> It really doesn't matter what your view about the controversial issue is; a leader who refuses to stop talking loudly about unrelated issues eventually creates an untenable distraction from ....
I can understand his position, but this is part of the picture of a core problem in society today.
Its NOT that leaders aren't allowed to speak about controversial issues - its that they aren't allowed to advocate ONE side of an issue, while the other side is perfectly OK. You probably shouldn't say "diversity is important but not our only goal" as a CEO, but you CAN say "diversity is the best". That kind of large scale censorship only stifles dissent without changing the dissenters mind. Which is a state of affairs the far left happily accepts - "toxic people dont deserve a voice". Just pray you don't speak against mob or they'll cancel you. Better yet, just don't even think those unthinkable thoughts. Submit to the collective. All your opinions can be inferred from your tribe anyways. You don't really exist, only your tribe does.
I think this idea that "free speech" means that you're not allowed to criticize or take actions based on the speech of others is a bigger problem. This idea that "free speech" makes you immune to consequences is somehow believed by a huge number of people who are otherwise well-educated. But the position seems to me to be impossible to support. It's just completely logically inconsistent.
How can defenders of "free speech" say that it's ok for them to say whatever they want, but it's unfair for other people to respond to them? This is a tactic especially favored by the alt-right. They claim they're being censored and appeal to "free speech" the instant someone calls out poor behavior, and then turn around and organize massive harassment campaigns against people who say things they don't like.
The position is logically inconsistent, but they've found that just saying "free speech" makes people want to defend both of their actions. It's a wonderful exploit targeting people who have been ingrained to enthusiastically defend people saying "free speech", regardless of whether or not what they're actually doing resembles respecting the rights of as many people as possible to speak.
I'd like to point out one more thing. This isn't censorship. This is what the real free market of ideas looks like. You say things that people find vile, and the market judges your ideas to be harmful and best avoided. That's how it's supposed to work.
A fair argument, as far as it goes. The Whig view of history is quite popular, but history is sometimes cyclical.
It took about five years for the cultural zeitgeist of Germany to swing from extremely liberal to extremely fascist starting in the late 1920s. Sure, false flag and other political shenanigans hastened the process along - but it was the culture, or in your words, "the market", that managed to move rapidly to the right quite alright on its own.
Imagine if the nascent nationalist tendencies in the US and Europe really start ratcheting upward in a serious way over the next decade. Imagine that, at some point, "the market" judges pro-healthcare or pro-LGBT ideas to be harmful and best avoided. What then?
My point is that what you've done with your argument is handed Nazis all the moral authority they need to repress your ideas if their ideas become popular.
The argument for free speech is that we pay the small price of hearing vile ideas as insurance premiums against good ideas being censored if the pendulum ever swings the other way.
> It took about five years for the cultural zeitgeist of Germany to swing from extremely liberal to extremely fascist starting in the late 1920s
You're implying that the group of people - the subset of the German population - who were (allegedly) extremely liberal transformed into the group of people that were extremely fascist.
I don't have the time to research this, but it seems much more likely that these were largely - if not entirely - different population subsets, and that the latter arose in reaction to the former. It's not like the two groups had the same shared values with the new addition of "kill everybody that disagrees with me."
I don’t really think that Germany was actively suppressing anti Semitic sentiment during the time the Nazis rose to power- frankly, they were a minority party that rose to power and then started killing their competition- Nazis were anti free speech, as in they actively went out of their way to kill people expressing differing views.
It isn’t limiting free speech by not wanting to listen to or follow people whose speech you disagree with and the argument that doing so is equivalent to how Nazis came to power is entirely historically inaccurate.
Or imagine a CEO saying "there isn't authoritative evidence that racial diversity would benefit our company, and bringing race into hiring decisions is inherently discriminatory." At least 40% of the country more-or-less agrees with that position, but basically any CEO would lose their job for saying it. While publicly supporting racial discrimination in favor of underrepresented groups is almost mandatory.
No CEO would say this, even if they thought it, because it could be used in evidence in a diversity lawsuit under the 80% rule of diverse impact, because the CEO was intentionally using neutral rules of hiring that ended in "discriminatory" results.
> because the CEO was intentionally using neutral rules of hiring that ended in "discriminatory" results.
Against what baseline? The results are only discriminatory against a baseline in which affirmative action is baked in. But this can't be the proper baseline, because if it is then any amount of affirmative action can be called into question.
Does your company practice some affirmative action? That has a disparate impact that hurts minorities, because you could be doing more affirmative action!
