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Stallman hasn't been silenced in any way. Free speech does not mean you can say whatever you like without consequence from private institutions and citizens, on

Stallman hasn't been silenced in any way. Free speech does not mean you can say whatever you like without consequence from private institutions and citizens, only that you may say whatever you like without consequences from the government et al. Your conflation that free speech is under attack is disappointing - That's not what is happening here.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
So let's have a new word for situation like this, describing the case when someone spins up an Internet drama around another person so that the resulting fallout ruins that person's life. There is still huge harm done, and it bypasses the court system.
- widowlark 7y ago
  we already have a word for it - mob mentality. I am not saying that it's the right way to go about things, but it's certainly not a violation of free speech
- kalleboo 7y ago
  "Cancel Culture" is the phrase I've heard used
  - edkennedy 7y ago
    Ah yes, the new term for "consequences"
    - kylecazar 7y ago
      I interpret it as the burning desire to impose those consequences, without sufficient thought as to whether it fits the crime. People want to be a part of something, even if it's an angry mob. Whether it's good or bad for society is a complex topic, but spending your time riling up a digital mob every time someone says something controversial can't be a personally healthy way to live.
    - oneshot908 7y ago
      Without "due process" Trial by Twitter(tm) is going to end like the Reign of Terror at the end of the French Revolution. Stallman had said more than enough to merit his termination IMO, but he still deserved due process before such judgment was passed.
      - joshuamorton 7y ago
        What due process does someone deserve before termination, and are you claiming Stallman didn't get it?
        TeMPOraL 7y ago
        Do you think it's fair to be fired, should someone spin a social media storm against you? Do you think this dynamic becoming increasingly frequent is healthy for society?
        joshuamorton 7y ago
        That depends. If there are valid reasons for me to be fired, (as there were in this case), yes. Irrespective of any social media storm, I'd fire an employee who defended paedophilia or excused rape, statutory or otherwise. As a business owner, if I felt that an employees continued employment was a net negative for my profitability, I'd be forced to let them go. Perhaps I could keep them for a while, but that's the case. Yes, I think powerful people facing consequences for doing and saying absolutely abysmal things is a net good for society. Going from no, to some, in egregious cases, accountability is great. RMS shouldn't get a pass for this. Especially not since he's done the same thing before. Especially since now it's concrete and deals with real people and not just abstract ideas. The threat of an abstract "you could get fired too for saying a truly terrible thing" falls flat because, well, I don't make a habit of doing that. You'd have better luck claiming that I benefit from people making statements that could get them mobbed. But that too is unconvincing: people who I benefit from sharing their views are pushed out anyway via structural dynamics, often due to the things powerful people who don't face consequences do and say. And then of course, it's not like my life, or his would be ruined. Damore is, as I understand it, gainfully employed and mostly out of the public eye. I'll ask my questions again since you didn't answer: what due process does one deserve before being fired? What of that did Stallman not receive?
    - zaroth 7y ago
      That’s a fairly glib response to a phenomenon which is magnified and made more damaging by recent changes in social media technology. It’s an old saying that a lie will travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on. Now it’s more like, 10 times around the world, and nobody even gives a damn what the truth ever was. Or to put it another way, wrong-think statements can be weaponized against the speaker more effectively than ever.
      - widowlark 7y ago
        Calling it wrong-think is so blatantly untrue. Orwell was talking about governments subjecting citizens to extreme censorship. Societies have always been able to do this without governments, that's how cultures are formed.
        TeMPOraL 7y ago
        And we grew up laughing at the stupid taboos and weirdly abusive social norms our forefathers had. Only to create similar ones ourselves.
        widowlark 7y ago
        Yes and if defending pedophiles becomes the norm then Stallman will be a hero.
        TeMPOraL 7y ago
        Did you miss the part when he explained his reasoning, and then another part where after discussing his reasoning and state of current research he realized he was wrong, changed his mind, and retracted earlier statements? I guess you might have, it was years ago. Or did you, again, mean correcting language so that allegations made were accurate, allegations that later turned out to be discredited by witness statement? EDIT: Turns out the realization and retraction statement was published 3 days ago, so in all honesty you could argue this was a reaction to mounting public pressure - but there isn't much evidence that he's lying here either.
- tantalor 7y ago
  > it bypasses the court system That's why it's called the court of public opinion.
  - ng12 7y ago
    I've never heard that phrase used in a positive light.
- jackbravo 7y ago
  Do you think that Stallman's life was ruined. I, and I guess lots of people, will still highly value his contributions. But at the same time I think his comments warranted moving on and passing the torch of leadership of the FSF. It is very different to work as a regular software engineer or individual contributor, than as the figurehead of a foundation. I wonder if he will still get invitations to be a speaker, and if he does, if he will be willing to do it, at least for a time.
  - stakhanov 7y ago
