5 ms·

I have a signed copy of this. I love it. Free Software, Free Society was maybe the most important book I read in college. I wish RMS didn't have the issues aro

I have a signed copy of this. I love it. Free Software, Free Society was maybe the most important book I read in college. I wish RMS didn't have the issues around women that he does, but I immensely venerate his thinking on software freedom.

murgindrag 6y ago
I wish people didn't believe everything others say about people. RMS has lots of enemies, and most of the stuff you read about him is fabricated. You start with a grain of truth, mix in a few half-truths, add a bold-faced lie, and you've got a great smear. I mean, he doesn't have the best human interface, but people take that, and use that as the basis of rumors to destroy him. Read about his departure from MIT/FSF. Compare what he wrote to what he was accused of writing.
- gumby 6y ago
  > I wish people didn't believe everything others say about people. The GP said, "I wish RMS didn't have the issues around women that he does" He does have sexist problems and has as long as I've known him (late 70s). We have been on again / off again friends over the decades, but never enemies so no reason to fabricate anything. As you say he has other issues both good and bad; this comment is specifically about the one issue.
  - murgindrag 6y ago
    Great. You know him. So do I. Now, does your knowledge of him justify this headline: "Richard Stallman resigns from FSF, MIT after defending child rape" - OSNews Seriously. Yes, he's awkward around women, and has sometimes hit on women in sometimes cringeworthy ways. He's also awkward around men, for that reason. There's a difference like night and day between the actual issues, which are about on-par for much of the population, and what's reported. Heck, I'd say that's about on-par for about half of the MIT student body back when it was a genuine nerd school rather than the "#1 branded university in the world." But he knows that no means no, he doesn't mean harm, and he doesn't abuse his power. And compare the treatment he gets to other people in position of power. Compare that to the MANY MIT faculty who DO use power dynamics to abuse female students, and who DID fly to Epstein's island to party. Heck, compare that to executives and politicians, or, well, many others in positions of power. You're not going to convince me Stallman is worse than the median there, or even the 25th percentile. It's just that one group is politically savvy, and the other, socially awkward. And this is exactly how you get a plausible smear. You start with a smaller issue, and you twist and exaggerate it until you have a pedophile-rapist. And yes, it was intentional.
    - bitwize 6y ago
      EDIT: Former comment snipped. krapp has the correct take on this. RMS is a known defender of pedophilia, and what happened to him was not a smear campaign at all, but understandable revulsion to someone who is provably a very gross individual when he put his foot in his mouth (figuratively speaking).
      - identity0 6y ago
        I can't tell if you're for or against the Stallman smear campaign. You can't possibly say that "We live in a post-truth world" and actually think that's a good thing, right? EDIT: Your other comment makes me thing you're 100% serious about this. The fuck? We need to smear him because he's an awkward nerd? An awkward person is not inherently harmful simply for being awkward. What harm has he "continually done" to deserve this?
        Shared404 6y ago
        I read it the other way. It appears to me that Bitwise is both against the smear campaign, and showing the "logic" that those behind it use.
        bitwize 6y ago
        > I can't tell if you're for or against the Stallman smear campaign. You can't possibly say that "We live in a post-truth world" and actually think that's a good thing, right? You're making an is-ought distinction. Of course we should not believe serious accusations against someone until they can back up their claims -- in an ideal world. In the real world, standards of evidence are routinely weaponized against decent people by assholes. Everybody knows that Trump has colluded with Russia, but no one can make anything stick. As another example, there is a small but growing movement to weaken the standards of evidence for rape and sexual assault. These crimes are notoriously difficult to get evidence for that meets the burden of proof, and the result is a very low conviction rape and active harm to women and society by rapists on the loose. I find it increasingly hard to challenge this argument except on theoretical or procedural grounds, and some countries -- such as Spain, which has special violence against women tribunals where the burden of proof is essentially on the accused to prove innocence -- have already followed through with this idea in their laws. > What harm has he "continually done" to deserve this? Numerous women have come forward with stories about being sexually harassed by Stallman over the years. He creates what is known in law as a hostile work environment. Women are afraid to work with him because they might be inappropriately propositioned, and risk consequences if they turned him down. (Stallman was "protected" by people in the MIT community, including Marvin Minsky.) And of course, he actually did advocate for legalization of child rape earlier in his career.
