Stallman in the FSF and Gnu did some secret ballots then discussed this with him their shared decision or you think a critical mass stopped showing up at work (is that online?) each independently?
More realistically, he was hounded by a loud minority with most people shruging and waiting. Given that his situation with MIT is somewhat more complicated and he has a limited amount of resources for handling simultaneous emergencies..
I think people who have come into professional contact with Stallman have had these problems for a very long time, and Stallman's extraordinarily ill-advised comments about Minsky and Epstein crystalized them.
>However, as a counterpoint, do you really want to live in a world where the leadership is not determined by how skilled you are at your craft, but how well you conform to a conventional morality?
We already live in that world. Within the boundaries of the law, any behavior which interferes with an organization's business, creates an intolerable work environment, or might invite a lawsuit or negative publicity can be grounds for dismissal regardless of a person's competence. Morality, politics and optics have always mattered, and matter more for leaders than others, because leaders are expected to embody an organization.
Stallman is an example of someone being given far more leeway than others when it comes to the effects of his his "unconventional morality."
I appreciate RMS for all that he has done. But unless he committed a crime, which he didn't, I don't think we should police his thoughts and opinions. The thresholds for decency may be different for you and me. And RMS is not a politician whose opinions could potentially affect all of us. If you don't link what he says, you can just ignore him.
More to the point, everyone else is entitled to their freedom to associate with him, despite his thoughts and opinions. He is entitled to be the head of the GNU project because it's his fucking project. And if other people are willing to contribute money or code to that project, fucking FINE.
That's what this is about. Sarah Mei is coming from a place of, "Because RMS said this Very Bad Thing, no one should associate with him at all." Carrying with it an implied threat: if you continue to associate with a Bad Person, then you are a Bad Person and maybe whoever signs your checks should know just what a Bad Person you are.
FWIW I have never heard of Sarah Mei until today. I had a quick look at her Twitter account. There must be over 100 tweets and retweets about Stallman and the FSF over 10 days, that's when I stopped scrolling.
I have no horse in this race, this is too much of a hot topic to take a stance about personally, but I can't say I'm enjoying the modern viral Twitter shit-storm phenomenon very much.
The loudest campaign, wrong or right, wins by deafening everybody and amplifying their moral stance through that platform.
I have nothing against Mei personally, but I _loathe_ the modern Twitter driven moralism. Does everything have to be a crusade?
People have literally written the same thing about me and DNSSEC, both here and on Twitter. If you don't want to pay attention to Sarah Mei, you don't have to. People are allowed to decide what they care about, and to advocate for those things.
Exactly. We could actually be more inclusive if we simply focused on people's actions within their domain, and ignored any flippant, tactless, or awkward _statement_ they may make when talking of other things.
Yes! That is the paradox. The narrower the focus of your group, the more people you can include because they don't have to agree on all these other issues, too.
And that is precisely the problem - not that the Government or other explicit power structure is stepping on him, but that it's becoming fashionable for individuals to refuse to associate with anyone who has said or done anything they don't like, regardless of how much good they have done or how nice and helpful they have been otherwise.
Political changes tend to follow behind cultural changes here. If this cultural change has legs, then I have to wonder how long it will be before the Government does start acting more directly against anyone who has views outside of the mainstream. Social Credit score, anyone?
I really don't see anything "precise" in the way you've connected the dots from "people exercising their right not to associate with others whose behavior offends them" to "the Government is going to enact a social credit score".
Government Social Credit Scores are bad. It does not follow that people don't have reputations.
Heh, when your org’s image is a hostage of few short-minded haters, it is not particularly strong definition of freedom. Those haters could unassociate with him by simply not associating. “Remove <humanname>” is completely different.
Dude. RMS has a history going way back. No doubt people have been telling him (both in informal and formal settings) to curb his behavior in private for years. This was, as has been said before, the last straw.
You don’t have privy to his HR record at MIT and neither do I. But I’ll bet it looks closer in size and volume to Bart Simpson’s file than it does Lisa Simpson.
It is hard to fire people in academia. They found a legit, lawsuit-proof excuse to can him and took it.
If there were a credible case of criminal misconduct against him, you can be sure you'd hear the witch hunters cry it from the fucking rooftops.
In the hours I've spent reading this story, all I've seen is hearsay about women feeling uncomfortable about him having a mattress in his office; criminally stupid misreadings of his writings regarding Minsky; and of course various accounts him being a terribly unpleasant person, which we already knew.
It's obvious what ways the winds are blowing. There's no place for misfits like RMS in today's world. (But I guess there never really was.) That doesn't mean I have to like it.
There is no amount of evidence that would please alt-right types like you. That’s why it’s not worth discussing things with you. Construct whatever narrative helps you sleep at night.... if this was any other website, I’d have a significantly less measured response.... needless to say, get used to being on the losing side of the culture war.
Would you please stop posting in the flamewar style like this to HN? It just degrades this place even further. I'm sure you can find substantive ways to make your points, or simply the discipline not to feed egregious comments.
Not only did he not commit a crime, he didn't even do anything other than awkwardly posit that maybe his deceased friend didn't realize he was doing something wrong. Certainly this was a tactless comment.