    I rather wonder the opposite. Not "what will become of Stallman, without the FSF", but "what will become of the FSF, without Stallman". Will the FSF still have the public forum it once had without Stallman using his public speaking and his standing in the free software community on their behalf? It is perfectly conceivable that Stallman will move on to bigger and better things and the FSF will sink into obscurity.
    - threwawasy1228 7y ago
      They won't see another penny from me. I assume a large amount of people will feel the same. Can't wait for Stallmans next project, I will be donating to that instead.
      - enriquto 7y ago
        notice that the FSF has not emitted an opinion yet regarding its previous president. I assume that they are still on good terms altogether.
    - argv_empty 7y ago
      Is nobody else at the FSF capable of public advocacy? It seems to me that Stallman's unique ability was formulating the FSF's ideals in the first place, but once the platform is laid out, anyone who holds those ideals ought to be at least somewhat capable of promoting them. Even before this particular incident, it seems rms was not exactly well liked as a spokesman.
- bandrami 7y ago
  Actually it's about ethics in computer science email groups.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    In a way it is. I propose that taking someone's messages from an e-mail group and publicly spinning them with intent to cause public outrage to force their employer to fire them is deeply unethical and should be discouraged regardless of and orthogonally to the content of messages in question. There is a group of people on-line who like to point to the "paradox of intolerance" as a justification for Internet lynch mobs. But this paradox works both ways. What it says is that society needs to combat people who label others as undesirables, intending to remove them from said society. But if someone fighting the intolerants ends up labeling tangential people as undesirable and unleashing pitchforks on them, that person is an intolerant too, and needs to be stopped as well.
    - bandrami 7y ago
      Gah. No. Keeping communications compartmented and secret is how creeps keep on creeping. If you write an email to an email list you don't have an expectation of privacy.
      - TeMPOraL 7y ago
        I'm not arguing for keeping communications private. I'm arguing for not trying to trigger a social media chain reaction with a general public, with an intent to harm someone, every time you felt angry reading that someone's post. There's a difference between information being available to the general public, and putting a spotlight on that information.
solidsnack9000 7y ago
So if MIT were a state school, would you say free speech is under attack?
- widowlark 7y ago
  Certainly they would have less grounds for firing him, but there would likely be a court case challenge if they chose to do so.
  - solidsnack9000 7y ago
    But do you feel free speech is genuinely under attack in the one case, and genuinely not in another? Does a person or institution have to be literally owned lock, stock and barrel by the public to act in a public capacity?
    - widowlark 7y ago
      Yes - The first amendment is as follows: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." In that vein, I would see the government limiting the ability for someone to speak out against anything as a violation of their Free Speech/First Amendment rights.
      - solidsnack9000 7y ago
        As written, this Amendment applies only to Congress, but it seems you reasonably infer that if the right of free speech is a limitation on Congress it should apply to state and local governments as well. Why wouldn’t it apply to other institutions operating in a public capacity, or operating with a public charter?
        projektfu 7y ago
        It has been "incorporated" to cover state and local laws by supreme court decisions, and that has not happened with places that are merely public spaces, and, in fact, the opposite has occurred. For example, you can be removed from a shopping mall if you refuse to leave when asked, and you were asked to leave because you were wearing a shirt that politely expressed a political opinion that either security or the management disagreed with. Unfortunately that is the constitution we currently have in the US.
cameldrv 7y ago
The concept of “free speech” does not begin and end with the 1st amendment. There is also free speech as an instrumental value.
- widowlark 7y ago
  The instrumental interpretation of free speech is more limiting than the philosophical one. Source: http://wordsideasandthings.blogspot.com/2012/03/instrumental-free-speech.html http://wordsideasandthings.blogspot.com/2012/03/instrumental...
  - cameldrv 7y ago
    Yes, and it is also broader than just the first amendment. Part of being able to maintain a free society is having cultural norms that do not require employers to fire someone just because they said something that others disagree with or find objectionable. The first amendment is really of no use if expressing opinions outside the norm causes you to be fired by social convention. In that case, only being independently wealthy affords one any freedom. In this case, even founding his own organization based on his own values did not protect him from being fired.
noobermin 7y ago
This has been said before, but free speech is beyond just government censorship and has a wider definition. Regardless of that, the idea that someone's livelihood is under threat due to their speech can be just as coercive as threatening a fine or jail for their speech. The idea that government chilling is someone kinder than private chilling is wrong.
- fooey 7y ago
  My freedom of association trumps your freedom of speech. If people don't want to associate with a person who says awful things, it's not a violation of their freedom of speech to disassociate with them.
  - rjf72 7y ago