- judge2020 6y ago
  > Compare what he wrote to what he was accused of writing. Given that so few people do this (in general, not just in regards to RMS), A smear is just as bad for PR as a non-smear, so it makes sense that organizations would want to limit collateral damage ASAP.
- bitwize 6y ago
  The rules have changed. We want the programming community to be a welcoming community for women, and part of the cost of that is we have to close it off to the creepier sort of nerd, which is well established and documented to describe Stallman. Fix your behavior or get out. Or find that organizations that hope for legitimacy want nothing to do with you.
  - murgindrag 6y ago
    If you want a programming community welcoming of minorities, you need to look to be inclusive. Signals change between cultures, and you want to look at what people DO, not whether they feel "creepy" to you. Median Indians, Africans, Chinese, Arabs, and Eastern Europeans all feel "creepy" to American women (at least until they learn the differences in body language, communication patterns, and so on). Indeed, they feel creepy to each other. For that matter, lawyers, engineers, and marketing people all feel "creepy" to each other until they build those cultural bridges.
  - Jon_Lowtek 6y ago
    The community was very welcoming to all people, until the SJW moved in and started to tell others to get out.
    - bitwize 6y ago
      No. Read krapp's posts. Stallman was for years provably a defender of pedophilia and the sexual abuse of children. He does not deserve to be a leader in our community.
      - Jon_Lowtek 6y ago
        While i do not agree with RMS fringe opinion on that matter, he was no defender of abuse. I am not going to discuss the details of the meaning of the words "sexual abuse of children" with you, because for what i have to say it is irrelevant how much you want to bend and weaken this once meaningful phrase. This is going to be about your willingness to relentlessly exaggerate to fuel your own cause: it has made you the one harassing people based on their opinion. And we don't like your kind of people here. Tell me, why don't you go and fight someone whose actions endanger women and children? Maybe go after the rich friends of sleazy playboy Epstein, who was very charming with the ladies and ran a criminal brothel. Or go after the prophet who married girls as young as seven and wrote about that in a holy book followed dogmatically by a major religion. Or go and protest actual child labor and marriage in Nigeria. And when i mean "go" and don't mean "talk more" i mean please go. And take your agenda with you. Your "more welcoming to women" is nothing but some self-absorbed narcissism, you are like a chauvinistic minstrel knight, who is claiming to make the road safe for the weak sex by the might of your sword, yet does nothing but bicker and bitch about your chosen enemy, the "creepy nerd who voiced opinions you don't agree with" - oh what heroic deeds you do. Such macho behavior would not even impresses some giggling girls of first semester gender studies, and it will surly not impress the honorable ladies of the community, who wrote code that sent people to space, power aircraft carriers, nuclear plants and the internet, who followed for generations in the footsteps of women like Rear Admiral Dr Grace "Grandma Cobol" Hopper. They neither need, nor want your twitter drama style vigilante protectionism. Oh and on your way out, take that "smearing people for great justice" and "the accused should prove innocence" garbage you spouted in your comments here out with you. You overstepped, you are far out of line, and your opinions don't speak well for the community, so by your own logic, get out! Am i being clear? You are done, you are canceled, you f'd up and are not welcome anymore. So say, how does it feel, when people go after you for some stupid thing you said? Again, i am not defending rms opinion about a topic of your choice, my point is: every community the SJW enter with their agenda of what they say will bring positive change long term turns into a toxic swamp of social drama. They are a splinter group of totalitarian socialists, believing to mold the people into ideal humans by means of social pressure, and are willing to harasse or even terrorize people, while demanding every aspect of society must follow their orthodox philosophy, because only then they can get rid of all the degenerates. I sure don't want those radicals as leadership, either. I see them as a danger to the very foundations of democracy and freedom. But they are very successful because they imagine themselves as the righteous guardians of morality and grant immediate feelings of power and social cohesion when they vigilante mob someone. So tell me, who should lead the community? Because for me it looks a lot like it is soon going to be a duma selected to match quotas of race, age, gender