Sure, if the employer separately has disparate impact problems, they could be in trouble based on those numbers. But merely saying that you do not practice affirmative action does not create additional legal problems.
I'm sure many of these cases end in settlement — 90% of all cases do. And yeah, it's not a great idea to go around saying stuff that will inflame people. But saying something that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court has said ("The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race") would not be great ammunition for a plaintiff.
Those studies are deeply flawed because they pressupose that the average black college graduate is as prepared as the average white college graduate, or that race does not predict performance controlling for educational attainment. When you look at the results of the National Adult Literacy Survey, it immediately becomes apparent that that is not the case.
Those are flawed studies, as different names is as much a class distinction as a racial one. Even if it were true, however, a white candidate will on average be better than a black candidate with the same resume, because the white candidate had to pass higher standards to get into the same university.
If RMS had said "diversity is important but not our only goal", there wouldn't be any FSF drama. He didn't say that.
His comments are the wrong comments to defend, I think, for reasons adequately explained in the article. Minimizing the harm powerful people have caused to their victims is not "dissent" we should avoid stifling.
Fair enough! I think elevating his types of position to the level of "dissent" sounds like a defense, because dissent is something I think is admirable.
I think you need to pick a better example. I don’t believe a CEO saying “diversity is important, but not our only goal” would be pilloried by either of the currently polarized sides, while one that said “diversity is the best” would, likely, be pilloried by one side.
Just don't use your real name. You can post any controversial opinion you like on the internet but don't tie it back to your real identity if you don't want real world consequences. The internet is still a massive improvement to freedom of speech.
thats observably not the case: countries where the government is unopposed in speech censorship do it pretty well. the only way people can engage in speech banned by the authorities is to do so on platforms run by countries who dont care about what they want to say
Subversive speech can survive despite the efforts of a government. Foreign platforms are one option, another is posters put up at night or materials circulated hand-to-hand.
But it's true that it's going to be a lot easier to remain anonymous when your opponents don't have the resources of a government.
I mean, that's the point. People care what RMS has to say in part because of the work of the FSF. Work other people are doing shouldn't necessarily amplify his stupid opinions.
This isn't new and it's a consequence of how publicity works. Some views make the news and others don't, depending on how outside the mainstream they are. Public figures are judged by all their attention-getting views.
Maybe it doesn't matter too much if nobody knows who you are, but it's why some authors write under pen names. (Back when the U.S. was founded, writing for newspapers using your real name was apparently pretty rare.)
Fairness has little to do with it. It's almost maximally unfair, since people often get more attention because they're already famous, or they get it randomly for almost no reason.
Society seems to be settling in on global norms due to the rise of social media. The more engaged you are with it, the more you know what's cancelled and what's trending.
> Just pray you don't speak against mob or they'll cancel you.
I think the prudent strategy is to understand what's being cancelled today and make sure you're on the right side of it. It's really pretty easy to do just by reading HN.
Just know that you're always speaking to the mob and you won't get canceled. If you have views that disgust the mob, you're going to end up like RMS.
A lot of people are upset about cancel culture, but if you embrace it, it's pretty easy to exploit. You don't have to do the canceling yourself, but if you understand it, it's like a cheat sheet for being socially "right" on every hot button issue. I can fit in any liberal circle with ease because it's so predictable, and I know how to be edgy if I want. And because there's only two tribes that are pretty much opposite, I can do the same with conservatives.
You can still have all the radical opinions you want, you just can't do public stuff with them under your real identity, if you want to avoid being canceled. Maybe we'll see a resurgence of anonymous early-internet type culture, where people have aliases and keep their views disconnected from their public life. I think that works pretty well, because most activism can be done anonymously. It's not that hard to conform irl and do meaningful things under an alias online.
I can think of a few: free speech advocates, libertarians, and long-time RMS supporters.
The thing I feel bad about with RMS is that he's clearly not able to read the room, which used to be considered quirky at best and unpleasant at worst, but now he finds himself unable to function at all in a society that he doesn't understand.
Most of the stuff he's saying would have been fringe in the 90s, but now it's unacceptable and worthy of exile.
While "don't be a distraction" is a reasonable principal, Stallman's problem here is clearly that he got on the wrong side of a single issue. He's constantly going on about how language and/or the world is technically incorrect on a battery of controversial issues, like abortion, race, the justice system, economic systems, climate change, etc, and not in a particularly different way. And no one cared as long as he was on the "correct side".