    If somebody doesn't want to associate with somebody I think that's of course 100% fine, even if in response to nothing more than what somebody said. But if somebody chooses not to associate with somebody because of an online mob [1] - that's not so okay. Granted some line does have to be drawn here. I think it's great that social media was able to 'touch' an 'untouchable' like Weinstein that would have been impossible without the protection of a mob. But now that we've unleashed the beast, it's starting to gnaw at anything it can find. And Stallman's far from an innocent, but he's being depersoned here for some relatively tepid comments. [1] - This event was started by somebody sending a copy of a discussion on a private mailing list to a third party. This third party then took social media and shared it. It fell flat, except for a handful of 'Twitter activists'. They then started spamming it off to their followers and media outlet they could find. Some of the clickiest baitiest institutions took it up along with some completely unrelated Twitter personalities. It all spun what were relatively innocuous comments into limited context outrage bait and that then caught the outrage train spot on.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    But my freedom of speech should trump your freedom to spin up angry Internet mobs that proceed to turn my words into lies that they use to rip my life apart. Time will come there will be regulations aiming to fix that, because slander laws apparently aren't enough. And then people will come out and talk about freedom of speech, but the only answer will be, "you had it, and you misused it, and almost ripped the society apart".
mindslight 7y ago
This is horribly incorrect. Freedom of Speech is a larger concept outside of how it is (and can even possibly be) codified in law. The US Bill of Rights is phrased in terms of a restriction on the government, because that's the only line that can be straightforwardly drawn within the framework of the Constitution. An example of the concept being applied to quasi-public entities, with enough generality for the legal realm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._Robins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R...
sremani 7y ago
Lack of proportion is the problem for me. Mr.Stallman could be censured - but again the people went after his position/job for what are at the best mis-guided or flawed statements. If Mr.Stallman were to be in Epstein's Island well that is whole level of any issue. Committing Rape and Questioning the logic behind defining the "act" of rape are not the same.
- saimiam 7y ago
  A comment further up this chain explains that SFC and GNOME were tired of Stallman’s tendency to speak first and worry about bigger picture later. Basically, looks like this situation was a long time coming.
  - Data_Junkie 7y ago
    Politics. He disregards politics and politicians and they eventually had enough weaponry to remove the threat his disregarding their political aims was to them. Nothing more.
    - shadowgovt 7y ago
      It's always interesting to me when people try to downplay politics as somehow "less than" the technological and theoretical aspects of software engineering. I wonder what those people imagine software is for.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Or, it was annoying but tolerable, until an opportunity presented itself to score virtue points while having past problematic behavior to use for plausible deniability.
    - chungus_khan 7y ago
      It really wasn't tolerable though. As much as I deeply respect Dr Stallman's work, he has a long history of reputationally troubling statements: https://stallman.org/cgi-bin/showpage.cgi?path=/archives/2003-may-aug.html&term=%22another%20caveman%22&type=norm&case=0 https://stallman.org/cgi-bin/showpage.cgi?path=/archives/200... https://www.stallman.org/archives/2006-may-aug.html#05%20June%202006%20%28Dutch%20paedophiles%20form%20political%20party%29 https://www.stallman.org/archives/2006-may-aug.html#05%20Jun...
contravariant 7y ago
Whatever you say might not even be free from consequences from the government. Freedom of speech is a bit of a nebulous concept in that sense. I don't think the distinction between government and private institutions is that meaningful though. When a constitution is preventing the government from infringing upon a right it's usually a good idea if that right is protected against other people as well. In fact freedom of speech is covered by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which clearly wasn't intended to only protect people against their own governments.
- ghettoimp 7y ago
  Eh. You have a right to say what you want, but your employer has a right to not want to be associated with it...
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    What about the right to air a private conversation in front of general public for express purpose of forcing one's employer to disassociate from a person? Consider this: were you to come to GP's office and show GP's boss a printout of them saying controversial things on HN, demanding GP's termination, GP would most likely keep their job and there would be a good chance you'd get kicked out by security. In order to get a company to fire someone, there needs to be a public mess, and those rarely happen organically. In this case, and other similar firings for wrongspeak that I can think of, a public storm was created intentionally. Can't see it as anything else than a weaker, non-lethal form of swatting.
    - ghettoimp 7y ago
      These are interesting questions to consider. I'm not sure how "private conversation" should be defined. If someone wrote something on HN, is it really private? In the case of RMS, I don't know enough about this mailing list to know whether it was private or not. I'm also not sure whether "private conversation" matters a lot. For instance, a governor of Puerto Rico was apparently sending homophobic and misogynistic messages around in a private messages. Is it less bad for being in a private conversation? To your hypothetical: If I was so upset with someone that I felt the need to go to their employer and complain about them, that seems like my right to free speech and expression. If, after security kicked me out, I took the matter to the local newspaper and it caused an uproar, that also seems like my right.