Now I don't personally like Richard Stallman, but the "one tactless comment and you're dead _and_ people who want to associate with you are dead, too" approach to modern Internet justice seems wrong.
In mob justice scenarios, it helps to have associates who are willing to defend you and stand by you. But it seems that Stallman has a history of wearing out his welcomes, so that rather than supporting him, his associates instead were saying "we'll quit if you don't push him out."
When you run a public organization, personal skills do matter.
> If you don't link what he says, you can just ignore him.
If the contributors to the GNU project stop contributing since they do not like what he says, Stallman becomes a liability. Resignation is likely the only viable option.
It is also worth noting that there are reasons to stop contributing to an organizations for reasons other than policing the thoughts and opinions of its leadership. Sometimes people don't want to be associated with those thoughts and opinions, even if they are a strong proponent of the freedom of speech. Other people will want to limit their exposure to thoughts and ideas that they find revolting, which is difficult to do when the leadership sanctions them. While it is possible to argue that ending contributions results in the policing of a threshold for decency regardless of the motivation, the motivations are meaningfully different.
Yes, we should be grateful to Stallman for his contributions to Free Software. We should also be grateful for his resignations. Some of his viewpoints are truly harmful to both individuals and society, while his leadership role lent those ideas more credence than they deserve. If he recognizes the undue influence that leadership roles provide, we should offer him an opportunity to rebuild his reputation. Otherwise, he brought his own downfall.
1. How is Richard Stallman not a "decent human being"?
2. Assuming your answer is "I find his positions on the age of consent / incest / bestiality etc. abhorrent" - having a legal-philosophical view which is lenient on punishing certain acts as crimes does not make one an indecent person IMHO.
The case against Stallman, from the sources I've read, seems to be that he has a reputation for harassing women, so much so that there was a longstanding joke about placing ferns in offices to ward him off (he apparently finds them powerfully aversive), and that his defense of Minsky dovetailed in a particularly unfortunate way with some very stupid things he's said in the past about pedophilia (for instance, that consensual pedophilia should be legal).
If you put it to Twitter or a message board whether he's a "decent human being", you're going to get answers like "he's among the very best human beings because free software" and "he's among the very worst human beings because pedophilia".
I think it's worth interrogating whether "is Stallman a decent human being" is a question worth asking. The operative question is "is Stallman the right person to be leading the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project".
He doesn't have a reputation for harassing women, he has a reputation for weird off-putting behavior towards everyone, with many stories of being really bad at social etiquette towards men and women, not reading social cues, and getting away with behaving like a spoiled child. At the moment he was branded (falsely and maliciously) in the media with being an Epstein defender, a social media moral panic mob rose up against him, in which stories from women feeling uncomfortable with him predominated. It went into the general frenzy of "this asshole drove countless women away from the computer industry over the years" very, very quickly.
And yes, Stallman wrote twice in the past that he thought consensual pedophilia was not particularly harmful - about three lines worth among many thousands of entries in his inane "political blog" that approximately nobody reads or cares about (and on which of course nobody commented or cared about at the time they were made). These lines were lovingly collected and placed, with some other examples of his wrongthink, e.g. on the geek feminism wiki years ago. They did not play a significant role in creating the moral panic - the initial Medium article with the lie about him saying Epstein's victims were entirely willing didn't have them. The articles in the media with headlines like "Star MIT Scientist Calls Epstein Victim Virginia Giuffre "Entirely Willing"" mostly didn't include them, though a few did when the journalists went to dig for more fodder.
Thomas, I've never met you, but admired your writings over the years. Seeing you defend the mob against Stallman with well-worn platitudes like "He is welcome to his thoughts and opinions, and everyone else is entitled to their freedom not to associate with him as a result" is particularly saddening.
You say that, but I hear differently, from people with firsthand experience. My suspicion is that you believe Stallman doesn't harass people because you want it to be true, not because you honestly believe it is true.
Please provide references regarding Stallman's supposed reputation for harassing women - I have not heard about this (though TBH I have not looked into it).
regardless of how i might feel about stallman's actions, the dishonest reporting and twitter mob-baiting leading up to his removal leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
while there are those who believe 'stallman did nothing wrong,' i suspect many in the community who object to his forced resignation feel the same way - that it was done in bad faith.
That's how the mainstream thinks all around the world; it's the rare position that believes principles rule society when consensus on any kind of vision for the human condition is so far out of reach.
Sadly, I reckon that even a lot of the folks who want Stallman gone are just as willing to turn a blind eye to someone doing the same things that he did if they have the right accomplishments and status, and that they just differ on who they're willing to do that for.
Do you reckon that? You look back over your recalled experiences and see example after example of the kinds of people condemning Stallman putting up with misogyny, harassment, and advocacy for pedophilia among higher-status people?
What about the US president? There's a recording of the president saying that he grabs women by their vagina. Surely it's not surprising to think that there's a critical voting demographic that believes such sexual violation isn't worthy of putting the country through an impeachment process.
The US President relies highly on evangelical voters. Surely this is because those voters have made a calculation on the balance of values, and despite honorable sexual conduct being an evangelical value... it didn't win in the sum of things.
RMS is more like "meek-and-bullied-rules-something-at-last" as a counterpoint to strong-rules-all culture. This witchhunt just keeps on giving :D I met RMS in person.