I don't know, if one is picking a single issue to use as a litmus test, sex trafficking of minors seems like the issue to do it with. Even if you believe that RMS's statements on that issue were taken out of context, his statements on that were callous, did not take into account the perspective of those who were suffering real harms, and were ill-timed in that they seemed to put RMS (in his position as one of the senior faculty at MIT) on the side of not understanding the real harms that had been done to MIT and people there. There is more to leadership than being technically correct (if he was even that), there is a degree of empathy and compassion to those you are leading that is expected of you. He failed that test of leadership at MIT so thoroughly that it called into serious question his ability to provide leadership at any other institution as well. In the face of that, he quite correctly resigned, and I think it's fair to applaud him in that narrow instance for making the right decision for the causes he has championed for so long, while being disappointed that he allowed it to get to the point where that was the correct decision.
I have no idea what you're talking about. Please tell me how taking a controversial position on sex advances the cause of software freedom. The free software movement isn't about providing a platform for people to discuss their sex lives.
Imagine you're in court, say you've been charged with something extremely serious and you're completely innocent. Your lawyer decides to argue your case by referring bitterly to a different, utterly hopeless case that he's losing. You wouldn't cheer him on for exercising his right to free speech -- you'd fire him and get an attorney that knew how to focus attention on a persuasive argument.
It doesn't advance the cause of software freedom. Should we all just shut up about anything that doesn't advance the cause of the organizations that we're part of?
Yeah that's what I disagree with. And its not about board members only - rank and file employees regularly get fired for expressing opinions not endorsed by their orgs.
you still have free speech - what you don't have is immunity to real world consequences if your views are so far out of whack with social norms regarding exploitation of vulnerable groups (eg. underage kids) that your coworkers and colleagues do not wish you to be representative of their organisation or their leader.
What a thoughtful essay. Kuhn clearly pored over those words most carefully.
> The question is whether an organization should have a designated leader who is on a sustained, public campaign advocating about an unrelated issue that many consider controversial. It really doesn't matter what your view about the controversial issue is; a leader who refuses to stop talking loudly about unrelated issues eventually creates an untenable distraction from the radical activism you're actively trying to advance.
The inability to differentiate between "acute" and "chronic" plagues our day.
I disagree with you, Kuhn expressed that he believes that a leader pushing a controversial message unrelated to an organization’s purpose can become a distraction which has consequences, whether you agree with the leader’s controversial message or not.
That is not invalidated by the fact that Kuhn also disagreed with the views RMS has expressed and Kuhn clearly wished to distance himself from those views.
"Give the game away" is too strong, you're right. I don't mean to imply that Kuhn didn't mean what he carefully wrote, he seems like a standup guy doing Free Software.
It is possible that there are multiple angles and reasons why a leader is no longer compatible, and that there is no 'game' to give away.
EDIT: What I mean is, it's entirely possible that its not just that Stallman had views that were disagreeable, nor that Stallman wouldn't stop talking about his personal views- its that Stallman wouldn't stop talking about his specifically disagreeable personal viewpoints.
Absolutely possible and I don't have a hard time believing they'd reached that point with RMS.
I hadn't seen RMS's politics link before -- he puts out like 10 bullet-point hot takes a day, lots of them with a viewpoint way outside the mainstream. He's got weirdo semanticist takes about basically everything, including, as infamously linked, sex laws.
I normally want to defend the right to have unorthodox takes on general principle, but I can see where they're coming from here as far as leadership.
> organizations need not and should not elevate spokespeople and leaders who speak regularly on unrelated issues that organizations find do not advance their mission, and/or that alienate important constituents. I, like many other software freedom leaders, curtail my public comments on issues not related to FOSS. (Indeed, I would not even be commenting on this issue if it had not become a central issue of concern to the software freedom community.)
I really respect this. Kuhn is articulating a principle here and then gives an example of how he himself makes a sacrifice to adhere to this principle. This makes him much more credible to me than if he was using the principle solely as an instrument against others.
"organizations need not and should not elevate spokespeople and leaders"
Musing out loud here, the question is if an organization elevates its founder. It almost seems like it's the other way around - the founder elevates the organization. If we prevent people from founding organizations at all, will the organizations be founded by people with more acceptable views? Or not founded at all?
It’s not about doing more than one thing at once, it’s about picking your battles. Leaders have a limited amount of what I call “credibility capital” (see https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2003/03/where_leaders_f_1/) they can use to get things done. The more of it you spend on issues unrelated to your core strategic concerns, the less you have available to spend on those.
