21 ms·

In the years to come, I believe free software will be recognised as one of the paradigmatic changes in how science itself is done. Now chemists and biologists h

by sn41 7y ago

In the years to come, I believe free software will be recognised as one of the paradigmatic changes in how science itself is done. Now chemists and biologists have started talking about making data openly available and so forth. It's a shame that RMS has to spout forth on every issue, and in the current climate of outrage, science may have lost an important transformational voice. I think as a society, we need to calm down a bit. We should not blacklist people merely based on opinions. We are one step away from thoughtcrime, and need to step back.

Frondo 7y ago
The complaints about stallman aren't a matter of thoughtcrime, they're a matter of entirely inappropriate behavior, not just once but repeatedly, over the course of decades. This was the one that disturbed me the most: "Going to an RMS talk in the early 90s and meeting with him in person was among the worst of my experienced - I was fifteen, still obviously underage, and skipping gym class to hear him speak at a professional conference (that I'd snuck into). He actually pointed to me in the back and proclaimed, into the mic, "A GIRL!" causing the audience to turn and look. Mortifying. Then he proceeded to gesture toward me every time he referred to "EMACS Virgins." (I cannot believe that he is still doing the same talk 10+ years later.) I was young and terrified of calling out someone that I'd previously idolized." Did he commit a crime? No. Should we overlook it, and should he remain in a leadership position at a prestigious organization? I can't imagine so; what kind of message does that send? Anecdote from: https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Experiences https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Experiences
- quickthrower2 7y ago
  Wow. Terrible. Hope she wasn't put off computer science / IT by that.
- zapzupnz 7y ago
  > The complaints about stallman aren't a matter of thoughtcrime, they're a matter of entirely inappropriate behavior, not just once but repeatedly, over the course of decades Indeed. A lot of people leaping to his defence have only a very surface-level understanding of his past record and think the accusations are something new or recent. Nobody expects the people who change the world to be perfect, but it really doesn't do to defend people based purely on their reputation. It's unjust to let influential people off the hook just because they're influential. Please note: I'm not pronouncing any opinion on whether his condemnation and dismissal are justified.
  - lliamander 7y ago
    I'm sure not all are aware of his history of inappropriate behavior, but some of us are. I think those of us who are bothered by his ousting are bothered for two reasons: 1. The triggering event was someone misquoting him and the media running with that misquote 2. The timing and manner in which MIT handled the situations suggests that they were hypocritically trying to deflect from their own complicity in the Epstein scandal, rather than addressing Stallman's behavior in good faith. 3. While Stallman certainly benefited from some protection for his behavior, the organizations which supported him also greatly benefited from him. The FSF saying that Stallman does not speak for them is particularly rich, considering they exist to promote his ideas. I'm not saying I care for his behavior, or that all of it should get a pass. There's also a lot that I just don't agree with him about. However: 1. I don't like seeing the media twist people's words 2. I don't like seeing organizations throw people under the bus during moral panics Also, I fear that it's becoming harder to be a weird nerd in tech[1]. [1]https://medium.com/@maradydd/when-nerds-collide-31895b01e68c https://medium.com/@maradydd/when-nerds-collide-31895b01e68c
    - zapzupnz 7y ago
      See, that's sounds like a fair rebuttal to the situation to me, though I'm not sure that point 3 really stands — who benefits from whom makes no difference to the matter in question, exaggerated though it is. Point 2 is quite strong, though I wonder if they might also have been looking for an excuse to good rid of him for some time? I'm not suggesting that's true at all, that's just musing based on some recent politics at the place I work.
      - lliamander 7y ago
        Regarding point 3 - I think that even if you have to cut ties with someone because of their transgressions, if they did a lot of good then it is still appropriate to have some gratitude for that good. From what I recall of the FSF statement about RMS, I did not see any of that there.
    - krapp 7y ago
      >Also, I fear that it's becoming harder to be a weird nerd in tech[1]. The thing is, tech can embrace "weirdness" without also embracing sexual harassment, hostility and toxicity. Not every behavior that deviates from the "politically correct" norm needs to be worn as a badge of honor and celebrated as cultural quirkiness by tech people.
- michannne 7y ago
  If I had a de-platformed individual every time they made a comment someone took offense to, I'd end up with an animal farm. Definitely, his comments should not be overlooked, but intellectually benching someone because of what they've said is not how you handle these types of situations. Furthermore, his leadership qualities depend only on his ability to lead a group towards a goal, which he was doing swell at.
  - schwartzworld 7y ago
    Or maybe people would just be more cautious about saying horrible things on the record.
    - michannne 7y ago
      "Horrible" is completely subjective.
      - egdod 7y ago
        "Horrible" is sometimes subjective. There are things that pretty much every reasonable person would agree are horrible.
        ben509 7y ago
        > pretty much every reasonable person Reasonable is subjective.
        egdod 7y ago
        No, it isn’t. The “reasonable person” standard in lots of laws exists exactly because we can agree on it as an objective standard.
        ben509 7y ago
        We don't agree what it actually is, though. In practice, the "reasonable person" standard is achieved by asking a jury. In a jury, the members apply their life experiences to the case they're deciding and then persuade each other to reach a unanimous conclusion. That's an entirely subjective process, and if you repeat it with another jury you can get the polar opposite answer.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Stratoscope 7y ago
