11 ms·

A different take: Microsoft, Oracle, et. al. waged a war against OSS in the 90s. They went as far as using mental illness as a weapon against the community (equ

A different take: Microsoft, Oracle, et. al. waged a war against OSS in the 90s. They went as far as using mental illness as a weapon against the community (equating participation in the commons as an equivalent to mental illness). It’s not a coincidence the class of human that weathered the storm looks like Stallman, Linus, ESR, et. al. That’s what it took. The toxicity in these communities is a result of what was leftover. These humans grew up amongst OSS activists that also weathered the storm. They carried the flag when no one else would. Vilifying them now, at a time where Microsoft just purchased the two largest infrastructure/tooling providers for the commons (npm, GitHub) is concerning to me. Without them, the commons wouldn’t be what it is today.

jarfil 6y ago
On the other hand, following that logic, in times of peace the soldiers of yesteryear are out of work. I'm not a fan of cancel culture, but it might be just a sign that priorities have changed for people. Maybe the basic software liberties are enough for most, and it's no longer enough to fight for OSS, but instead time to consider "how" to fight for it. In a sense, it could be seen as a victory.
- r3trohack3r 6y ago
  “Good times breed weak [humans]” But I see it differently. I feel the wolves are in sheep’s skin, and are trying to convince me the sheep are wolves.
  - _euac 6y ago
    I'm always curious about this line of thinking. What exactly do you think people are gaining by - say - denouncing sexism or other kinds of awful behavior? What's so wolfish about that?
    - r3trohack3r 6y ago
      Here is how a wolf would disrupt the commons: http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/Comes-3096.pdf http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/Comes-3096.pdf
    - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
      They improve their social status, which potentially makes them more powerful and influential within their tribe. Unfortunately this can be entirely orthogonal to making genuine improvements in how humans relate to each other. You're dealing with some deep seated flaws in human social psychology, and the polarised morality of cancel culture doesn't leave room to explore potential solutions which are based on that uncomfortable truth. You're either an insider who agrees with The Cause or an outsider unbeliever who must be reeducated or destroyed. This can feel great for participants, in a slightly manic way. But there's no space for a more nuanced view, and that makes stable solutions unlikely.
      - dguaraglia 6y ago
        > You're either an insider who agrees with The Cause or an outsider unbeliever who must be reeducated or destroyed. This can be also said of the 'anti-anti' crowd. Their whole objective is to moralize about how bad the 'anti' crowd is and telling them to shut up, while throwing a number of perfectly valid concerns out the window in the process. While most people in HN might leave it at denouncing the behavior, people have been doxxed, harassed online and in person for 'canceling' someone or something before. BTW, I hate the 'cancel culture' term. I hate how it is used by people who - given the opportunity - would 'cancel' LGBT rights, immigration, etc. Every time I see someone using the term, I can't help but feel they've fallen for Propaganda 101.
    - strken 6y ago
      People who denounce sexism because they've got a moral framework or intuition that tells them sexism is bad are principled actors. People who denounce sexism because they're trying to get likes on social media, because it grants them social approval, or because they've made a job out of it are acting out of self-interest. Not everyone who is in the second group knows what their motivations are: people usually come up with seemingly altruistic reasons for self-interested behaviour, and genuinely believe those reasons, even though they wouldn't behave that way if they weren't getting anything out of it. As per the article, "punishment should be proportional to the offence", and punishments should ensure the offender will "constructively come to understand, repent, and make amends for an infraction". The first group can be relied upon to see transgressions in light of their broader moral principles. They won't always seek punishments that are proportional and restorative, because those are moral principles in themselves, but they'll at least be trying to do what they believe is a good thing. The second group is scary because they just don't stop. They'll keep doing things in order to get the reward of social approval or social media, for as long as that reward lasts. Even worse, because they don't have good introspection about the underlying rewards that incentivise them, they'll reward each other for escalating. They'll tear people's lives apart without a shred of guilt, because they're getting something out of it, which is why they're seen as predators.
      - dguaraglia 6y ago
        I understand your argument, but wouldn't be the opposite be true too? Aren't RMS's comments defending Minsky just a form of 'clout seeking' and being argumentative for arguments sake? If people are making the case that RMS is neurodivergent and therefore his behavior should be tolerated, shouldn't we be making exactly the same argument about the people you put on the latter group? Or is it only people we agree with that get the benefit of being 'neurodivergent'?
        strken 6y ago