Some leaders have tons of credibility capital banked away, so they can afford to freelance on the side. But freelancing is a luxury. Spend too much on that and you’ll fail at your main job.
It's not really about leaders at all but about the public and press who will listen to and amplify anything leaders say even if it's off-topic bullshit.
Please explain how I did and I won't. Mentioning Trump does not equate to "ideological flamewar". I know you cant explain what you said because you are HN's biggest troll.
>You should be able to do more than one thing at once.
Depends on the things.
Remain President and play golf? Sure.
Remain a spokesman for free software and repeatedly and publicly expound on your belief that pedophilia isn't harmful, and that children are capable of sexual consent? Yes, apparently.
That, and then toss a match on the PR tinderbox that is MIT's involvement with Jeffrey Epstein with a tediously legalistic argument over the definition of sexual assault which appears to the rest of the world to be an attempt to defend Marvin Minsky's alleged involvement in child sex trafficking? No. Turns out that's the straw that breaks the camel's back.
> Most importantly, I believe we must find a way to stand firm for software freedom while also making a safe environment for victims of sexual assault, sexual abuse, gaslighting, and other deplorable actions.
I understand and I fully stand by his belief that software freedom does not mean egalitarian and morally righteous principles have to be undermined in order to progress.
However, it is not the FSF's job to make sure those values are upheld in every facet of moral righteousness. The goal is clear: make and keep software free as in liberty. That's it. Anything else should be completely within the realm of personal viewpoints.
I completely and wholeheartedly stand by the fact that we as a society need to deal with sexual violence much better than we are currently doing so.
Not an ounce of my being, however, places the burden on dealing with this onto Stallman's, or Kuhn's, or any other FSF member's shoulder. Help if you can. Help if you want, but if your job is to make software free, you're doing great. If you can solve other moral issues while doing so, even better, but it's not required.
The problem is that RMS undermines the FSF's progress by being a dumbass. No one's expects him to solve a moral issue, they expect to him to avoid harming their mission by being a ridiculous troll.
Their mission is his mission. FSF didn't hire Stallman, he created it. I think it's baseless to say that Stallman is either trolling or harming the FSF.
He created it more then 30 years ago. It has evolved into something much, much greater than himself and so the organization has a very serious responsibility to more stakeholders as well.
It wasn't harmful as in it would kill the organization but I believe that a lot of people were turned away from the FSF or even FOSS entirely due to RMS' behaviour.
Also lets not pretend its just RMS. ESR has been ostracized for his weird comments and behavior as well. The presentation of this as without precedent is really disingenuous.
Has it flourished? If we use the GPL as a barometer of FSFs success then it's going downhill. Apache and MIT licensing is on the rise dramatically while GPL is a decline proportion wise. On the other hand companies that want a GPL-like license are finding the GPL not strong enough (MongoDB).
> The question is whether an organization should have a designated leader who is on a sustained, public campaign advocating about an unrelated issue that many consider controversial.
I don't understand this. Are people in prominent positions not allowed to have opinions or interests outside of their job? As long as RMS wasn't actively using his power/influence as head of the FSF to advance his odd-ball views I really don't see what the problem is. The only argument I could see is that RMS's persona was so fundamentally quintessential to the FSF that the two could not be separated -- in which case firing him was obviously a boneheaded move.
Sometimes who you are, a physical trait, an accent, an unrelated disability is a "distraction". And, yes, personality and neurological traits can count as well.
I can understand "don't be a jerk", and maybe RMS failed that test. But "don't be a distraction" can easily be (and has been) an excuse to oppress in the name of pragmatism.
The problem is people don't want to associate with an organization lead by someone they have problems with, and a lot of people have problems with his views/behavior. The struggle of the FSF is difficult as it is. He doesn't have to be actively using power/influence.
Because of their public-facing role and influence, whatever opinions and interests they express while in that spotlight will widely be interpreted, fairly or not, as being implicitly endorsed by the institution they represent. That's a tradeoff of being someone whose actions and decisions profoundly affect and direct the work of everyone in the institution.
>Are people in prominent positions not allowed to have opinions or interests outside of their job?
They can always share opinions anonymously. I don't know you who are: for all I know you could be the president of the US.
If you're seen as a figurehead of a company/organisation/movement etc, it makes sense to limit what opinions you say under your real name. As the article says, it can be a distraction from the organisation's purpose. Musk is a good example: I work in a company that has links to SpaceX, and when Musk dives off the deep end on Twitter every conversation about SpaceX eventually leads to a discussion about him.