  Same thing ten years ago. I had lunch with a young lady who was maintainer of a popular GNU project, and much of the conversation revolved around the creepy advances RMS had made toward her. She was older than the 15 year old you quoted, and I think she knew how to take care of herself. But obviously his behavior had caused her quite a bit of discomfort.
- 4bpp 7y ago
  It's notable that all of these anecdotes are from back in the '90s and before; since I assume Stallman's accusers dug around very hard for material and this is the best they could find, it stands to reason that he probably has long since improved in that regard. Moreover, the same cluster of people among others has seriously been arguing (https://medium.com/@selamie/remove-richard-stallman-appendix-a-a7e41e784f88 https://medium.com/@selamie/remove-richard-stallman-appendix...) that a mattress in the office of someone whose every public profile involves a mention of how he slept in the office for years to develop GNU is unambiguous sexual innuendo (quote: "He kept the door to his office open, to proudly showcase that mattress and all the implications that went with it."). I am not sure how trustworthy their accounts can be considered to begin with.
  - jonathankoren 7y ago
    The contemporary misinterpretation of the mattress aside, RMS already had already earned his reputation in the 90s, as had at least one other OSS luminary of the time. Case in point: RMS's incredibly uncomfortable St iGNUcius routine was already legendary.[0] Does he intend for it to be awkward at best, and offensive at worst? I doubt it. Has people told him that it is not received as he intends? Definitely. Does he change his behavior to better reflect his purported views of inclusiveness? Nope. Ultimately, it doesn't matter what you intend your actions to be interpreted, it only matters how they actually are interpreted. That failure to adapt to clear feedback, is problem. [0] From 2009 https://mjg59.livejournal.com/113408.html https://mjg59.livejournal.com/113408.html
    - 4bpp 7y ago
      I do not think that a tacky joke about "emacs virgins" as part of a comedy routine parodying real religious movements past and present deserves being treated as a punishable offense at all. Not only do I think that this should not be objectionable and those who try to make it out to be are contributing to our society being a worse place than it has to be, calls for punishment on the basis of it also strike me as plainly hypocritical in an age where beloved and respected media and tech figures can use the sexual history of members of their political outgroup as an insult ("incel", "cuck") and are applauded for it. Long before the current iteration of our dominant ideology, people talked about the slut-versus-stud distinction[1] as one of the ways in which sexism manifests itself in our society. It seems to me that both the circumstance that we would find Stallman joking about female sexual inexperience intrinsically scandalous, and the circumstance that we find $twitterpersonality taking actual malicious shots at male sexual inexperience okay, would serve to reinforce this double standard, not combat it. Consider the possibility that at the very least, the people who are now actually interpreting Stallman's remark as offensive may at least not have been considered good feminists back in 2009, when mjg59's post and my citation were written. Should we fault Stallman for acting ineptly but ultimately in line with what was probably the "best" advice at the time? [1] https://www.gender-focus.com/2009/11/22/slut-vs-stud/ https://www.gender-focus.com/2009/11/22/slut-vs-stud/
- cat_plus_plus 7y ago
  Are you actually kidding me? As you are nearing adulthood as a teenager, you are sometimes able to sneak into adult spaces and experience a bit of adult off-color talk. Not everything is guarded by a fence, but maybe more tech events should be if the alternative is catering to child sensitivities. In any case, these comments would not even be PG-13 in a Disney movie. Also, if the idea is to protect under-18s from any minor adult banter, how come 6th grade has an LGBTQ club? "was among the worst of my experienced" alone suggests that the author had an incredibly sheltered and privileged life. Expecting every minor offense to be handled by ruining offender's life is not a healthy attitude in life, hope she grew out of that eventually?
  - inimino 7y ago
    > incredibly sheltered. > privileged I'm coming to realize more and more—those aren't the same thing.
    - dspillett 7y ago
      The latter often results in the former, and sometimes the former illicits expectations of the latter in the sheltered, so there is significant coincidence of the two, but no they are certainly not the same nor do they necessarily imply each other.
  - jakelazaroff 7y ago
    > Also, if the idea is to protect under-18s from any minor adult banter, how come 6th grade has an LGBTQ club? What do these have to do with each other? Nothing about an LGBTQ club has to be "adult".
  - akdas 7y ago
    Maybe I'm reading the GP's anecdote incorrectly, but the behavior in question seemed like targeted harassment, not just "a bit of adult off-color talk".
    - cat_plus_plus 7y ago
      People are throwing these words around so much they lost all the real meaning. Harassment is someone seriously interfering in your life. Bad jokes during a public talk where you are obviously safe from unwanted advances does not qualify. Neither is Joe Biden anything. Al Franken maybe deserved a slap on the face or some other minor consequences around the time things happened (if they did as alleged) but not an unpersoning. The most easily offended person in the society does not get to be a unilateral tyrant over all functional adults with normal offense thresholds.
- lostjohnny 7y ago
  > The complaints about stallman aren't a matter of thoughtcrime, they're a matter of entirely inappropriate behavior Who are you exactly to think you can decide what is - without doubt - "entirely inappropriate behaviour"? are you in charge of the thought police?
  - SolaceQuantum 7y ago
    Sorry, I’m not understanding. Is inappropriate actions a thoughtcrime? Like. I thought thoughtcrime and actions are separate- you can think about how women are just pieces of meat all you like, once you start treating them as pieces of meat then you’ve moved from thinking (thoughtcrime) to action (serial killer)? (Edit; to be clear, since this was a point of confusion, I do not believe anyone I am responding to thinks women are meat! This is a rhetorical tactic to use as an example.)
    - lostjohnny 7y ago