and sexuality, but limited to a strict and orthodox set of believes not about the communal subject matter, but about everything else. This duma will be plagued by constant infighting, bickering, and their tries to socially assassinated each other, like a bunch of crabs in a barrel. They will focus not on source-code but on code-of-conduct, not on merit in the subject-matter but on the flaws of the person. They will establish no inclusive infrastructure, but systematic precedence for canceling access, denying bug reports and even merge requests because of things like arbitrary twitter drama. For this astonishing communal work they will be paid by the corporations that wish for nothing more then to embrace and expand the community, throwing around buzzwords like welcoming, diverse and inclusive to justify such involvement. How is it a welcoming community that tells people that their technological and intellectual commitment is not welcome, because their opinion on an unrelated matter in a different context is not in line? These very corporations already try to rebrand "free and open source" as the feature-incomplete version of "enterprise edition" and their next step is to exploit: participating in such communities will become a job requirement: you want to be a programmer? work for free, prove you not only have technical skill but can stay in line in behavior and opinion, and then we will maybe see about some gig work. It is young adults, barely legal, who are most vulnerable to such promises and they will comply willingly.
- LukeShu 6y ago
  Your replies seem to be focused in the reaction to his defense of Minsky. Without defending what he said, you're right, it's disgusting how that was reported on compared to what he actually said. However, (according to Bradley Kuhn, who was a FSF board member at the time) his removal from the FSF was a long time coming even without that incident, though that wasn't obvious from the outside. Bradley Kuhn was able to write the sentence "In fact, RMS' views and statements posted on stallman.org about sexual morality escalated for the worse over the last few years" with each word linked to a separate post from RMS, spread from 2016 to 2019. Perhaps it's just my reading of them, but your comments give the sense that his defense of Minsky was the only wrong thing he said. That's its own half-truth on your part, there's plenty more that he's been saying for years. http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2019/10/15/fsf-rms.html http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2019/10/15/fsf-rms.html

murgindrag 6y ago

I wish people didn't believe everything others say about people. RMS has lots of enemies, and most of the stuff you read about him is fabricated. You start with a grain of truth, mix in a few half-truths, add a bold-faced lie, and you've got a great smear. I mean, he doesn't have the best human interface, but people take that, and use that as the basis of rumors to destroy him. Read about his departure from MIT/FSF. Compare what he wrote to what he was accused of writing.

gumby 6y ago
> I wish people didn't believe everything others say about people. The GP said, "I wish RMS didn't have the issues around women that he does" He does have sexist problems and has as long as I've known him (late 70s). We have been on again / off again friends over the decades, but never enemies so no reason to fabricate anything. As you say he has other issues both good and bad; this comment is specifically about the one issue.
- murgindrag 6y ago
  Great. You know him. So do I. Now, does your knowledge of him justify this headline: "Richard Stallman resigns from FSF, MIT after defending child rape" - OSNews Seriously. Yes, he's awkward around women, and has sometimes hit on women in sometimes cringeworthy ways. He's also awkward around men, for that reason. There's a difference like night and day between the actual issues, which are about on-par for much of the population, and what's reported. Heck, I'd say that's about on-par for about half of the MIT student body back when it was a genuine nerd school rather than the "#1 branded university in the world." But he knows that no means no, he doesn't mean harm, and he doesn't abuse his power. And compare the treatment he gets to other people in position of power. Compare that to the MANY MIT faculty who DO use power dynamics to abuse female students, and who DID fly to Epstein's island to party. Heck, compare that to executives and politicians, or, well, many others in positions of power. You're not going to convince me Stallman is worse than the median there, or even the 25th percentile. It's just that one group is politically savvy, and the other, socially awkward. And this is exactly how you get a plausible smear. You start with a smaller issue, and you twist and exaggerate it until you have a pedophile-rapist. And yes, it was intentional.