Of course people are allowed to have opinions or interests. AFAIK nobody has said you can't. He was also not fired, but resigned.
People in prominent positions have visibility and platform that elevates their voice as well as tacitly tieing their declared opinions to the organizations they represent. That is just how societies operate. You can rationalize that it shouldn't be like that, but it always has been and always will be and it is surprising that people are seemingly shocked or offended by this.
I think you have it totally backwards. Would anyone give a damn what the FSF said if RMS hadn't been its leader for 30 years? I sure wouldn't. The FSF has put the personal political goals of some of its members ahead of free software. Stallman would never, and has never done that.
You're allowed to have interests outside of your job, but most workplaces expect you to leave them aside, and focus on doing WORK at work.
If your job involves being a public speaker, who is 'on' 24/7, then that's what you have to deal with. You're always free to pursue flipping burgers, or fixing cars, where you only need to be focused on work for 40 hours a week.
Maybe once it was only leaders, but I think these days anybody can be harassed via their employer for saying controversial things on the Internet. I guess free speech still exists in non-controversial matters, and for people who don't have to worry about employment.
I think that's factually accurate. He's not a professor of sexology and (to my knowledge) has never pursued any formal study of the topic.
Not everybody needs to be Dr. Ruth, but in some sense, Stallman going on about sex topics when he's not is as much a problem as Sagan once going on about the "reptile brain" without considering how much of the neuroscience he was contemporary to had already disproved that hypothesis.
If you're going to have strong opinions on something and want to maintain your credibility in general, at least find a trustworthy and informed advisor on the topic.
It's not a question of sexology, it's a question of ethics. I doubt that any of his critics are professors of sexology as well, people are arguing on moral ground here.
Many of issues people are attacking him on, are not issues in my country. I don't see many fellow Europeans bothering what he said, it's American moral issue totally.
Yeah that struck me as a "sick burn" too, or at least potentially could be taken as one, but the rest of the essay makes me think it was unintentional and more about being one of the people who study sexuality.
Considering the guy has felt the need to publicly express his view that kids should be "allowed" to have sex with adults if they want to.. yeahh, I am going to have to agree.
This actually makes sense. It is also morally bad to sell cigarettes and alcohol to minors because it is proven to be bad for their health and the society has determined that before the age of 18 people are unable to choose what's good for them.
Very thoughtful and nuanced post-mortem. I generally agree with what he had to say.
I think I’m more on the side of thinking leaders should be moral people and not think that pedophilia is defensible. I do believe people in power should be held accountable.
I think “cancel culture” is the wrong term to use, I think is accountable culture. If you think it’s okay to demean woman and defend someone exploiting young girls because his sex trafficker friend gives his institution lots of money, then I think you’re a bad person.
Free speech doesn’t mean you’re free from consequences.
> However, we do not need to follow leadership from those whose views we fundamentally disagree.
I don't know much about the author, but I really like this viewpoint. People are of course entitled to their opinions and to free speech. But we don't have to follow leaders whose values don't align with our own.
The “Free as in Freedom” podcast, with Sandler and Kuhn, restarted this year. It hasn’t had an episode in a few months however. I wonder if they will do an episode on this
> It really doesn't matter what your view about the controversial issue is; a leader who refuses to stop talking loudly about unrelated issues eventually creates an untenable distraction
So this practically means the moment you become the leader, you renounce your freedom of free speech. RMS is a freedom fighter, there is no way he would agree to that. And I'm grateful he didn't give up.
Except reading the links and keeping the timestamps in mind pretty much the opposite occurred. In 2016 he was blabbing about bestiality and pedophilia / rape of minors and excusing it, but later on he was mostly talking about not calling 18yos children, and saying that not all 'Sexual assault' is equal and different words should be used to describe different actions, he even provides a pretty logical argument for this.
Regardless of how his stated views changed over time, the article is more about how such outside-the-mainstream views end up being a significant distraction from the already (unrelated) outside-the-mainstream views of the FSF.
Even were he to turn out to be an incredible coder and lover of open source, I also wouldn't expect the FSF to hire David Duke as a spokesman because the combination of two unrelated advocacy positions would be a distraction for both.
I think we need to keep in mind that RMS was posting this stuff very publicly all the while FSF was a runaway success. If RMS were being nominated to lead the FSF today, sure it might be appropriate to point out that he seems like a wack-job. However, as it stands we've lost one of the most impactful thought leaders of the past several decades over some mudslinging and theoretical "distraction".
He hasn't been silenced. He still has internet access and the many publishing platforms that affords him.
