So I think this is the most cogent argument against RMS's leadership I've seen. It directly relates to his ability to practically lead an organization. Its too bad that this argument has not been front and center instead of the politically charged but subjective comments by RMS. In short RMS is a bad boss that does not consider the needs of his employees according to the author.
RMS being repeatedly awful to women is just as important as this, and his other comments are "political" insomuch that arguing about the age of consent is political.
It seems like the age of consent is political, or the age would be identical everywhere.
There is a bell curve for the start of human sexuality. Here in Sweden the age of 14 is the median for girls, 14.4 for boys, and the age of consent is set to 15. Does that mean 15 is a good age of consent? Should the age of consent be the median age, the 10% (12y), or the 80% (16y)?
Personally I prefer the "half the person's age + 7" rule (for the partner's minimum age), but I don't know any country that has that as an age of consent.
The mind finishes maturing at the age of 25. The medical evidence for that is pretty much established, and is why a lot of researchers want to (at minimum) abolish the death sentence for anyone younger. It is quite questionable if one should hold people responsible for behavior before their mind has finished developing.
A similar argument could be made about driving. At the age of 16, the impulse control is severely underdeveloped, likely by evolutionary benefits. New experiences invoke a much stronger endocrine response than for fully matured individuals, and with faster depletion rate. A driving license should really be around age 20+ if one would follow mental maturity. Sweden have set it to 18.
We have so many different age lines. Driving, drinking, military service, voting, consent, crime, legal responsibility. 25 would be a great line for it all based on medical data. In Sweden we expect young people to have the mind around 15 to start having sex with each other, but we don't trust that they have the mental capacity to drive before 18. Is the numbers that the US use better? Worse? Is the answer political? I would say yes.
By the half your age + 7 rule, Trump should have never been married.
Now I don’t have an opinion on how great or terrible the guy is but if 50% of the country supports him, then that’s indicative that there isn’t really any consensus on age differences when dating.
Personally I think there is no reason to look down on consensual relationships between two adults. Especially true if they are far beyond the age of consent.
Those are serious and cogent argument (although I don't like the "safe space" terminology).
Having said that - the issue at hand right now is whether RMS should or should not be on the GCC steering committee, not managing the FSF. And "leadership" is an even more diffuse term.
Also, one should bear in mind that Stallman has (AFAICT) Asperger's syndrome or High-Functioning Autism (a.k.a. neuro-diversity). That does not excuse much in itself - and in fact, is an argument against making him a powerful singular boss of people - but should be taken into consideration when you think about how this sort of situation develops.
Or maybe he should had restricted the foundation's mission scope to solely open source software and not tie everything into a progressive endeavor. Your culture determines everything. Collective action and employee protests at Google is very different than at Amazon/Microsoft. If RMS had tied his personal brand to FSF's success, then he would have easily weathered the coup attempts. This is basic executive power MBA 101. During the massive corporate adoption of open source post-2010 he could have restructured the foundation to make it more scalable like the Linux Foundation or Wikimedia, a force unto itself with cash reserves and endowments. But he didn't, I think he has learnt an important lesson this time.
The FSF is a startup that never grew beyond the "scrappy entrepreneur in garage" phase. Starbucks has a much better chance of surviving collective action than your average neighborhood kombucha café place.
It is something to look at in term of leadership, but I am missing a key detail. What pay did RMS give to himself, what kind of raises, benefits, cost of living conditions, paid vacations, stock options, works hours? How much of it was communicated at the point of hire to the non-profit organization, and what were the expectations?
It's not that Stallman had the monopoly on bad management. In fact, the interests of workers and management are intrinsically at odds, and every workplace needs a union.
Everywhere has bad managers, but this is a case where a union was formed specifically because of a single actor, and that actor has a demonstrated history of abuses yet was then silently brought back despite that history because of a few zealots who cared more about him than what was ostensibly their mission.
Oh, come on! Tone is set at the top everywhere. Uber, Amazon, SpaceX, these are great examples with tens of thousands affected.
And what's with the abuse? One makes strange remarks about women and abhors soap, and the other manages you out a few months before vesting cliff. That isn't even the same league.
One denies you money. The other denies you dignity and humanity. You're right that it's not even close, but I suspect you've got the analysis backwards.
I'm not sure how you arrived at that conclusion. Does having to pee in a bottle sound more like "having your humanity denied" or "having your money denied"? What about the actual example from the GP, having your stock options clawed back? Which one of those categories does that fit in? And then, as to my point, what about RMS's pattern of sexual harassment? Which category does that fall in?
Sure, he denied raises too. But that's not why people are upset with his reinstatement, and not anything more than one single example in the story being discussed. It feels deceptive to focus on that one detail and ignore everything else that makes RMS a bad person to work with.