        The argument was explaining why Twitter mobs form and what they're getting out of it, not in favour of RMS. I think the general principle of scepticism towards people who benefit from the stance they hold applies to you and I, to RMS, and to his detractors. That being said, I don't think he expected to benefit socially from the opinions that got him cancelled in general, or from complaining about the term "assaulting" in particular. His autism is less relevant than there being no real gain for him. It being a costly opinion for him to express is evidence he genuinely believes it. Whether or not he should be tolerated is another question, but I don't think he's the metaphorical wolf here.
- readflaggedcomm 6y ago
  Or apparatchiks inevitably replace enthusiasts, enabling mainstream influence.
seebs 6y ago
That's a fascinating take, but I don't think it's particularly related to what actually happened. I wasn't toxic because of some Microsoft FUD, I was toxic because I was a teenager with low empathy who hadn't learned things yet. I grew out of it. Lots of people in open source were never particularly toxic, and there's no reason they should have been. Even granting the existence of the external stress (and it really was NOT that big a deal), not everyone reacts to stress by treating people badly. Furthermore, people who didn't grow up around those OSS advocates have exactly the same problems sometimes, for the same reason that people in every field of human endeavor have those problems sometimes.
- boulos 6y ago
  What, if anything, would you update in your post from a decade ago [1] on Steve Jobs, RMS, and empathy? (My guess is not much, other than maybe a personal preference on the empathy side?) [1] https://www.seebs.net/log/post/2011/10/11/why-steve-jobs-did-more-for-free-software-than-rms-did./ https://www.seebs.net/log/post/2011/10/11/why-steve-jobs-did...
  - preommr 6y ago
    Is seebs someone that's particularly famous? The parent comment seems to imply they were part of the "Stallman, Linus, ESR, et. al." And their profile just says "that seebs".
    - seebs 6y ago
      I don't know about "particularly" famous but I know that I've talked to people whose family members were programmers who reacted with "wait you know SEEBS!?!" when they mentioned me, so apparently some people have heard of me. I used to be fairly active in Usenet discussions of C, and I've published some stuff, most of it now lost to the mists of time.
  - seebs 6y ago
    Haha, wow. I totally forgot I wrote that one. When I wrote that I was unaware of some of the Sort Of Creepy stuff. I recognize that some of the allegedly creepy stuff is sorta misquoted. I think that matters. But I don't think it changes my overall conclusions, which is that RMS was acting in a way that he could reasonably predict would hurt or distress people, and he didn't think it was important to change this. But I also note that, completely unaware of any of the allegations now being discussed, I thought he was bad for the development of free and open source software because he was bad at treating people in ways conducive to positive outcomes, and I knew many people who worked on free or open source software, or worked with the FSF or on FSF projects, who also felt that way. I believe quite a few of them had told him of these concerns. I wrote about the specific more-recent RMS stuff last year: https://www.seebs.net/log/post/2019/09/21/rms-minsky-and-the-search-for-truth/ https://www.seebs.net/log/post/2019/09/21/rms-minsky-and-the... Thomas Bushnell wrote about this, too, and honestly his post was much better: https://medium.com/@thomas.bushnell/a-reflection-on-the-departure-of-rms-18e6a835fd84 https://medium.com/@thomas.bushnell/a-reflection-on-the-depa... It is perhaps worth noting that, maybe thirty years ago, I had some run-ins with Thomas Bushnell, and I thought he was sort of a jerk at the time, but when I called him out on an example of that, he acknowledged it and apologized and said he'd try to do better. Nothing external to RMS was preventing RMS from doing that if people said his behavior hurt or distressed them. The idea that we couldn't try to do better because we were being threatened by Microsoft is honestly sort of condescending and insulting in and of itself.
Mc91 6y ago
> The toxicity in these communities is a result of what was leftover Toxicity relative to what? I have worked in a number of places much more toxic than Stallman's GNU project, or Linus's Linux kernel etc. As has been said before - the difference between open source communities and closed source companies is that open source communities are open - we can see the flamewars on public mailing lists. There are plenty of toxic Jira pull request code review comment threads out there, resulting in lots of meetings with managers over turf wars or whatnot, which the world will never see because it's private.
klodolph 6y ago
I think that this is just an attempt at explaining away toxic behavior without taking responsibility for it. People in the OSS community can, at times, glorify toxic behavior. I know people who take it as a badge of honor to "speak the truth", "speak directly", or "have no filter". Speaking directly and speaking the truth are good ideals to have, but if you really want to PROVE that you speak the truth and don't fear social pressures, what better way to do it than to be rude or insensitive to people? Take Mr. X, who is outraged by Microsoft's behavior and refuses to buy Microsoft's products, tells other people about his problems with Microsoft, and tells everyone to use FOSS alternatives? Now, Mr. X also thinks that it's stupid to believe in god, and is not afraid to say it to everyone he meets. He's suddenly changed from "FOSS advocate" to "toxic workplace on legs". This is by no means exclusive to the FOSS community. Think of the product manager who styles himself a Steve Jobs type, who abuses his staff in the style of Steve Jobs. These aren't examples I'm picking out of a hat; these are real people.