      You're not in charge of deciding what's inappropriate or not. Talking about dicks is inappropriate, but if you are an urologist speaking with other urolgy students, it makes perfect sense. Stallman was writing to other students about the correct representation of the Minsky situation, because they were using Minsky's name in an inappropriate way to protest against MIT-Epstein case. (Unless you think that accusing a dead person without proof is alright) His entire life has been devoted to finding the precise combinations of words to express what he wanted to say, in the most exact possible manner. Can you blame him for doing what he did best, among his peers? I blame the weapon builder who felt triggered and accused him of something he did not do. > you can think about how women are just pieces of meat all you like Pathetic... Nobody ever said that. You're embarrassing yourself.
      - SolaceQuantum 7y ago
        Sorry, I should’ve clarified that this is a rhetorical you! My apologies for not being clear; I was under the impression that the structure of my post would’ve implied as such. Sorry for the offense I’ve caused. As for the rest of it- well, the post questioning thoughtcrime wasn’t about the individual email defense of a friend at all, but about the decades of complaints! So, again, totally out of context there. Can you re-respond with relevant conjecture?
grawprog 7y ago
One of the things that really soured me to working as a biologist was being told the data we collected would not be allowed to be made freely available, as we originally proposed and was accepted in our grant proposal. Instead it would be locked away in a government database, available for a fee despite the data being collected using tax dollars, after we'd been working for over a year and a half on the project and had gone throught two funding cycles, on threat of our grant money being withdrawn. It was after we found an endangered species in an active mine site. It sucked. We'd built an open database easily accessible online, we used open street maps to display the data and had built a bunch of custom layers, we were also working with another group that wanted to add the data to their open database. In the end though none of that happened and the work that was put into making it was wasted and everything was given to the government and locked away.
- harshreality 7y ago
  What the hell? What mine and what endangered species? Why the hell is my government hiding this data?
  - grawprog 7y ago
    A species of big-eared bats on the west coast known to hibernate in only a few locations. It's an open pit gravel quarry, not sure if it's your government, I'm in Canada. There are still people actively working on the project, or at least doing work that came from it, as far as I know, so I'd rather not be too detailed about it.
- gHosts 7y ago
  This is why we need initiatives like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_data
- prepend 7y ago
  That sounds really frustrating. Fortunately many countries now have open data legislation. For example, in the US, since 2013 by executive order (M-13-13) and this year (Evidencemaking in Policy/Open Data Act), federally funded projects must eventually release their data to the public or include a plan explaining why national security or privacy reasons prevent it. I think it’s getting better.
eesmith 7y ago
Free software isn't about making data openly available. Stallman, at https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html , argues that free software developers should "charge as much as they wish or can, ... if you are redistributing copies of free software, you might as well charge a substantial fee and make some money." If you have useful data, the free software principles say that you might as well charge a lot of money for it, which is not what most chemists and biologists think of in discussion of data openness. FWIW, the discussion in science started independently of free software. Here's an example from structural biology. Previous to the 1980s, it was common for crystallographers to withhold structure data from a publication, and perhaps only publish an image showing the C-alpha backbone. This was because they wanted to be able to publish additional papers from the same data set, without competition. By 1987[1], there was a push to require coordinate submission into the PDB as requirement for publication. Most journals adopted this new policy in 1989, and funding agencies started to do so as well[2]. While the GNU project started earlier (1983), there is no connection between free software and the open data availability requirements for publication and funding in structural biology. [1] https://search.proquest.com/openview/0a93cbb72da63b2899793bf27f9fd920/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=1256 https://search.proquest.com/openview/0a93cbb72da63b2899793bf... [2] https://journals.iucr.org/a/issues/2008/01/00/sc5004/index.html https://journals.iucr.org/a/issues/2008/01/00/sc5004/index.h... Open Source also isn't about making data openly available. Both are only applicable to those who acquire software. It just happens to be that most free and open source developers also make their software available at no cost.
- inimino 7y ago
  > Free software isn't about making data openly available. You must be allowed to redistribute the software, and you must be allowed to get, modify, and redistribute the code. Binaries and code are data. Maybe what you mean is that the biologists' and x-ray crystallographers' journals developed their push for data access independently of the free software movement, but it's a stretch to say that access to the data that a programmer creates and access to the data that a biologist creates have nothing in common.
  - eesmith 7y ago
djrobstep 7y ago
Perhaps the real problem is that we build personality cults around ideas.
- lostjohnny 7y ago
  Or that we fight the person to destroy or weaken the idea.
burtonator 7y ago
RMS was and always will be a fraud.
tjpnz 7y ago
>It's a shame that RMS has to spout forth on every issue, and in the current climate of outrage, science may have lost an important transformational voice. The four freedoms are truly revolutionary and have grown on me over the years. If he had been a bit more focussed and perhaps even a little pragmatic it wouldn't be hard to view him as a Steve Jobs or Bill Gates like figure. At the very least we would be having conversations about software in terms of non-free and free versus proprietary and open source.
- tzs 7y ago
  > The four freedoms are truly revolutionary and have grown on me over the years. If he had been a bit more focussed and perhaps even a little pragmatic it wouldn't be hard to view him as a Steve Jobs or Bill Gates like figure. If he had been a lot more pragmatic, he probably could have put the whole free software thing on hold for 20 years, and been one of the early microcomputer billionaires either alongside Jobs and Gates, or even instead of one (or both!) of them. Then go back to free software--except now it would be backed by the several tens of billions of dollars of the Stallman Foundation, which would generate enough annual investment income forever to easily afford to award tens of thousands of $100k grants for free software development each year. A decade of that, and there would be GPL replacements for pretty much everything.