The thing is that money really helps with your dignity, many people who had income dislocations this year thanks to COVID will confirm. On the other hand, words are just words.
Snowflakes. IT sector have quite a lot snowflakes. And since they have access to media outlets much more readily then most other workers, their voices are amplified. They are free to work in any other companies given the skillsets they have. They chose to be there and chose to embrace the conditions there. Suddenly they want to unionised because their feelings hurt when they could have done so years ago. Their "bad treatments" are light years milder than what others had to endure.
The thread begins "RMS created non-safe spaces at both MIT & the FSF", which is a giveaway in itself.
"prior cost of living adjustments were a battle and not annual" - the federal minimum wage has not changed since 2009, and millions of workers across the US have not gotten a raise for over a decade. For businesses making a profit - not a non-profit like the FSF. So staff getting COLAs once in a while sounds good in comparison.
I don't know if staff of the FSF non-profit were being paid fairly or not, but he does not seem to be living in the real world.
Someone else writing a diatribe against Stallman said he made MIT an "non-safe space" because he took naps in his office on a mattress as opposed to a couch.
This is a great question. What is the cost/benefit to the mission of the FSF of keeping RMS in a leadership position? I guess this depends on the stated mission of the FSF. If its evangelizing for software freedom then RMS himself is too much of the story to do that effectively anymore I think. If its to promote RMS and give him a platform then he must stay. If its to do practical organizational work to support free software projects then RMS is easily replacable. If its to write free software the last I checked RMS really hasn't contributed much in the way of code in years.
a "great leader" also needs to be able to manage people.
If you're passionate but spend your time being abusive to others then you're not a leader, you're a dictator. And that is what RMS is - we've seen time and time again he expects his opinion to be the law, and anyone with whom he disagrees is wrong and should themselves be expelled.
So to be clear would you categories Steve Jobs as "a great leader" or "a dictator"? Because he fell between your two chairs being both extremely abusive but were also able to manage people.
He's a very interesting case that probably gets to be classified as both.
He produced amazing results. He's definitely not someone I would ever recommend attempting to emulate in general. These two facts can both be true at the same time. He was an extremely polarizing figure.
Importantly, though, from what I've heard (so take with appropriate seasoning), his worst excesses were more toward the earlier parts of his career, and as he got older, he became less abusive and unreasonable, while honing his visionary side. If he had lived to today, he might have changed how people think about him....
...or he might have shown himself to be just as bad as the worst people think, and been "canceled" himself.
No, great leader must recognize his weaknesses and hire people to compensate for them. If you think leaders/owners of big companies are not dictators, I have a bridge to sell to you.
No, but he is nevertheless an expert for certain culinary specialities (see e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ#t=1m46s). Essentially, of course, this is also about good manners. Anyway, it seems to be a law of nature that a guru will always find suitable devotees.
Just to be clear, since the title is ambiguous, it's not "thanks to RMS" it's "to protect themselves from RMS"
> We formed a union to help protect ourselves from RMS — he controlled our pay, benefits, and workplace conditions.
> RMS did not believe in providing raises... RMS believed that if a precedent was created for increasing wages, the logical conclusion would be that employees would be paid infinity dollars and the FSF would go bankrupt.
I'm getting tired of these lynchmobs. An opinion screamed out on Twitter is not important and should be dismissed. Neither Twitter or HN is the place to decide for or against or dig around someone's life. The FSF's board is where this belongs. It disgusts me that HN is as bad as Reddit and Facebook and I'm extremely disappointed.
How would you feel if this where about you? HN is usually better than this.
Well, personally, if it were about me, they wouldn't be able to say that I had refused to provide cost-of-living increases to people I employed because I don't understand that "slippery slope" is a fallacy, not a truism.
In general, they wouldn't be able to say that I had mistreated people serially over the course of years with no apology, made a long string of bigoted and degrading statements about a wide variety of marginalized groups, and generally made an asshole of myself in public with no apparent understanding of why it was bad and no apology for it.
I mean, what, did you think "how would you feel if they talked on Twitter about what you did at work" would result in similar stories for everyone?
"RMS is hard to work with" is not news, JWZ had some deeply amusing insights about that before he got into web browsers.
RMS has said, all along, that no one needs to work with him. He shares his stuff and anyone can make a better version of it.
It's wild how often, and for how long, every criticism of him ends with "and thats why RMS should go away and leave us all the cool things he built".
The "FSF" at heart, at first, was a way to get this unemployable geek paid so he could continue working for the good of the world even when no one particularly cared who he was. If it became more, great. If the "more" needs to be something better, than someone go build the something better.