- Clewza313 6y ago
  So expressing sincerely held beliefs in a personal forum like his own website is in and of itself "toxic"? Many of RMS's beliefs are indeed well outside the mainstream, but as far as I'm aware nobody has ever accused him actually doing anything abusive to anybody.
  - rtpg 6y ago
    How is there any controversy to judging people for what they believe? This seems so normal! At every level of society we judge people for what they think, for their sort of moral philosophy. That's morality on some level (or some sort of meta-morality). Though I think the added point here is that people who believe something _and_ have some power over other people can effectively apply these beliefs. If I say "I don't think that hiring women is a good idea cuz they might go on maternity leave" and I'm also the managing director of some non-profit, well... I feel like suspicion about my capabilities in that role are judstified!
  - Arainach 6y ago
    https://selamjie.medium.com/remove-richard-stallman-appendix-a-a7e41e784f88 https://selamjie.medium.com/remove-richard-stallman-appendix... >I recall being told early in my freshman year “If RMS hits on you, just say ‘I’m a vi user’ even if it’s not true.” >Richard Stallman told me of his misery and that he’d kill himself if I didn’t go out with him. There's also his office door at one point: https://miro.medium.com/max/1050/1*lDSkAjF1958TpEafxuJsLg.jpeg https://miro.medium.com/max/1050/1*lDSkAjF1958TpEafxuJsLg.jp... (source: https://selamjie.medium.com/remove-richard-stallman-fec6ec210794v https://selamjie.medium.com/remove-richard-stallman-fec6ec21...) Even before his indefensible statements about Epstein, RMS was toxic and there's no denying it.
boulos 6y ago
Hmm. I think RMS’s anti-establishment push was so much earlier (mostly against Bell Labs, etc.) that “the 90s” don’t really apply. If anything, it’s just his personality: he takes hardline positions and holds onto them. You might be right about hardliners being the only folks who have enough persistence to come through (vis a vis survivorship bias), but then you’re also just including the leaders of those companies you mentioned: Bill Gates and Larry Ellison were famously combative, competitive, and all sorts of other words.
- r3trohack3r 6y ago
  “What was left” certainly applies. These are predominantly the personality types, and socio-economic groups, that made it through this time period in open source. It isn’t easy being on the receiving end of this: http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/Comes-3096.pdf http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/Comes-3096.pdf
smsm42 6y ago
TBH, I has been participating in open source since the 1990s, and I never seen the actual stigma like you describe. Yes, OSS projects were laughed at, dismissed as hobbyist and unserious, insinuated to be low quality and "worth exactly how much you pay for it" - all that happened all the time. But implying OSS people are mentally ill... maybe somebody did it, but I've never seen it. And I did work with people from Microsoft, Oracle, etc. - albeit from the parts that were more OSS-friendly. But I think if it was indeed that widespread I'd hear about it. RMS certainly had a reputation to be an unusual character - even in OSS circles - but I didn't see it wielded as a weapon agains OSS - at least not until the cancel culture started. And yes, there were plenty of assholes in OSS (as there were outside) and it was mostly young people, many of whom confused being rude with being honest and direct, but I don't think it had anything to do with either Microsoft or mental illness. It had to do with being young and unexperienced and trying to form a new culture online where none existed before.
- r3trohack3r 6y ago
  Here is a nice document about their approach to “evangelism” http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/Comes-3096.pdf http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/Comes-3096.pdf And some nice documentation on patent trolling to make the commons financially unviable, this destroyed lives: http://techrights.org/2007/10/22/lasuit-evolution-linux/ http://techrights.org/2007/10/22/lasuit-evolution-linux/ And examples of when they paid folks to go spread a bunch of misinformation about the commons: http://techrights.org/wiki/index.php/AstroTurfing http://techrights.org/wiki/index.php/AstroTurfing
  - smsm42 6y ago
    I know there was a concerted FUD effort and much dirty playing, including all the stuff you are pointing out. What I specifically didn't see is usage of mental illness as a weapon against OSS.
    - r3trohack3r 6y ago
      It’s part of their documented strategy in the evangelism document. Section 11: Mopping Up. I’ll update my comment to read “mental deficiency” instead of mental illness for accuracy. I overstated. (Update: I’ve lost my edit button on the original post)
r3trohack3r 6y ago
In fairness, I overstated. They used “mental deficiency” as a weapon. Equating use of a competing product, the commons, as a sign of mental deficiency. Not necessarily illness. Source document: http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/Comes-3096.pdf http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/Comes-3096.pdf I’ve lost my edit button on the original post so putting the correction here.
yellowapple 6y ago