  - bartread 7y ago
    No. In the intervening years somebody else would have done substantially what RMS did: it's not like he's the only hacker of his era who believes software should be free. There's no guarantee he would have been successful in business and, even if he was, he would have undermined his moral authority on free software. People don't in general have serious doubts about RMS's motivations even if they don't agree with him - he's a true believer - but they can be much more cynical about Google or Facebook and their open source efforts.
    - pessimizer 7y ago
      > In the intervening years somebody else would have done substantially what RMS did There's no reason to believe this.
pg_is_a_butt 7y ago
stallman.org
marijn 7y ago
He wasn't blacklisted for committing thought crime. The dumb Epstein email triggered a reevaluation of his consistent creepy and inappropriate behavior against current community standards, which resulted in a large part of the community deciding they didn't want anything to do with him anymore. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from social consequences.
- Smithalicious 7y ago
  Amazing how whenever someone does something controversial and gets forced out soon afterwards, it's never the thing they said, but "consistent creepy and inappropriate behavior" based on 10 year old anecdotes that suddenly appear out of nowhere... I'd think that if someone was "consistently" creepy and inappropriate, there would be a pretty good public record for that, but what do I know? EDIT: Let me give a bit more of a nuanced position, because reading my post back, it looks like I'm saying that Stallman never did anything inappropriate before this. Of course, I recognize that Stallman is fucking weird. I'm not saying that parrot-fucking, foot-fungus-eating St. IGNUcius never did anything inappropriate before; we'd be here for a long time if we were to make a list of all the times Stallman failed to read the mood. However, I strongly believe that Stallman is not a creep. He holds some odd views and is pretty autistic, and so he occasionally makes inappropriate advances. Add to that that Stallman has been a very prolific person for decades and you won't relaly have trouble coming up with a list of anecdotes that, when framed a certain way, make him look bad. I've read quite a few of these anecdotes by now. Some of them look fairly innocent to me. Some of them are clear social blunders. None of them look seriously harmful or in bad faith to me. Even taking all of them together, believing that all of them are remembered 100% correctly and played out as portrayed without any additional context, I don't think the appropirate reaction is to remove Stallman from his position(s). What ticks me off so much about all this is the way the media deals with it. Stallman is portrayed as some kind of sexist, some kind of patriarch keeping women out of tech. It's ridiculous; Stallman is quite possibly the most inclusionary person I can think of. Stallman has had an immense, direct contribution to making tech more open for everyone. I can understand the criticism of Stallman. I don't even think he necessarily makes for a good figurehead for Free Software; he has poor social skills, unhelpfully rigid and strong positions, and I feel like he often conflates free software issues with other social issues he cares about. He makes for a better philosopher than a political leader. In this case, he's being thrown under the bus to score social points. People in tech are very itchy to do whatever they can to seem more inclusive, and condemning Epstein and his ilk is a noble goal (that also makes you look good). Stallman's statements that sparked this controversy were naive and he failed to read the mood, but they were not unacceptable things to believe or say. He did not deserve to have his words twisted, get kicked out of his own organisation based on the strawman, and then have people say that he was always bad, anyways.
cbanek 7y ago
> I believe free software will be recognised as one of the paradigmatic changes in how science itself is done. I think we're already there. I'm an astronomer, and we (and many others) are already building platforms with software like Jupyter, dask, holoviews, etc. While RMS may have started with a great idea, I'm not sure he's super influential in actually making progress and writing software. If anything, the idea that companies will sponsor open source software has (and I'm not sure many saw that one coming). For example, nVidia supporting dask, or Bloomberg supporting Jupyter. It's the idea that was important, and less so the person IMHO. RMS had a lot of ideas, some good, and some bad. But like evolution, people take the good and run with them, and leave the bad. And we rarely remember who started the whole thing, since having the idea is generally such a small part of actually making it a reality. "We are told to remember the idea, not the man, because a man can fail. He can be caught, he can be killed and forgotten, but 400 years later, an idea can still change the world." - V for Vendetta
- varjag 7y ago
  > While RMS may have started with a great idea, I'm not sure he's super influential in actually making progress and writing software. I had to re-read this to be sure it's not sarcasm. RMS has some of the largest footprints in software among the living people. How can one hold an opinion about his contribution and not be aware of that?
  - pessimizer 7y ago
    Maybe its a sign of your greatness when people think your contribution to the world somehow arose spontaneously, like a hurricane.
    - krapp 7y ago
      That's not a sign of greatness, so much as a sign of a cult of personality. If people believe that Free Software could never have existed without Richard Stallman, and cannot continue without him, that calls into question whether it has any lasting societal or cultural value of its own. Other software licensing paradigms don't have this problem, real or percieved. No one believes that open source will die if ESR gets hit by a bus, after all.
zouhair 7y ago
I don't think Free Software would have arrived where they are now if it wasn't for the RMS and his specific personality. Him, being how he is, is what made on of the big part of the success of Free Software.
rajacombinator 7y ago
Thoughtcrime came and went years ago. We are now entering the precrime era.