He's been dissociated from a role in an organization.
If his ideas so clearly stand on their own, then he should have no problems. What he will not be doing anymore is acting as a direct representative of the organization.
I haven't seen him branded as a pedophile. I'll happily brand him as a former pedophile apologist, and have yet to read anything that suggests he has renounced those views explicitly.
He's being branded as an insensitive twit who's pattern of behavior has showed no signs of attempts to change, understand or really engage with the criticism he chooses to attract, and has finally broken the camel's back and this is the result.
It's not a direct comparison, but what was the financial impact and mindshare/market impact on Uber of Travis Kalanick's perceived 'dudebro' leadership? Heck, how much did Uber spend just on damage control? A controversial and divisive leadership figure is a problem for any organization, particularly once that's dependent on donations.
Edit: have you ever witnessed something where all you could think while watching it was "Guy, just shut up, you're doing nothing but hurting yourself by talking."? Now imagine that instead of being some guy on news coverage it's someone who's seen as the public face of your organization, he has a history of doing the same thing and you have zero faith that he won't do it in the future.
yes, it's clear that he has some unorthodox views, though all of them are backed by a degree of logic that most people don't apply to these things.
I wouldn't personally touch any of these topics. Too controversial, no gain. But I can't really fault his logic. Of course, social and sexual morality runs on feelings rather than logic, and perhaps that's what RMS doesn't get!
I think what Stallman doesn't get is the same thing that I don't get, why should he at all have to be concerned with the feelings or even thoughts of everyone else in the entire world when speaking his mind. What makes other people's feelings or even thoughts so much more important that action should be taken against him if he's honest about what he thinks. By the way, some of the comments he's being demonized for would mean demonizing hundreds of millions of people living in much more civilized societies than America's.
> I think what Stallman doesn't get is the same thing that I don't get, why should he at all have to be concerned with the feelings or even thoughts of everyone else in the entire world when speaking his mind.
He doesn't have to be.
Of course, equally, they don't need to at all be concerned with his thoughts or feelings when exercising their rights, either.
Now, if he wants them to give favorable consideration to him when exercising their freedoms, well...
It's an exercise of property and association rights, rather than speech rights, so, sure, it's a different thing on a precise enough level.
On the other hand, it's the same thing on the level of exercise of rights in which others thoughts and feelings need not be considered outside of voluntary (e.g., contractual) commitments or legal mandates.
Dr. Stallman is free to exercise his rights in manners which disregard the thoughts and feelings of others. He should not, however, be surprised that his doing so is reciprocated.
>why should he at all have to be concerned with the feelings or even thoughts of everyone else in the entire world when speaking his mind
He's absolutely free to speak his mind. Similarly, people and organizations are free to disassociate with him if they find his opinions offensive (or even just distracting).
The question isn't whether people should have the freedom to disassociate. I haven't seen anyone argue otherwise. The question is whether it's wise or beneficial to use that freedom in this way.
The parent seemed (here and elsewhere) to argue that RMS was having his freedom of speech hindered vis-a-vis the fact that people were disassociating with him. Further arguing that RMS should be able to say anything he wants as long as he's honest (paraphrased).
I only argued about freedom of association to counter that simplistic thinking. That is, yes it's your right to say whatever you want, but it's my right to disassociate from you if I don't like what you're saying.
> The question is whether it's wise or beneficial to use that freedom in this way
I agree whole-heartedly with this more nuanced take on it. In a round-about way, that was kind of my point - That the matter is not as simple as being able to say whatever you want, whenever you want, and not have repercussions.
The thing is, there are very different kinds of responsibilities. One person's responsibilities are to perform some assembly line step in a factory. Another person's responsibilities consist of being a representative of an organization.
If a person has responsibilities as a representative, then there isn't a clear cut separation between their private conduct and that representation, and they have to be aware of that and accept it, however reluctantly that may be. Anything that leader says and does may be interpreted by the public, rightly or wrongly, as being part of the representation.
Most of it is just rephrasing of the same few comments, which are mostly semantic arguments such as "a 17 year old isn't really a" child". This may be evidence of him holding "problematic" views, but it's no campaign.
This is Bradley Kuhn trying to explain and justify his behavior to himself (and, to take a personal stance, I think he did - I think his actions and motivations are fine). I think it points out several things.
1. Dealing with a controversial issue from inside an organization rarely works. Sure, maybe FSF has been grappling with Stallman's non-FSF stances and how they hurt the FSF and free software in general. But they had several years internally to make changes and nothing happened until it spilled over into the public. And then, yes, it did happen quickly.