A different take on your different take: it might not be coincidental that said current wave of villification coincides with large technology corporations (ostensibly) embracing "open source". The causality is unclear - it could be some nefarious attempt by corporate interests to weaponize public sentiment against "obstacles" to said corporate interests, or it could simply be corporate interests becoming more 21w/illing to dip their toes in "open source" as its more fanatical figures get pushed out - but the correlation is plain as day. What's especially concerning to me is that such an alignment with corporate interests has somehow managed to successfully brand itself as "leftist" here in the US, both among right-wingers and among people who sincerely believe themselves to be advancing leftist causes by aligning with these large corporations against people with fairly strong anticapitalist leanings. Like with the FOSS movement, I strongly suspect that the ownership class is engaging in its own form of EEE against leftism: paying lip-service to it to appear to "embrace" it, while intending to "extend" it with things outright antithetical to workers' rights (like, you know, celebrating when large corporations terminate employees as long as it's for the "right" reasons, or celebrating when workers are prevented from acquiring arms and ammunition) until it's weak and fragmented enough to "extinguish". We're approaching a new age of wealth consolidation, be that wealth in the form of real estate, money, intellectual property, you name it. A new gilded age, with all the monopolism that entails. </tinfoil>
- eeZah7Ux 6y ago
  Not much tinfoil: big corporations successfully coopted the Free Software movement into Open Source and finally into unpaid labor for SaaS corporations. Then, they start banning GPLv3. Next, the same "Linux is cancer" microsoft now "loves Linux" and buys GitHub. The EEE process is going strong.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
wayneftw 6y ago
> They went as far as using mental illness as a weapon against the community (equating participation in the commons as an equivalent to mental illness). They went as far as fantasizing about associating those who used competing tech with mental deficiency. Here is the quote from page 55 of the document you cited [0] > Ideally, use of the competing technology becomes associated with mental deficiency, as in, "he believes in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and OS/2." Just keep rubbing it in, via the press, analysts, newsgroups, whatever. Make the complete failure of the competition's technology part of the mythology of the computer industry. We want to place selection pressure on [people who use the competing tech]... Do people really need a plan to talk this way though? I remember how Linux, Mac and Windows enthusiasts used to talk about each other in the 90s, early 2000s and even today. Even right here on HN. Is it all Microsoft's fault? I don't think so. This is how people behave, especially online. [0] http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/Comes-3096.pdf http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/Comes-3096.pdf
bitwize 6y ago
Who do you think is behind cancel culture? Social justice is like the Anti-Life Equation for bigcorps and other established institutions who are incensed that somewhere nerds are having fun without their official sanction. My eyes were opened when I heard a podcast in which a prominent cancelista put forth the idea that federated protocols were a Bad Thing because by requiring implementations to be protocol compatible, federated services caused "vendor lock-in" and stifled innovation. I thought, what in the seven hells is this? It's like something a professional propagandist for single-vendor services (think Slack, Salesforce, etc.) might say. Up there with Steve Ballmer declaring the GPL a cancer. Then the burblings of other open-source SJ types began to make more sense. Coraline Ada Ehmke declaring that the Open Source Definition made sense when the enemy was corporations, but now that the enemy was the fascist Trump administration it needed to change. The implication being that bigcorps were no longer the enemy, even though a hallmark of fascism is a corrupt collusion between the state and industry. "We have always been at war with Eastasia" tier cognitive dissonance. Anyway, open source was intended to protect users' freedom, not to fight a particular enemy. There was another one, I forgot who, who said something like in order to be "real open source" in $CURRENT_YEAR you can't just put the code out there, You need to have a code of conduct, and a code of conduct enforcement board. He lamented the fact that open source projects did not implement the standard practices used by corporate HR departments. Which, if you need to have an HR department to be legitimate open source then that limits legitimate open source participants to corporations only. I'm counting nonprofits like the Linux Foundation as "corporations" because they require (large amounts of) money, infrastructure, a legal team, and yes, an HR department in order to function. No Linus Torvalds could come along and start a project used by billions in the environment they want to create. It would have to go through the Proper Channels and be certified as anti-racist and free of toxic masculinity by the Proper Authorities. Like many forms of regulatory compliance, it's a filter to ensure only the big players can play, but unlike regulation there isn't even a nominal accountability to the public. Scientology style "dead agenting" tactics will suffice when governments are too slow to act. I want to believe that SJ in open source is for the greater good, but it looks far too much like a weapon to be wielded by the powerful against the users and developers open source was supposed to protect.
- mindslight 6y ago