  - bitwize 6y ago
    EDIT: Former comment snipped. krapp has the correct take on this. RMS is a known defender of pedophilia, and what happened to him was not a smear campaign at all, but understandable revulsion to someone who is provably a very gross individual when he put his foot in his mouth (figuratively speaking).
    - identity0 6y ago
      I can't tell if you're for or against the Stallman smear campaign. You can't possibly say that "We live in a post-truth world" and actually think that's a good thing, right? EDIT: Your other comment makes me thing you're 100% serious about this. The fuck? We need to smear him because he's an awkward nerd? An awkward person is not inherently harmful simply for being awkward. What harm has he "continually done" to deserve this?
      - Shared404 6y ago
        I read it the other way. It appears to me that Bitwise is both against the smear campaign, and showing the "logic" that those behind it use.
      - bitwize 6y ago
        > I can't tell if you're for or against the Stallman smear campaign. You can't possibly say that "We live in a post-truth world" and actually think that's a good thing, right? You're making an is-ought distinction. Of course we should not believe serious accusations against someone until they can back up their claims -- in an ideal world. In the real world, standards of evidence are routinely weaponized against decent people by assholes. Everybody knows that Trump has colluded with Russia, but no one can make anything stick. As another example, there is a small but growing movement to weaken the standards of evidence for rape and sexual assault. These crimes are notoriously difficult to get evidence for that meets the burden of proof, and the result is a very low conviction rape and active harm to women and society by rapists on the loose. I find it increasingly hard to challenge this argument except on theoretical or procedural grounds, and some countries -- such as Spain, which has special violence against women tribunals where the burden of proof is essentially on the accused to prove innocence -- have already followed through with this idea in their laws. > What harm has he "continually done" to deserve this? Numerous women have come forward with stories about being sexually harassed by Stallman over the years. He creates what is known in law as a hostile work environment. Women are afraid to work with him because they might be inappropriately propositioned, and risk consequences if they turned him down. (Stallman was "protected" by people in the MIT community, including Marvin Minsky.) And of course, he actually did advocate for legalization of child rape earlier in his career.
judge2020 6y ago
> Compare what he wrote to what he was accused of writing. Given that so few people do this (in general, not just in regards to RMS), A smear is just as bad for PR as a non-smear, so it makes sense that organizations would want to limit collateral damage ASAP.
bitwize 6y ago
The rules have changed. We want the programming community to be a welcoming community for women, and part of the cost of that is we have to close it off to the creepier sort of nerd, which is well established and documented to describe Stallman. Fix your behavior or get out. Or find that organizations that hope for legitimacy want nothing to do with you.
- murgindrag 6y ago
  If you want a programming community welcoming of minorities, you need to look to be inclusive. Signals change between cultures, and you want to look at what people DO, not whether they feel "creepy" to you. Median Indians, Africans, Chinese, Arabs, and Eastern Europeans all feel "creepy" to American women (at least until they learn the differences in body language, communication patterns, and so on). Indeed, they feel creepy to each other. For that matter, lawyers, engineers, and marketing people all feel "creepy" to each other until they build those cultural bridges.
- Jon_Lowtek 6y ago
  The community was very welcoming to all people, until the SJW moved in and started to tell others to get out.
  - bitwize 6y ago
    No. Read krapp's posts. Stallman was for years provably a defender of pedophilia and the sexual abuse of children. He does not deserve to be a leader in our community.