2. There is a huge tension between the mission of a group and how to interact with the society that group is embedded within. I agree that a group should focus on its mission, and leave other goals to groups more dedicated to those issues. I especially agree that a group with no particular expertise in a matter should avoid pontificating or trying to "lead" in that issue. And yet a group is composed of members from the society. There's a conflict here that no one really knows how to handle.
Why do people high up in very visible or very powerful organizations take on topics outside their remit? Because they have personal opinions and want to use the power of the organization to amplify their voice. I think this is a subtle form of corruption, even in the case where you "created" the organization. Because while Stallman did pioneer the idea of "free software", he's not personally responsible for all or even most of the success and visibility of the FSF. He hijacked the org to press certain opinions. And, yes, while he didn't pretend that the FSF was saying these things, he knew full well that he only had attention paid to him because of all the history of free software and the fact that he was the very visible figurehead. Saying these things to your friends and associates is one thing, but blogging about them is a public campaign.
I don't know the full answer. But an org can't avoid big issues for the society it's embedded in, because that often looks like it's made a decision (usually for repression - to wit, the many groups facing public approbation over apparent kow-towing to the Chinese position on recent events in Hong Kong). But also #metoo and LGBTQ+ rights and Epstein and any number of culture flashpoints in recent history. I think orgs need to make cautious statements that these things exist and that orgs will not endorse unethical or illegal behavior but that other things are up to the actual actors involved. So for example "Black Lives Matter" - I don't expect companies to be champions, and I certainly don't expect any companies to attack it (whether flat-out or noxious things like "Blue Lives Matter"); but I do expect those companies to not make empty talk about equal rights and diversity but to work to make sure their companies aren't part of the problem (e.g. only hiring white men, for example). When a problem is exposed to you, you take that information in and you use it, you don't ignore it, and you certainly don't work to undermine it.
These things blow up because someone in a position of a lot of power does something either purposely or accidentally evil, and then the reaction looks like an overreaction, and we all "murmur murmur MURMUR MURMUR!!" about it for a while.
Let's all be humans. That means we have our goals (game companies make games - and profits) but we also are composed of members of the society we are embedded in, so we are part of those larger goals whether we like it or not. And we don't make social decisions based on "the market", but on foundations of morals and ethics - which we argue about constantly, but over the longer run are pretty easy to see.
Not quite on a tangent - companies today face a huge problem in that they employ people, and people have their own opinions and goals not related to the company's mission. For some companies, the expectation is that you take no position on matters, because that would harm the opinion of the company. I think this is very problematic, especially since a lot of self-censoring happens. I said very little controversial in public while I was employed by a certain large game company, for example, and no one in the company explictly told me to be like that. I think that caused society a tiny bit of harm. But the flip-side is also bad in that companies face unwarranted criticism because some employee says something that goes viral, and then if the company fires the person, the company is in trouble, but if the company defends the person, the company can also get in trouble.
I think this whole thing is only tough because we haven't yet figured out how to handle it. And then once we do, future generations will look back in dismay and say "what the fuck, how could you have been so blind?". I wish someone would figure it out already, so we can go back to being productive.
You didn't post a thesis, you posted an unhinged rant about your hatred for "California liberals." If you want a substantive reply, offer something of substance to begin with.
>I gave multiple examples. Software liberalism is California liberalism and examples were given.
You didn't give any examples. You gave a barely incoherent, poorly spelled, rambling word-salad stream of consciousness spiel about "hispanic supremacists" and white genocide and Orwellian THOUGHT CRIME and Zuckerberg and China and the Second Amendment and how California Liberals are literally socialist Hitler.
>Your failure to address any of the many examples I gave demonstrates exactly what I said, that California liberals are not interested in logic and information.
> However, we do not need to follow leadership from those whose views we fundamentally disagree.
I hesitate to bring up Trump in this context but I know many wish they didn't have to follow a man who casually joked about sexual assault. Yet Americans do have to follow Trump on matters of law related to his office as President, like it or not.
> [...] organizations need not and should not elevate spokespeople and leaders who speak regularly on unrelated issues that organizations find do not advance their mission, and/or that alienate important constituents.
I agree on "need not" but disagree on "should not".
Just because Kuhn chooses to keep his public persona free from conflicts with his personal commitments to organizations does not mean anyone else must as well. Nor does his belief that he is doing something worthwhile mean it is a universal moral law. I appreciate his integrity but I do not consider it a requirement for leadership of software advocacy organizations.