jarfil 6y ago

On the other hand, following that logic, in times of peace the soldiers of yesteryear are out of work. I'm not a fan of cancel culture, but it might be just a sign that priorities have changed for people. Maybe the basic software liberties are enough for most, and it's no longer enough to fight for OSS, but instead time to consider "how" to fight for it. In a sense, it could be seen as a victory.

r3trohack3r 6y ago
“Good times breed weak [humans]” But I see it differently. I feel the wolves are in sheep’s skin, and are trying to convince me the sheep are wolves.
- _euac 6y ago
  I'm always curious about this line of thinking. What exactly do you think people are gaining by - say - denouncing sexism or other kinds of awful behavior? What's so wolfish about that?
  - r3trohack3r 6y ago
    Here is how a wolf would disrupt the commons: http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/Comes-3096.pdf http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/Comes-3096.pdf
  - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    They improve their social status, which potentially makes them more powerful and influential within their tribe. Unfortunately this can be entirely orthogonal to making genuine improvements in how humans relate to each other. You're dealing with some deep seated flaws in human social psychology, and the polarised morality of cancel culture doesn't leave room to explore potential solutions which are based on that uncomfortable truth. You're either an insider who agrees with The Cause or an outsider unbeliever who must be reeducated or destroyed. This can feel great for participants, in a slightly manic way. But there's no space for a more nuanced view, and that makes stable solutions unlikely.
    - dguaraglia 6y ago
      > You're either an insider who agrees with The Cause or an outsider unbeliever who must be reeducated or destroyed. This can be also said of the 'anti-anti' crowd. Their whole objective is to moralize about how bad the 'anti' crowd is and telling them to shut up, while throwing a number of perfectly valid concerns out the window in the process. While most people in HN might leave it at denouncing the behavior, people have been doxxed, harassed online and in person for 'canceling' someone or something before. BTW, I hate the 'cancel culture' term. I hate how it is used by people who - given the opportunity - would 'cancel' LGBT rights, immigration, etc. Every time I see someone using the term, I can't help but feel they've fallen for Propaganda 101.
  - strken 6y ago
    People who denounce sexism because they've got a moral framework or intuition that tells them sexism is bad are principled actors. People who denounce sexism because they're trying to get likes on social media, because it grants them social approval, or because they've made a job out of it are acting out of self-interest. Not everyone who is in the second group knows what their motivations are: people usually come up with seemingly altruistic reasons for self-interested behaviour, and genuinely believe those reasons, even though they wouldn't behave that way if they weren't getting anything out of it. As per the article, "punishment should be proportional to the offence", and punishments should ensure the offender will "constructively come to understand, repent, and make amends for an infraction". The first group can be relied upon to see transgressions in light of their broader moral principles. They won't always seek punishments that are proportional and restorative, because those are moral principles in themselves, but they'll at least be trying to do what they believe is a good thing. The second group is scary because they just don't stop. They'll keep doing things in order to get the reward of social approval or social media, for as long as that reward lasts. Even worse, because they don't have good introspection about the underlying rewards that incentivise them, they'll reward each other for escalating. They'll tear people's lives apart without a shred of guilt, because they're getting something out of it, which is why they're seen as predators.
    - dguaraglia 6y ago
      I understand your argument, but wouldn't be the opposite be true too? Aren't RMS's comments defending Minsky just a form of 'clout seeking' and being argumentative for arguments sake? If people are making the case that RMS is neurodivergent and therefore his behavior should be tolerated, shouldn't we be making exactly the same argument about the people you put on the latter group? Or is it only people we agree with that get the benefit of being 'neurodivergent'?
      - strken 6y ago
        The argument was explaining why Twitter mobs form and what they're getting out of it, not in favour of RMS. I think the general principle of scepticism towards people who benefit from the stance they hold applies to you and I, to RMS, and to his detractors. That being said, I don't think he expected to benefit socially from the opinions that got him cancelled in general, or from complaining about the term "assaulting" in particular. His autism is less relevant than there being no real gain for him. It being a costly opinion for him to express is evidence he genuinely believes it. Whether or not he should be tolerated is another question, but I don't think he's the metaphorical wolf here.
readflaggedcomm 6y ago
Or apparatchiks inevitably replace enthusiasts, enabling mainstream influence.