by sn41 7y ago

Frondo 7y ago

The complaints about stallman aren't a matter of thoughtcrime, they're a matter of entirely inappropriate behavior, not just once but repeatedly, over the course of decades. This was the one that disturbed me the most: "Going to an RMS talk in the early 90s and meeting with him in person was among the worst of my experienced - I was fifteen, still obviously underage, and skipping gym class to hear him speak at a professional conference (that I'd snuck into). He actually pointed to me in the back and proclaimed, into the mic, "A GIRL!" causing the audience to turn and look. Mortifying. Then he proceeded to gesture toward me every time he referred to "EMACS Virgins." (I cannot believe that he is still doing the same talk 10+ years later.) I was young and terrified of calling out someone that I'd previously idolized." Did he commit a crime? No. Should we overlook it, and should he remain in a leadership position at a prestigious organization? I can't imagine so; what kind of message does that send? Anecdote from: https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Experiences https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Experiences

quickthrower2 7y ago
Wow. Terrible. Hope she wasn't put off computer science / IT by that.
zapzupnz 7y ago
> The complaints about stallman aren't a matter of thoughtcrime, they're a matter of entirely inappropriate behavior, not just once but repeatedly, over the course of decades Indeed. A lot of people leaping to his defence have only a very surface-level understanding of his past record and think the accusations are something new or recent. Nobody expects the people who change the world to be perfect, but it really doesn't do to defend people based purely on their reputation. It's unjust to let influential people off the hook just because they're influential. Please note: I'm not pronouncing any opinion on whether his condemnation and dismissal are justified.
- lliamander 7y ago
  I'm sure not all are aware of his history of inappropriate behavior, but some of us are. I think those of us who are bothered by his ousting are bothered for two reasons: 1. The triggering event was someone misquoting him and the media running with that misquote 2. The timing and manner in which MIT handled the situations suggests that they were hypocritically trying to deflect from their own complicity in the Epstein scandal, rather than addressing Stallman's behavior in good faith. 3. While Stallman certainly benefited from some protection for his behavior, the organizations which supported him also greatly benefited from him. The FSF saying that Stallman does not speak for them is particularly rich, considering they exist to promote his ideas. I'm not saying I care for his behavior, or that all of it should get a pass. There's also a lot that I just don't agree with him about. However: 1. I don't like seeing the media twist people's words 2. I don't like seeing organizations throw people under the bus during moral panics Also, I fear that it's becoming harder to be a weird nerd in tech[1]. [1]https://medium.com/@maradydd/when-nerds-collide-31895b01e68c https://medium.com/@maradydd/when-nerds-collide-31895b01e68c
  - zapzupnz 7y ago
    See, that's sounds like a fair rebuttal to the situation to me, though I'm not sure that point 3 really stands — who benefits from whom makes no difference to the matter in question, exaggerated though it is. Point 2 is quite strong, though I wonder if they might also have been looking for an excuse to good rid of him for some time? I'm not suggesting that's true at all, that's just musing based on some recent politics at the place I work.
    - lliamander 7y ago
      Regarding point 3 - I think that even if you have to cut ties with someone because of their transgressions, if they did a lot of good then it is still appropriate to have some gratitude for that good. From what I recall of the FSF statement about RMS, I did not see any of that there.
  - krapp 7y ago
    >Also, I fear that it's becoming harder to be a weird nerd in tech[1]. The thing is, tech can embrace "weirdness" without also embracing sexual harassment, hostility and toxicity. Not every behavior that deviates from the "politically correct" norm needs to be worn as a badge of honor and celebrated as cultural quirkiness by tech people.
michannne 7y ago
If I had a de-platformed individual every time they made a comment someone took offense to, I'd end up with an animal farm. Definitely, his comments should not be overlooked, but intellectually benching someone because of what they've said is not how you handle these types of situations. Furthermore, his leadership qualities depend only on his ability to lead a group towards a goal, which he was doing swell at.
- schwartzworld 7y ago
  Or maybe people would just be more cautious about saying horrible things on the record.
  - michannne 7y ago
    "Horrible" is completely subjective.
    - egdod 7y ago
      "Horrible" is sometimes subjective. There are things that pretty much every reasonable person would agree are horrible.
      - ben509 7y ago
        > pretty much every reasonable person Reasonable is subjective.
        egdod 7y ago
        No, it isn’t. The “reasonable person” standard in lots of laws exists exactly because we can agree on it as an objective standard.
        ben509 7y ago
        We don't agree what it actually is, though. In practice, the "reasonable person" standard is achieved by asking a jury. In a jury, the members apply their life experiences to the case they're deciding and then persuade each other to reach a unanimous conclusion. That's an entirely subjective process, and if you repeat it with another jury you can get the polar opposite answer.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Stratoscope 7y ago
Same thing ten years ago. I had lunch with a young lady who was maintainer of a popular GNU project, and much of the conversation revolved around the creepy advances RMS had made toward her. She was older than the 15 year old you quoted, and I think she knew how to take care of herself. But obviously his behavior had caused her quite a bit of discomfort.
4bpp 7y ago
It's notable that all of these anecdotes are from back in the '90s and before; since I assume Stallman's accusers dug around very hard for material and this is the best they could find, it stands to reason that he probably has long since improved in that regard. Moreover, the same cluster of people among others has seriously been arguing (https://medium.com/@selamie/remove-richard-stallman-appendix-a-a7e41e784f88 https://medium.com/@selamie/remove-richard-stallman-appendix...) that a mattress in the office of someone whose every public profile involves a mention of how he slept in the office for years to develop GNU is unambiguous sexual innuendo (quote: "He kept the door to his office open, to proudly showcase that mattress and all the implications that went with it."). I am not sure how trustworthy their accounts can be considered to begin with.