TeMPOraL 7y ago

So let's have a new word for situation like this, describing the case when someone spins up an Internet drama around another person so that the resulting fallout ruins that person's life. There is still huge harm done, and it bypasses the court system.

widowlark 7y ago
we already have a word for it - mob mentality. I am not saying that it's the right way to go about things, but it's certainly not a violation of free speech
kalleboo 7y ago
"Cancel Culture" is the phrase I've heard used
- edkennedy 7y ago
  Ah yes, the new term for "consequences"
  - kylecazar 7y ago
    I interpret it as the burning desire to impose those consequences, without sufficient thought as to whether it fits the crime. People want to be a part of something, even if it's an angry mob. Whether it's good or bad for society is a complex topic, but spending your time riling up a digital mob every time someone says something controversial can't be a personally healthy way to live.
  - oneshot908 7y ago
    Without "due process" Trial by Twitter(tm) is going to end like the Reign of Terror at the end of the French Revolution. Stallman had said more than enough to merit his termination IMO, but he still deserved due process before such judgment was passed.
    - joshuamorton 7y ago
      What due process does someone deserve before termination, and are you claiming Stallman didn't get it?
      - TeMPOraL 7y ago
        Do you think it's fair to be fired, should someone spin a social media storm against you? Do you think this dynamic becoming increasingly frequent is healthy for society?
        joshuamorton 7y ago
        That depends. If there are valid reasons for me to be fired, (as there were in this case), yes. Irrespective of any social media storm, I'd fire an employee who defended paedophilia or excused rape, statutory or otherwise. As a business owner, if I felt that an employees continued employment was a net negative for my profitability, I'd be forced to let them go. Perhaps I could keep them for a while, but that's the case. Yes, I think powerful people facing consequences for doing and saying absolutely abysmal things is a net good for society. Going from no, to some, in egregious cases, accountability is great. RMS shouldn't get a pass for this. Especially not since he's done the same thing before. Especially since now it's concrete and deals with real people and not just abstract ideas. The threat of an abstract "you could get fired too for saying a truly terrible thing" falls flat because, well, I don't make a habit of doing that. You'd have better luck claiming that I benefit from people making statements that could get them mobbed. But that too is unconvincing: people who I benefit from sharing their views are pushed out anyway via structural dynamics, often due to the things powerful people who don't face consequences do and say. And then of course, it's not like my life, or his would be ruined. Damore is, as I understand it, gainfully employed and mostly out of the public eye. I'll ask my questions again since you didn't answer: what due process does one deserve before being fired? What of that did Stallman not receive?
  - zaroth 7y ago
    That’s a fairly glib response to a phenomenon which is magnified and made more damaging by recent changes in social media technology. It’s an old saying that a lie will travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on. Now it’s more like, 10 times around the world, and nobody even gives a damn what the truth ever was. Or to put it another way, wrong-think statements can be weaponized against the speaker more effectively than ever.
    - widowlark 7y ago
      Calling it wrong-think is so blatantly untrue. Orwell was talking about governments subjecting citizens to extreme censorship. Societies have always been able to do this without governments, that's how cultures are formed.
      - TeMPOraL 7y ago
        And we grew up laughing at the stupid taboos and weirdly abusive social norms our forefathers had. Only to create similar ones ourselves.
        widowlark 7y ago