seebs 6y ago

That's a fascinating take, but I don't think it's particularly related to what actually happened. I wasn't toxic because of some Microsoft FUD, I was toxic because I was a teenager with low empathy who hadn't learned things yet. I grew out of it. Lots of people in open source were never particularly toxic, and there's no reason they should have been. Even granting the existence of the external stress (and it really was NOT that big a deal), not everyone reacts to stress by treating people badly. Furthermore, people who didn't grow up around those OSS advocates have exactly the same problems sometimes, for the same reason that people in every field of human endeavor have those problems sometimes.

boulos 6y ago
What, if anything, would you update in your post from a decade ago [1] on Steve Jobs, RMS, and empathy? (My guess is not much, other than maybe a personal preference on the empathy side?) [1] https://www.seebs.net/log/post/2011/10/11/why-steve-jobs-did-more-for-free-software-than-rms-did./ https://www.seebs.net/log/post/2011/10/11/why-steve-jobs-did...
- preommr 6y ago
  Is seebs someone that's particularly famous? The parent comment seems to imply they were part of the "Stallman, Linus, ESR, et. al." And their profile just says "that seebs".
  - seebs 6y ago
    I don't know about "particularly" famous but I know that I've talked to people whose family members were programmers who reacted with "wait you know SEEBS!?!" when they mentioned me, so apparently some people have heard of me. I used to be fairly active in Usenet discussions of C, and I've published some stuff, most of it now lost to the mists of time.
- seebs 6y ago
  Haha, wow. I totally forgot I wrote that one. When I wrote that I was unaware of some of the Sort Of Creepy stuff. I recognize that some of the allegedly creepy stuff is sorta misquoted. I think that matters. But I don't think it changes my overall conclusions, which is that RMS was acting in a way that he could reasonably predict would hurt or distress people, and he didn't think it was important to change this. But I also note that, completely unaware of any of the allegations now being discussed, I thought he was bad for the development of free and open source software because he was bad at treating people in ways conducive to positive outcomes, and I knew many people who worked on free or open source software, or worked with the FSF or on FSF projects, who also felt that way. I believe quite a few of them had told him of these concerns. I wrote about the specific more-recent RMS stuff last year: https://www.seebs.net/log/post/2019/09/21/rms-minsky-and-the-search-for-truth/ https://www.seebs.net/log/post/2019/09/21/rms-minsky-and-the... Thomas Bushnell wrote about this, too, and honestly his post was much better: https://medium.com/@thomas.bushnell/a-reflection-on-the-departure-of-rms-18e6a835fd84 https://medium.com/@thomas.bushnell/a-reflection-on-the-depa... It is perhaps worth noting that, maybe thirty years ago, I had some run-ins with Thomas Bushnell, and I thought he was sort of a jerk at the time, but when I called him out on an example of that, he acknowledged it and apologized and said he'd try to do better. Nothing external to RMS was preventing RMS from doing that if people said his behavior hurt or distressed them. The idea that we couldn't try to do better because we were being threatened by Microsoft is honestly sort of condescending and insulting in and of itself.

Mc91 6y ago

> The toxicity in these communities is a result of what was leftover Toxicity relative to what? I have worked in a number of places much more toxic than Stallman's GNU project, or Linus's Linux kernel etc. As has been said before - the difference between open source communities and closed source companies is that open source communities are open - we can see the flamewars on public mailing lists. There are plenty of toxic Jira pull request code review comment threads out there, resulting in lots of meetings with managers over turf wars or whatnot, which the world will never see because it's private.

klodolph 6y ago

I think that this is just an attempt at explaining away toxic behavior without taking responsibility for it. People in the OSS community can, at times, glorify toxic behavior. I know people who take it as a badge of honor to "speak the truth", "speak directly", or "have no filter". Speaking directly and speaking the truth are good ideals to have, but if you really want to PROVE that you speak the truth and don't fear social pressures, what better way to do it than to be rude or insensitive to people? Take Mr. X, who is outraged by Microsoft's behavior and refuses to buy Microsoft's products, tells other people about his problems with Microsoft, and tells everyone to use FOSS alternatives? Now, Mr. X also thinks that it's stupid to believe in god, and is not afraid to say it to everyone he meets. He's suddenly changed from "FOSS advocate" to "toxic workplace on legs". This is by no means exclusive to the FOSS community. Think of the product manager who styles himself a Steve Jobs type, who abuses his staff in the style of Steve Jobs. These aren't examples I'm picking out of a hat; these are real people.