- jonathankoren 7y ago
  The contemporary misinterpretation of the mattress aside, RMS already had already earned his reputation in the 90s, as had at least one other OSS luminary of the time. Case in point: RMS's incredibly uncomfortable St iGNUcius routine was already legendary.[0] Does he intend for it to be awkward at best, and offensive at worst? I doubt it. Has people told him that it is not received as he intends? Definitely. Does he change his behavior to better reflect his purported views of inclusiveness? Nope. Ultimately, it doesn't matter what you intend your actions to be interpreted, it only matters how they actually are interpreted. That failure to adapt to clear feedback, is problem. [0] From 2009 https://mjg59.livejournal.com/113408.html https://mjg59.livejournal.com/113408.html
  - 4bpp 7y ago
    I do not think that a tacky joke about "emacs virgins" as part of a comedy routine parodying real religious movements past and present deserves being treated as a punishable offense at all. Not only do I think that this should not be objectionable and those who try to make it out to be are contributing to our society being a worse place than it has to be, calls for punishment on the basis of it also strike me as plainly hypocritical in an age where beloved and respected media and tech figures can use the sexual history of members of their political outgroup as an insult ("incel", "cuck") and are applauded for it. Long before the current iteration of our dominant ideology, people talked about the slut-versus-stud distinction[1] as one of the ways in which sexism manifests itself in our society. It seems to me that both the circumstance that we would find Stallman joking about female sexual inexperience intrinsically scandalous, and the circumstance that we find $twitterpersonality taking actual malicious shots at male sexual inexperience okay, would serve to reinforce this double standard, not combat it. Consider the possibility that at the very least, the people who are now actually interpreting Stallman's remark as offensive may at least not have been considered good feminists back in 2009, when mjg59's post and my citation were written. Should we fault Stallman for acting ineptly but ultimately in line with what was probably the "best" advice at the time? [1] https://www.gender-focus.com/2009/11/22/slut-vs-stud/ https://www.gender-focus.com/2009/11/22/slut-vs-stud/
cat_plus_plus 7y ago
Are you actually kidding me? As you are nearing adulthood as a teenager, you are sometimes able to sneak into adult spaces and experience a bit of adult off-color talk. Not everything is guarded by a fence, but maybe more tech events should be if the alternative is catering to child sensitivities. In any case, these comments would not even be PG-13 in a Disney movie. Also, if the idea is to protect under-18s from any minor adult banter, how come 6th grade has an LGBTQ club? "was among the worst of my experienced" alone suggests that the author had an incredibly sheltered and privileged life. Expecting every minor offense to be handled by ruining offender's life is not a healthy attitude in life, hope she grew out of that eventually?
- inimino 7y ago
  > incredibly sheltered. > privileged I'm coming to realize more and more—those aren't the same thing.
  - dspillett 7y ago
    The latter often results in the former, and sometimes the former illicits expectations of the latter in the sheltered, so there is significant coincidence of the two, but no they are certainly not the same nor do they necessarily imply each other.
- jakelazaroff 7y ago
  > Also, if the idea is to protect under-18s from any minor adult banter, how come 6th grade has an LGBTQ club? What do these have to do with each other? Nothing about an LGBTQ club has to be "adult".
- akdas 7y ago
  Maybe I'm reading the GP's anecdote incorrectly, but the behavior in question seemed like targeted harassment, not just "a bit of adult off-color talk".
  - cat_plus_plus 7y ago
    People are throwing these words around so much they lost all the real meaning. Harassment is someone seriously interfering in your life. Bad jokes during a public talk where you are obviously safe from unwanted advances does not qualify. Neither is Joe Biden anything. Al Franken maybe deserved a slap on the face or some other minor consequences around the time things happened (if they did as alleged) but not an unpersoning. The most easily offended person in the society does not get to be a unilateral tyrant over all functional adults with normal offense thresholds.
lostjohnny 7y ago
> The complaints about stallman aren't a matter of thoughtcrime, they're a matter of entirely inappropriate behavior Who are you exactly to think you can decide what is - without doubt - "entirely inappropriate behaviour"? are you in charge of the thought police?
- SolaceQuantum 7y ago
  Sorry, I’m not understanding. Is inappropriate actions a thoughtcrime? Like. I thought thoughtcrime and actions are separate- you can think about how women are just pieces of meat all you like, once you start treating them as pieces of meat then you’ve moved from thinking (thoughtcrime) to action (serial killer)? (Edit; to be clear, since this was a point of confusion, I do not believe anyone I am responding to thinks women are meat! This is a rhetorical tactic to use as an example.)
  - lostjohnny 7y ago
    You're not in charge of deciding what's inappropriate or not. Talking about dicks is inappropriate, but if you are an urologist speaking with other urolgy students, it makes perfect sense. Stallman was writing to other students about the correct representation of the Minsky situation, because they were using Minsky's name in an inappropriate way to protest against MIT-Epstein case. (Unless you think that accusing a dead person without proof is alright) His entire life has been devoted to finding the precise combinations of words to express what he wanted to say, in the most exact possible manner. Can you blame him for doing what he did best, among his peers? I blame the weapon builder who felt triggered and accused him of something he did not do. > you can think about how women are just pieces of meat all you like Pathetic... Nobody ever said that. You're embarrassing yourself.
    - SolaceQuantum 7y ago
      Sorry, I should’ve clarified that this is a rhetorical you! My apologies for not being clear; I was under the impression that the structure of my post would’ve implied as such. Sorry for the offense I’ve caused. As for the rest of it- well, the post questioning thoughtcrime wasn’t about the individual email defense of a friend at all, but about the decades of complaints! So, again, totally out of context there. Can you re-respond with relevant conjecture?