        Yes and if defending pedophiles becomes the norm then Stallman will be a hero.
        TeMPOraL 7y ago
        Did you miss the part when he explained his reasoning, and then another part where after discussing his reasoning and state of current research he realized he was wrong, changed his mind, and retracted earlier statements? I guess you might have, it was years ago. Or did you, again, mean correcting language so that allegations made were accurate, allegations that later turned out to be discredited by witness statement? EDIT: Turns out the realization and retraction statement was published 3 days ago, so in all honesty you could argue this was a reaction to mounting public pressure - but there isn't much evidence that he's lying here either.
tantalor 7y ago
> it bypasses the court system That's why it's called the court of public opinion.
- ng12 7y ago
  I've never heard that phrase used in a positive light.
jackbravo 7y ago
Do you think that Stallman's life was ruined. I, and I guess lots of people, will still highly value his contributions. But at the same time I think his comments warranted moving on and passing the torch of leadership of the FSF. It is very different to work as a regular software engineer or individual contributor, than as the figurehead of a foundation. I wonder if he will still get invitations to be a speaker, and if he does, if he will be willing to do it, at least for a time.
- stakhanov 7y ago
  I rather wonder the opposite. Not "what will become of Stallman, without the FSF", but "what will become of the FSF, without Stallman". Will the FSF still have the public forum it once had without Stallman using his public speaking and his standing in the free software community on their behalf? It is perfectly conceivable that Stallman will move on to bigger and better things and the FSF will sink into obscurity.
  - threwawasy1228 7y ago
    They won't see another penny from me. I assume a large amount of people will feel the same. Can't wait for Stallmans next project, I will be donating to that instead.
    - enriquto 7y ago
      notice that the FSF has not emitted an opinion yet regarding its previous president. I assume that they are still on good terms altogether.
  - argv_empty 7y ago
    Is nobody else at the FSF capable of public advocacy? It seems to me that Stallman's unique ability was formulating the FSF's ideals in the first place, but once the platform is laid out, anyone who holds those ideals ought to be at least somewhat capable of promoting them. Even before this particular incident, it seems rms was not exactly well liked as a spokesman.
bandrami 7y ago
Actually it's about ethics in computer science email groups.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  In a way it is. I propose that taking someone's messages from an e-mail group and publicly spinning them with intent to cause public outrage to force their employer to fire them is deeply unethical and should be discouraged regardless of and orthogonally to the content of messages in question. There is a group of people on-line who like to point to the "paradox of intolerance" as a justification for Internet lynch mobs. But this paradox works both ways. What it says is that society needs to combat people who label others as undesirables, intending to remove them from said society. But if someone fighting the intolerants ends up labeling tangential people as undesirable and unleashing pitchforks on them, that person is an intolerant too, and needs to be stopped as well.
  - bandrami 7y ago
    Gah. No. Keeping communications compartmented and secret is how creeps keep on creeping. If you write an email to an email list you don't have an expectation of privacy.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      I'm not arguing for keeping communications private. I'm arguing for not trying to trigger a social media chain reaction with a general public, with an intent to harm someone, every time you felt angry reading that someone's post. There's a difference between information being available to the general public, and putting a spotlight on that information.