Clewza313 6y ago
So expressing sincerely held beliefs in a personal forum like his own website is in and of itself "toxic"? Many of RMS's beliefs are indeed well outside the mainstream, but as far as I'm aware nobody has ever accused him actually doing anything abusive to anybody.
- rtpg 6y ago
  How is there any controversy to judging people for what they believe? This seems so normal! At every level of society we judge people for what they think, for their sort of moral philosophy. That's morality on some level (or some sort of meta-morality). Though I think the added point here is that people who believe something _and_ have some power over other people can effectively apply these beliefs. If I say "I don't think that hiring women is a good idea cuz they might go on maternity leave" and I'm also the managing director of some non-profit, well... I feel like suspicion about my capabilities in that role are judstified!
- Arainach 6y ago
  https://selamjie.medium.com/remove-richard-stallman-appendix-a-a7e41e784f88 https://selamjie.medium.com/remove-richard-stallman-appendix... >I recall being told early in my freshman year “If RMS hits on you, just say ‘I’m a vi user’ even if it’s not true.” >Richard Stallman told me of his misery and that he’d kill himself if I didn’t go out with him. There's also his office door at one point: https://miro.medium.com/max/1050/1*lDSkAjF1958TpEafxuJsLg.jpeg https://miro.medium.com/max/1050/1*lDSkAjF1958TpEafxuJsLg.jp... (source: https://selamjie.medium.com/remove-richard-stallman-fec6ec210794v https://selamjie.medium.com/remove-richard-stallman-fec6ec21...) Even before his indefensible statements about Epstein, RMS was toxic and there's no denying it.

boulos 6y ago

Hmm. I think RMS’s anti-establishment push was so much earlier (mostly against Bell Labs, etc.) that “the 90s” don’t really apply. If anything, it’s just his personality: he takes hardline positions and holds onto them. You might be right about hardliners being the only folks who have enough persistence to come through (vis a vis survivorship bias), but then you’re also just including the leaders of those companies you mentioned: Bill Gates and Larry Ellison were famously combative, competitive, and all sorts of other words.

r3trohack3r 6y ago
“What was left” certainly applies. These are predominantly the personality types, and socio-economic groups, that made it through this time period in open source. It isn’t easy being on the receiving end of this: http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/Comes-3096.pdf http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/Comes-3096.pdf

smsm42 6y ago

TBH, I has been participating in open source since the 1990s, and I never seen the actual stigma like you describe. Yes, OSS projects were laughed at, dismissed as hobbyist and unserious, insinuated to be low quality and "worth exactly how much you pay for it" - all that happened all the time. But implying OSS people are mentally ill... maybe somebody did it, but I've never seen it. And I did work with people from Microsoft, Oracle, etc. - albeit from the parts that were more OSS-friendly. But I think if it was indeed that widespread I'd hear about it. RMS certainly had a reputation to be an unusual character - even in OSS circles - but I didn't see it wielded as a weapon agains OSS - at least not until the cancel culture started. And yes, there were plenty of assholes in OSS (as there were outside) and it was mostly young people, many of whom confused being rude with being honest and direct, but I don't think it had anything to do with either Microsoft or mental illness. It had to do with being young and unexperienced and trying to form a new culture online where none existed before.

r3trohack3r 6y ago
Here is a nice document about their approach to “evangelism” http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/Comes-3096.pdf http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/Comes-3096.pdf And some nice documentation on patent trolling to make the commons financially unviable, this destroyed lives: http://techrights.org/2007/10/22/lasuit-evolution-linux/ http://techrights.org/2007/10/22/lasuit-evolution-linux/ And examples of when they paid folks to go spread a bunch of misinformation about the commons: http://techrights.org/wiki/index.php/AstroTurfing http://techrights.org/wiki/index.php/AstroTurfing
- smsm42 6y ago
  I know there was a concerted FUD effort and much dirty playing, including all the stuff you are pointing out. What I specifically didn't see is usage of mental illness as a weapon against OSS.
  - r3trohack3r 6y ago
    It’s part of their documented strategy in the evangelism document. Section 11: Mopping Up. I’ll update my comment to read “mental deficiency” instead of mental illness for accuracy. I overstated. (Update: I’ve lost my edit button on the original post)

r3trohack3r 6y ago

In fairness, I overstated. They used “mental deficiency” as a weapon. Equating use of a competing product, the commons, as a sign of mental deficiency. Not necessarily illness. Source document: http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/Comes-3096.pdf http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/Comes-3096.pdf I’ve lost my edit button on the original post so putting the correction here.