    - Jon_Lowtek 6y ago
      While i do not agree with RMS fringe opinion on that matter, he was no defender of abuse. I am not going to discuss the details of the meaning of the words "sexual abuse of children" with you, because for what i have to say it is irrelevant how much you want to bend and weaken this once meaningful phrase. This is going to be about your willingness to relentlessly exaggerate to fuel your own cause: it has made you the one harassing people based on their opinion. And we don't like your kind of people here. Tell me, why don't you go and fight someone whose actions endanger women and children? Maybe go after the rich friends of sleazy playboy Epstein, who was very charming with the ladies and ran a criminal brothel. Or go after the prophet who married girls as young as seven and wrote about that in a holy book followed dogmatically by a major religion. Or go and protest actual child labor and marriage in Nigeria. And when i mean "go" and don't mean "talk more" i mean please go. And take your agenda with you. Your "more welcoming to women" is nothing but some self-absorbed narcissism, you are like a chauvinistic minstrel knight, who is claiming to make the road safe for the weak sex by the might of your sword, yet does nothing but bicker and bitch about your chosen enemy, the "creepy nerd who voiced opinions you don't agree with" - oh what heroic deeds you do. Such macho behavior would not even impresses some giggling girls of first semester gender studies, and it will surly not impress the honorable ladies of the community, who wrote code that sent people to space, power aircraft carriers, nuclear plants and the internet, who followed for generations in the footsteps of women like Rear Admiral Dr Grace "Grandma Cobol" Hopper. They neither need, nor want your twitter drama style vigilante protectionism. Oh and on your way out, take that "smearing people for great justice" and "the accused should prove innocence" garbage you spouted in your comments here out with you. You overstepped, you are far out of line, and your opinions don't speak well for the community, so by your own logic, get out! Am i being clear? You are done, you are canceled, you f'd up and are not welcome anymore. So say, how does it feel, when people go after you for some stupid thing you said? Again, i am not defending rms opinion about a topic of your choice, my point is: every community the SJW enter with their agenda of what they say will bring positive change long term turns into a toxic swamp of social drama. They are a splinter group of totalitarian socialists, believing to mold the people into ideal humans by means of social pressure, and are willing to harasse or even terrorize people, while demanding every aspect of society must follow their orthodox philosophy, because only then they can get rid of all the degenerates. I sure don't want those radicals as leadership, either. I see them as a danger to the very foundations of democracy and freedom. But they are very successful because they imagine themselves as the righteous guardians of morality and grant immediate feelings of power and social cohesion when they vigilante mob someone. So tell me, who should lead the community? Because for me it looks a lot like it is soon going to be a duma selected to match quotas of race, age, gender and sexuality, but limited to a strict and orthodox set of believes not about the communal subject matter, but about everything else. This duma will be plagued by constant infighting, bickering, and their tries to socially assassinated each other, like a bunch of crabs in a barrel. They will focus not on source-code but on code-of-conduct, not on merit in the subject-matter but on the flaws of the person. They will establish no inclusive infrastructure, but systematic precedence for canceling access, denying bug reports and even merge requests because of things like arbitrary twitter drama. For this astonishing communal work they will be paid by the corporations that wish for nothing more then to embrace and expand the community, throwing around buzzwords like welcoming, diverse and inclusive to justify such involvement. How is it a welcoming community that tells people that their technological and intellectual commitment is not welcome, because their opinion on an unrelated matter in a different context is not in line? These very corporations already try to rebrand "free and open source" as the feature-incomplete version of "enterprise edition" and their next step is to exploit: participating in such communities will become a job requirement: you want to be a programmer? work for free, prove you not only have technical skill but can stay in line in behavior and opinion, and then we will maybe see about some gig work. It is young adults, barely legal, who are most vulnerable to such promises and they will comply willingly.
LukeShu 6y ago
Your replies seem to be focused in the reaction to his defense of Minsky. Without defending what he said, you're right, it's disgusting how that was reported on compared to what he actually said. However, (according to Bradley Kuhn, who was a FSF board member at the time) his removal from the FSF was a long time coming even without that incident, though that wasn't obvious from the outside. Bradley Kuhn was able to write the sentence "In fact, RMS' views and statements posted on stallman.org about sexual morality escalated for the worse over the last few years" with each word linked to a separate post from RMS, spread from 2016 to 2019. Perhaps it's just my reading of them, but your comments give the sense that his defense of Minsky was the only wrong thing he said. That's its own half-truth on your part, there's plenty more that he's been saying for years. http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2019/10/15/fsf-rms.html http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2019/10/15/fsf-rms.html