solidsnack9000 7y ago

So if MIT were a state school, would you say free speech is under attack?

widowlark 7y ago
Certainly they would have less grounds for firing him, but there would likely be a court case challenge if they chose to do so.
- solidsnack9000 7y ago
  But do you feel free speech is genuinely under attack in the one case, and genuinely not in another? Does a person or institution have to be literally owned lock, stock and barrel by the public to act in a public capacity?
  - widowlark 7y ago
    Yes - The first amendment is as follows: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." In that vein, I would see the government limiting the ability for someone to speak out against anything as a violation of their Free Speech/First Amendment rights.
    - solidsnack9000 7y ago
      As written, this Amendment applies only to Congress, but it seems you reasonably infer that if the right of free speech is a limitation on Congress it should apply to state and local governments as well. Why wouldn’t it apply to other institutions operating in a public capacity, or operating with a public charter?
      - projektfu 7y ago
        It has been "incorporated" to cover state and local laws by supreme court decisions, and that has not happened with places that are merely public spaces, and, in fact, the opposite has occurred. For example, you can be removed from a shopping mall if you refuse to leave when asked, and you were asked to leave because you were wearing a shirt that politely expressed a political opinion that either security or the management disagreed with. Unfortunately that is the constitution we currently have in the US.

cameldrv 7y ago

The concept of “free speech” does not begin and end with the 1st amendment. There is also free speech as an instrumental value.

widowlark 7y ago
The instrumental interpretation of free speech is more limiting than the philosophical one. Source: http://wordsideasandthings.blogspot.com/2012/03/instrumental-free-speech.html http://wordsideasandthings.blogspot.com/2012/03/instrumental...
- cameldrv 7y ago
  Yes, and it is also broader than just the first amendment. Part of being able to maintain a free society is having cultural norms that do not require employers to fire someone just because they said something that others disagree with or find objectionable. The first amendment is really of no use if expressing opinions outside the norm causes you to be fired by social convention. In that case, only being independently wealthy affords one any freedom. In this case, even founding his own organization based on his own values did not protect him from being fired.

noobermin 7y ago

This has been said before, but free speech is beyond just government censorship and has a wider definition. Regardless of that, the idea that someone's livelihood is under threat due to their speech can be just as coercive as threatening a fine or jail for their speech. The idea that government chilling is someone kinder than private chilling is wrong.

fooey 7y ago
My freedom of association trumps your freedom of speech. If people don't want to associate with a person who says awful things, it's not a violation of their freedom of speech to disassociate with them.
- rjf72 7y ago
  If somebody doesn't want to associate with somebody I think that's of course 100% fine, even if in response to nothing more than what somebody said. But if somebody chooses not to associate with somebody because of an online mob [1] - that's not so okay. Granted some line does have to be drawn here. I think it's great that social media was able to 'touch' an 'untouchable' like Weinstein that would have been impossible without the protection of a mob. But now that we've unleashed the beast, it's starting to gnaw at anything it can find. And Stallman's far from an innocent, but he's being depersoned here for some relatively tepid comments. [1] - This event was started by somebody sending a copy of a discussion on a private mailing list to a third party. This third party then took social media and shared it. It fell flat, except for a handful of 'Twitter activists'. They then started spamming it off to their followers and media outlet they could find. Some of the clickiest baitiest institutions took it up along with some completely unrelated Twitter personalities. It all spun what were relatively innocuous comments into limited context outrage bait and that then caught the outrage train spot on.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  But my freedom of speech should trump your freedom to spin up angry Internet mobs that proceed to turn my words into lies that they use to rip my life apart. Time will come there will be regulations aiming to fix that, because slander laws apparently aren't enough. And then people will come out and talk about freedom of speech, but the only answer will be, "you had it, and you misused it, and almost ripped the society apart".