yellowapple 6y ago

A different take on your different take: it might not be coincidental that said current wave of villification coincides with large technology corporations (ostensibly) embracing "open source". The causality is unclear - it could be some nefarious attempt by corporate interests to weaponize public sentiment against "obstacles" to said corporate interests, or it could simply be corporate interests becoming more 21w/illing to dip their toes in "open source" as its more fanatical figures get pushed out - but the correlation is plain as day. What's especially concerning to me is that such an alignment with corporate interests has somehow managed to successfully brand itself as "leftist" here in the US, both among right-wingers and among people who sincerely believe themselves to be advancing leftist causes by aligning with these large corporations against people with fairly strong anticapitalist leanings. Like with the FOSS movement, I strongly suspect that the ownership class is engaging in its own form of EEE against leftism: paying lip-service to it to appear to "embrace" it, while intending to "extend" it with things outright antithetical to workers' rights (like, you know, celebrating when large corporations terminate employees as long as it's for the "right" reasons, or celebrating when workers are prevented from acquiring arms and ammunition) until it's weak and fragmented enough to "extinguish". We're approaching a new age of wealth consolidation, be that wealth in the form of real estate, money, intellectual property, you name it. A new gilded age, with all the monopolism that entails. </tinfoil>

eeZah7Ux 6y ago
Not much tinfoil: big corporations successfully coopted the Free Software movement into Open Source and finally into unpaid labor for SaaS corporations. Then, they start banning GPLv3. Next, the same "Linux is cancer" microsoft now "loves Linux" and buys GitHub. The EEE process is going strong.
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wayneftw 6y ago

> They went as far as using mental illness as a weapon against the community (equating participation in the commons as an equivalent to mental illness). They went as far as fantasizing about associating those who used competing tech with mental deficiency. Here is the quote from page 55 of the document you cited [0] > Ideally, use of the competing technology becomes associated with mental deficiency, as in, "he believes in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and OS/2." Just keep rubbing it in, via the press, analysts, newsgroups, whatever. Make the complete failure of the competition's technology part of the mythology of the computer industry. We want to place selection pressure on [people who use the competing tech]... Do people really need a plan to talk this way though? I remember how Linux, Mac and Windows enthusiasts used to talk about each other in the 90s, early 2000s and even today. Even right here on HN. Is it all Microsoft's fault? I don't think so. This is how people behave, especially online. [0] http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/Comes-3096.pdf http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/Comes-3096.pdf

bitwize 6y ago

Who do you think is behind cancel culture? Social justice is like the Anti-Life Equation for bigcorps and other established institutions who are incensed that somewhere nerds are having fun without their official sanction. My eyes were opened when I heard a podcast in which a prominent cancelista put forth the idea that federated protocols were a Bad Thing because by requiring implementations to be protocol compatible, federated services caused "vendor lock-in" and stifled innovation. I thought, what in the seven hells is this? It's like something a professional propagandist for single-vendor services (think Slack, Salesforce, etc.) might say. Up there with Steve Ballmer declaring the GPL a cancer. Then the burblings of other open-source SJ types began to make more sense. Coraline Ada Ehmke declaring that the Open Source Definition made sense when the enemy was corporations, but now that the enemy was the fascist Trump administration it needed to change. The implication being that bigcorps were no longer the enemy, even though a hallmark of fascism is a corrupt collusion between the state and industry. "We have always been at war with Eastasia" tier cognitive dissonance. Anyway, open source was intended to protect users' freedom, not to fight a particular enemy. There was another one, I forgot who, who said something like in order to be "real open source" in $CURRENT_YEAR you can't just put the code out there, You need to have a code of conduct, and a code of conduct enforcement board. He lamented the fact that open source projects did not implement the standard practices used by corporate HR departments. Which, if you need to have an HR department to be legitimate open source then that limits legitimate open source participants to corporations only. I'm counting nonprofits like the Linux Foundation as "corporations" because they require (large amounts of) money, infrastructure, a legal team, and yes, an HR department in order to function. No Linus Torvalds could come along and start a project used by billions in the environment they want to create. It would have to go through the Proper Channels and be certified as anti-racist and free of toxic masculinity by the Proper Authorities. Like many forms of regulatory compliance, it's a filter to ensure only the big players can play, but unlike regulation there isn't even a nominal accountability to the public. Scientology style "dead agenting" tactics will suffice when governments are too slow to act. I want to believe that SJ in open source is for the greater good, but it looks far too much like a weapon to be wielded by the powerful against the users and developers open source was supposed to protect.

mindslight 6y ago