grawprog 7y ago

One of the things that really soured me to working as a biologist was being told the data we collected would not be allowed to be made freely available, as we originally proposed and was accepted in our grant proposal. Instead it would be locked away in a government database, available for a fee despite the data being collected using tax dollars, after we'd been working for over a year and a half on the project and had gone throught two funding cycles, on threat of our grant money being withdrawn. It was after we found an endangered species in an active mine site. It sucked. We'd built an open database easily accessible online, we used open street maps to display the data and had built a bunch of custom layers, we were also working with another group that wanted to add the data to their open database. In the end though none of that happened and the work that was put into making it was wasted and everything was given to the government and locked away.

harshreality 7y ago
What the hell? What mine and what endangered species? Why the hell is my government hiding this data?
- grawprog 7y ago
  A species of big-eared bats on the west coast known to hibernate in only a few locations. It's an open pit gravel quarry, not sure if it's your government, I'm in Canada. There are still people actively working on the project, or at least doing work that came from it, as far as I know, so I'd rather not be too detailed about it.
gHosts 7y ago
This is why we need initiatives like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_data
prepend 7y ago
That sounds really frustrating. Fortunately many countries now have open data legislation. For example, in the US, since 2013 by executive order (M-13-13) and this year (Evidencemaking in Policy/Open Data Act), federally funded projects must eventually release their data to the public or include a plan explaining why national security or privacy reasons prevent it. I think it’s getting better.

eesmith 7y ago

Free software isn't about making data openly available. Stallman, at https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html , argues that free software developers should "charge as much as they wish or can, ... if you are redistributing copies of free software, you might as well charge a substantial fee and make some money." If you have useful data, the free software principles say that you might as well charge a lot of money for it, which is not what most chemists and biologists think of in discussion of data openness. FWIW, the discussion in science started independently of free software. Here's an example from structural biology. Previous to the 1980s, it was common for crystallographers to withhold structure data from a publication, and perhaps only publish an image showing the C-alpha backbone. This was because they wanted to be able to publish additional papers from the same data set, without competition. By 1987[1], there was a push to require coordinate submission into the PDB as requirement for publication. Most journals adopted this new policy in 1989, and funding agencies started to do so as well[2]. While the GNU project started earlier (1983), there is no connection between free software and the open data availability requirements for publication and funding in structural biology. [1] https://search.proquest.com/openview/0a93cbb72da63b2899793bf27f9fd920/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=1256 https://search.proquest.com/openview/0a93cbb72da63b2899793bf... [2] https://journals.iucr.org/a/issues/2008/01/00/sc5004/index.html https://journals.iucr.org/a/issues/2008/01/00/sc5004/index.h... Open Source also isn't about making data openly available. Both are only applicable to those who acquire software. It just happens to be that most free and open source developers also make their software available at no cost.

inimino 7y ago
> Free software isn't about making data openly available. You must be allowed to redistribute the software, and you must be allowed to get, modify, and redistribute the code. Binaries and code are data. Maybe what you mean is that the biologists' and x-ray crystallographers' journals developed their push for data access independently of the free software movement, but it's a stretch to say that access to the data that a programmer creates and access to the data that a biologist creates have nothing in common.
- eesmith 7y ago

djrobstep 7y ago

Perhaps the real problem is that we build personality cults around ideas.

lostjohnny 7y ago
Or that we fight the person to destroy or weaken the idea.

burtonator 7y ago

RMS was and always will be a fraud.

tjpnz 7y ago

>It's a shame that RMS has to spout forth on every issue, and in the current climate of outrage, science may have lost an important transformational voice. The four freedoms are truly revolutionary and have grown on me over the years. If he had been a bit more focussed and perhaps even a little pragmatic it wouldn't be hard to view him as a Steve Jobs or Bill Gates like figure. At the very least we would be having conversations about software in terms of non-free and free versus proprietary and open source.

