I think parent poster is referring to this paragraph in particular: > Throughout this period, Eben disparaged FSF staff and other free software community membe

I think parent poster is referring to this paragraph in particular: > Throughout this period, Eben disparaged FSF staff and other free software community members in various semi-public settings. In doing so he harmed the credibility of many people who have devoted significant portions of their lives to aiding the free software community. At Libreplanet earlier this year he made direct threats against an attendee - this was reported as a violation of the conference's anti-harassment policy. The reason I think this is because when I opened the article there were zero comments here, and after reading the post, I clicked through back here to leave a comment much the same as the one you're responding to. A couple remarks: I'm aware who Matthew Garrett is, and I respect him and his contributions and his overall stance, in that way where when you see someone's name attached to something, it automatically kicks off good feelings. Having said that, we need a term for something like this. (One probably exists.) Wikipedia popularized "weasel words", but this is something more specialized. Something like "proxy words", where rather than tell someone the things that happened, you give them this sort of non-specific, pre-digested proxy for people to derive their judgment from. It operates on almost the same principle as strawman arguments. It may be a good proxy, or it may not be, but for good reason you should always favor reserving your judgment for the real issue when presented with a proxy, rather than accepting the proxy itself. That aside, Bruce Perens's comments in the following two LWN threads are relevant to the overall discussion: https://lwn.net/Articles/738046/ https://lwn.net/Articles/738046/ https://lwn.net/Articles/738279/ https://lwn.net/Articles/738279/