This isn't true. Many signatories of the anti-Stallman letter are known, smooth careerists who have been climbing the OSS corporate ladder for the last decade.
The don't care about the actual issues at all, otherwise they'd sign anti-Clinton and anti-Gates letters.
Which they won't, because their careers would suffer.
You are not forced to defend him, in fact Leah calls some of Stallman's statements "idiotic" herself.
But she is intellectually mature enough to see that most humans have had 5 stupid views over 30 years, and Stallman was just honest enough to write them down.
You don't need to defend the views (some of which have already been retracted), but you have to accept Stallman as flawed human being.
Stallman is currently still the only candidate who is uncompromising enough to drag the technological Overton Window in a good direction.
So I don't think the article is trash at all, it is a refreshing, honest, bold take on the current elephant in the room: Corporate influence on free software.
> You don't need to defend the views (some of which have already been retracted), but you have to accept Stallman as flawed human being.
This (the holding on to his views of 15 years ago, which he has since come to understand are wrong) is a major issue in the modern world IMHO.
That's not to defend Stallman's more recent gaffes, or even those older ones. But it raises a question - we know people can learn, grow and change. At what point does society start to accept that something said online in the past is no longer representative of the living person?
Because if it's "never", we appear to be gearing up for a future where politicians can only be people who have never set a single rhetorical foot wrong, and have been on-message since the day they came of age. And that scares me because such people are probably psychopaths or puritans.
> But it raises a question - we know people can learn, grow and change
I think we are starting to learn this. I believe this at my core because I've observed myself and others, but when I feel some type of way it's not always the first idea in my mind.
I hope I never become famous, because someone will surely trawl through my 25 year old USENET posts and probably find something to hang me with. Probably something that was benign and harmless back in the 90’s but now offensive.
I wonder what future discussion-archaeologists will find 25 years from now in our HN posts that by 2046 becomes offensive!
The don't care about the actual issues at all, otherwise they'd sign anti-Clinton and anti-Gates letters.
Which they won't, because their careers would suffer.