tzs 7y ago
> The four freedoms are truly revolutionary and have grown on me over the years. If he had been a bit more focussed and perhaps even a little pragmatic it wouldn't be hard to view him as a Steve Jobs or Bill Gates like figure. If he had been a lot more pragmatic, he probably could have put the whole free software thing on hold for 20 years, and been one of the early microcomputer billionaires either alongside Jobs and Gates, or even instead of one (or both!) of them. Then go back to free software--except now it would be backed by the several tens of billions of dollars of the Stallman Foundation, which would generate enough annual investment income forever to easily afford to award tens of thousands of $100k grants for free software development each year. A decade of that, and there would be GPL replacements for pretty much everything.
- bartread 7y ago
  No. In the intervening years somebody else would have done substantially what RMS did: it's not like he's the only hacker of his era who believes software should be free. There's no guarantee he would have been successful in business and, even if he was, he would have undermined his moral authority on free software. People don't in general have serious doubts about RMS's motivations even if they don't agree with him - he's a true believer - but they can be much more cynical about Google or Facebook and their open source efforts.
  - pessimizer 7y ago
    > In the intervening years somebody else would have done substantially what RMS did There's no reason to believe this.

pg_is_a_butt 7y ago

stallman.org

marijn 7y ago

He wasn't blacklisted for committing thought crime. The dumb Epstein email triggered a reevaluation of his consistent creepy and inappropriate behavior against current community standards, which resulted in a large part of the community deciding they didn't want anything to do with him anymore. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from social consequences.

Smithalicious 7y ago
Amazing how whenever someone does something controversial and gets forced out soon afterwards, it's never the thing they said, but "consistent creepy and inappropriate behavior" based on 10 year old anecdotes that suddenly appear out of nowhere... I'd think that if someone was "consistently" creepy and inappropriate, there would be a pretty good public record for that, but what do I know? EDIT: Let me give a bit more of a nuanced position, because reading my post back, it looks like I'm saying that Stallman never did anything inappropriate before this. Of course, I recognize that Stallman is fucking weird. I'm not saying that parrot-fucking, foot-fungus-eating St. IGNUcius never did anything inappropriate before; we'd be here for a long time if we were to make a list of all the times Stallman failed to read the mood. However, I strongly believe that Stallman is not a creep. He holds some odd views and is pretty autistic, and so he occasionally makes inappropriate advances. Add to that that Stallman has been a very prolific person for decades and you won't relaly have trouble coming up with a list of anecdotes that, when framed a certain way, make him look bad. I've read quite a few of these anecdotes by now. Some of them look fairly innocent to me. Some of them are clear social blunders. None of them look seriously harmful or in bad faith to me. Even taking all of them together, believing that all of them are remembered 100% correctly and played out as portrayed without any additional context, I don't think the appropirate reaction is to remove Stallman from his position(s). What ticks me off so much about all this is the way the media deals with it. Stallman is portrayed as some kind of sexist, some kind of patriarch keeping women out of tech. It's ridiculous; Stallman is quite possibly the most inclusionary person I can think of. Stallman has had an immense, direct contribution to making tech more open for everyone. I can understand the criticism of Stallman. I don't even think he necessarily makes for a good figurehead for Free Software; he has poor social skills, unhelpfully rigid and strong positions, and I feel like he often conflates free software issues with other social issues he cares about. He makes for a better philosopher than a political leader. In this case, he's being thrown under the bus to score social points. People in tech are very itchy to do whatever they can to seem more inclusive, and condemning Epstein and his ilk is a noble goal (that also makes you look good). Stallman's statements that sparked this controversy were naive and he failed to read the mood, but they were not unacceptable things to believe or say. He did not deserve to have his words twisted, get kicked out of his own organisation based on the strawman, and then have people say that he was always bad, anyways.

cbanek 7y ago

> I believe free software will be recognised as one of the paradigmatic changes in how science itself is done. I think we're already there. I'm an astronomer, and we (and many others) are already building platforms with software like Jupyter, dask, holoviews, etc. While RMS may have started with a great idea, I'm not sure he's super influential in actually making progress and writing software. If anything, the idea that companies will sponsor open source software has (and I'm not sure many saw that one coming). For example, nVidia supporting dask, or Bloomberg supporting Jupyter. It's the idea that was important, and less so the person IMHO. RMS had a lot of ideas, some good, and some bad. But like evolution, people take the good and run with them, and leave the bad. And we rarely remember who started the whole thing, since having the idea is generally such a small part of actually making it a reality. "We are told to remember the idea, not the man, because a man can fail. He can be caught, he can be killed and forgotten, but 400 years later, an idea can still change the world." - V for Vendetta

varjag 7y ago
> While RMS may have started with a great idea, I'm not sure he's super influential in actually making progress and writing software. I had to re-read this to be sure it's not sarcasm. RMS has some of the largest footprints in software among the living people. How can one hold an opinion about his contribution and not be aware of that?
- pessimizer 7y ago
  Maybe its a sign of your greatness when people think your contribution to the world somehow arose spontaneously, like a hurricane.
  - krapp 7y ago
    That's not a sign of greatness, so much as a sign of a cult of personality. If people believe that Free Software could never have existed without Richard Stallman, and cannot continue without him, that calls into question whether it has any lasting societal or cultural value of its own. Other software licensing paradigms don't have this problem, real or percieved. No one believes that open source will die if ESR gets hit by a bus, after all.

zouhair 7y ago

I don't think Free Software would have arrived where they are now if it wasn't for the RMS and his specific personality. Him, being how he is, is what made on of the big part of the success of Free Software.

rajacombinator 7y ago

Thoughtcrime came and went years ago. We are now entering the precrime era.