I find it troubling that a common tactic when someone disagrees with someone else is they want to ruin them. They want them de-platformed and unemployable. It isn't enough to combat their ideas with better ideas, they need them to go away permanently. I would have preferred both Kuhn and RMS to stay on the FSF and engage in a public healthy debate.
Even setting aside RMS's indefensible behavior, his vision of what "free software" means is stuck in the '80s. [1] got flagged for its flame-baity title but it's a valid point. Nobody gives a damn about the firmware for your laptop's wi-fi card. Cloud services and mobile rule the world now, and RMS never came up with a good solution to either besides "don't use them." (There's AGPL but it's never won any victories for software freedom. All it means is "buy a commercial license.")
It's unfortunate that RMS loyalists will continue to control the FSF for the foreseeable future. This is one of those cases where progress is made one funeral at a time.
> "Cloud services and mobile rule the world now, and RMS never came up with a good solution to either besides "don't use them.""
I generally agree and I think the problem is bigger than SaaS. Consumers are now becoming accustomed to software "running" on low power hardware that simply cannot actually run on that low power hardware, which requires some sort of "SaaS" system, which in turn requires that they either trust somebody else (inevitably a for-profit corporation who very often has incentives misaligned with the user) or become their own system administrator (an unreasonable ask for the typical user.)
A concrete example:
Suppose a user wants a FOSS photograph organization application that supports organizing large numbers of images through tagging. A user coming from the proprietary world might reasonably expect this application to perform face detection and recognition to automatically tag all of their friends in the application. There are FOSS implementations of this kind of ML tech.. but what are the chances any of that heavy duty stuff can run on the users low power smartphone? Snowball's chance in hell. Even if you get it to run, it certainly won't scale as well as the SaaS alternative from Facebook/Google/Apple.
What's the answer though? I don't have a great answer to this, RMS obviously doesn't, I don't think any RMS supporters or critics do. Not that I've heard anyway.
Apple's on-device ML at least proves it's possible even if the FOSS world would take a while to catch up. A bigger problem may getting access to training data.
It's only possible to a limited extent. A low power smartphone will simply never be able to do as much ML as a high power server, so there will always be a capability asymmetry here. And that's not even getting into the matter of FOSS drivers for such hardware.
And as you say, training these models is a different matter than merely using them. The data and power requirements involved are a huge problem.
Cloud services seem like one of the few places where it's easy to make money from AGPL software: you use it, but you charge people because they're using your infrastructure. If your customers don't like something, they're free to set up their own, using their own hardware, running the AGPL software that you are. Many won't, because they don't want to deal with this.
Precisely my point. Are there any significant AGPL projects that aren't just advertisements for their commercial editions or services? Has anyone actually been forced to contribute back their private changes to AGPLware, or do they just avoid it?
(EDIT: AGPL Ghostscript is an ad for Artifex, but it's a very useful one.)
"Freedom of speech" is a universal principle that is also crystallized in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution with respect to government suppression of private speech.
It's also important that the principle be applied in private interactions, weighing other considerations. Of course, a political diatribe at a funeral is a poor choice. But there need to be places for well intentioned and civil people to come together and discuss things, even if ignorance is spouted of from time to time. If we're all humble, we'll all understand we're each ignorant in our own way and have a little grace to let each other be wrong, annoying, and even circumstantially negative from time to time.
Yes, freedom of association is important and conflicts with freedom of speech sometimes. But deciding to shun people also has repercussions. We have to consider all the repercussions of all of our actions.
The question I would ask next though, is whether RMS is well intentioned, humble and aware of his own capability to be ignorant? I don't have a strong opinion, but there does appear to be a long history of behaviours and musings which suggest he isn't.
I'm not saying he deserves to be a social pariah. But it seems reasonable for the FSF to want to disassociate with him.
I can understand his position, but this is part of the picture of a core problem in society today.
Its NOT that leaders aren't allowed to speak about controversial issues - its that they aren't allowed to advocate ONE side of an issue, while the other side is perfectly OK. You probably shouldn't say "diversity is important but not our only goal" as a CEO, but you CAN say "diversity is the best". That kind of large scale censorship only stifles dissent without changing the dissenters mind. Which is a state of affairs the far left happily accepts - "toxic people dont deserve a voice". Just pray you don't speak against mob or they'll cancel you. Better yet, just don't even think those unthinkable thoughts. Submit to the collective. All your opinions can be inferred from your tribe anyways. You don't really exist, only your tribe does.