mindslight 7y ago

This is horribly incorrect. Freedom of Speech is a larger concept outside of how it is (and can even possibly be) codified in law. The US Bill of Rights is phrased in terms of a restriction on the government, because that's the only line that can be straightforwardly drawn within the framework of the Constitution. An example of the concept being applied to quasi-public entities, with enough generality for the legal realm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._Robins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R...

sremani 7y ago

Lack of proportion is the problem for me. Mr.Stallman could be censured - but again the people went after his position/job for what are at the best mis-guided or flawed statements. If Mr.Stallman were to be in Epstein's Island well that is whole level of any issue. Committing Rape and Questioning the logic behind defining the "act" of rape are not the same.

saimiam 7y ago
A comment further up this chain explains that SFC and GNOME were tired of Stallman’s tendency to speak first and worry about bigger picture later. Basically, looks like this situation was a long time coming.
- Data_Junkie 7y ago
  Politics. He disregards politics and politicians and they eventually had enough weaponry to remove the threat his disregarding their political aims was to them. Nothing more.
  - shadowgovt 7y ago
    It's always interesting to me when people try to downplay politics as somehow "less than" the technological and theoretical aspects of software engineering. I wonder what those people imagine software is for.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Or, it was annoying but tolerable, until an opportunity presented itself to score virtue points while having past problematic behavior to use for plausible deniability.
  - chungus_khan 7y ago
    It really wasn't tolerable though. As much as I deeply respect Dr Stallman's work, he has a long history of reputationally troubling statements: https://stallman.org/cgi-bin/showpage.cgi?path=/archives/2003-may-aug.html&term=%22another%20caveman%22&type=norm&case=0 https://stallman.org/cgi-bin/showpage.cgi?path=/archives/200... https://www.stallman.org/archives/2006-may-aug.html#05%20June%202006%20%28Dutch%20paedophiles%20form%20political%20party%29 https://www.stallman.org/archives/2006-may-aug.html#05%20Jun...

contravariant 7y ago

Whatever you say might not even be free from consequences from the government. Freedom of speech is a bit of a nebulous concept in that sense. I don't think the distinction between government and private institutions is that meaningful though. When a constitution is preventing the government from infringing upon a right it's usually a good idea if that right is protected against other people as well. In fact freedom of speech is covered by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which clearly wasn't intended to only protect people against their own governments.

ghettoimp 7y ago
Eh. You have a right to say what you want, but your employer has a right to not want to be associated with it...
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  What about the right to air a private conversation in front of general public for express purpose of forcing one's employer to disassociate from a person? Consider this: were you to come to GP's office and show GP's boss a printout of them saying controversial things on HN, demanding GP's termination, GP would most likely keep their job and there would be a good chance you'd get kicked out by security. In order to get a company to fire someone, there needs to be a public mess, and those rarely happen organically. In this case, and other similar firings for wrongspeak that I can think of, a public storm was created intentionally. Can't see it as anything else than a weaker, non-lethal form of swatting.
  - ghettoimp 7y ago
    These are interesting questions to consider. I'm not sure how "private conversation" should be defined. If someone wrote something on HN, is it really private? In the case of RMS, I don't know enough about this mailing list to know whether it was private or not. I'm also not sure whether "private conversation" matters a lot. For instance, a governor of Puerto Rico was apparently sending homophobic and misogynistic messages around in a private messages. Is it less bad for being in a private conversation? To your hypothetical: If I was so upset with someone that I felt the need to go to their employer and complain about them, that seems like my right to free speech and expression. If, after security kicked me out, I took the matter to the local newspaper and it caused an uproar, that also seems like my right.