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I'll begin by quoting an excerpt from "A man for all seasons" Alice More: Arrest him! More: Why, what has he done? Margaret More: He's bad!

I'll begin by quoting an excerpt from "A man for all seasons" Alice More: Arrest him! More: Why, what has he done? Margaret More: He's bad! More: There is no law against that. Will Roper: There is! God's law! More: Then God can arrest him. Alice: While you talk, he's gone! More: And go he should, if he was the Devil himself, until he broke the law! Roper: So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law! More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? Roper: I'd cut down every law in England to do that! More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast– man's laws, not God's– and if you cut them down—and you're just the man to do it—do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law for my own safety's sake. ---- With every passing year, and the way modern web/cloud based SaaS is playing out, RMS seems increasingly prescient. His uncompromising and principled stance on software freedoms is crucial to maintaining the Overton window on the matter, allowing space for others to make compromises and find practical solutions.

justinator 4y ago
I'll begin by quoted this page, https://thenewstack.io/why-almost-everyone-wants-richard-stallman-cancelled/ https://thenewstack.io/why-almost-everyone-wants-richard-sta... And his public behavior has been equally worrisome. According to dozens of witnesses, Stallman actively sexually harassed women students and faculty at MIT, for 30 or more years. To the point that women have passed down RMS-specific avoidance tactics like he hates plants so faculty should fill their offices with them or “If RMS hits on you, just say ‘I’m a vi user’ even if it’s not true.” It had allegedly reached the point that he was asked so many times to stop asking out colleagues and students that he decided to create and hand out a business card to non-verbally harass. Georgia Lyle, who worked at FSF from 2015 to 2018, wrote a long Twitter thread about the exhaustive — and ultimately moot — efforts she and other FSF staff made trying to change Stallman’s toxic behavior and silence his “racist and sexist ‘hacker humor’.” I don't think I can improve upon that.
- teddyh 4y ago
  From what I can tell, every allegation you repeated is false: https://sterling-archermedes.github.io/ https://sterling-archermedes.github.io/
  - cyber_kinetist 4y ago
    This covers the Epstein comment drama, but what about the actual sexual harassment allegations?
    - daveevad 4y ago
    - teddyh 4y ago
      The link I gave does cover those, from what I can tell.
  - tptacek 4y ago
    This doesn't rebut any of those allegations, and in fact adds new ones, like the time Stallman threatened to commit suicide if a woman refused to date him.
    - teddyh 4y ago
      - tptacek 4y ago
        No, it was not in fact OK to coerce someone into a date with a threat of suicide in 1985. I was there. It's telling, about this whole Stallman debate, that anyone would even try to make this claim. Anyways, I didn't know anything about the suicide threat before seeing this link, and didn't know my contempt for Stallman could get any deeper. So thanks for that!
        4y ago
shadowgovt 4y ago
If anything, I think Stallman represents an increasingly-obsolete view of computer freedom. It is perhaps worth meditating on what happens to the protagonist of A Man For All Seasons. This article gives good reasons why modern financial incentives make it increasingly irrelevant if software is copylefted (the Corps interpret copyleft as damage and route around it; the free software community has not demonstrated enough organizational energy or proactive vision to outpace moneyed development with their copyleft solutions). Meanwhile, some of the Fundamental Freedoms are philosophically undercut in the Cloud era; why should you have the right to view the source code or modify what runs on someone else's computer? The best the GNU philosophy gave us is "don't use Cloud," which is head-in-sand ignorant of how modern developers value things. New approaches are needed, and the approach represented by GNU has run its course. The Overton Window moves regardless of RMS's opinion these days
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  > Meanwhile, some of the Fundamental Freedoms are philosophically undercut in the Cloud era; why should you have the right to view the source code or modify what runs on someone else's computer? Because the user should have that right regardless of where the program happens to execute. > The best the GNU philosophy gave us is "don't use Cloud," Er, no? They wrote the AGPL.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    > Because the user should have that right regardless of where the program happens to execute. Sorry, that makes no sense. I have no right to the source code of the bank's ATM, and even less right to run any software I choose on that hardware.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
      You're welcome to that opinion, but you're just arguing against Free Software in general; that's exactly the same argument as saying that the user has no right to inspect or control the software running on their own machine.
flomo 4y ago
People love Stallman as a moral figurehead. A lot of people who have 'worked for' him consider him to be a terrible boss. There has been many posts like this over the years, when a true believer figures out the leader is terrible at leading. You could even look at the history of FOSS organizing as setting up alternative organizations where RMS has no pull. Even Debian was about "laws, not men". I also do not believe Stallman 'got' SaaS or ever even really understood the basic economics of the software industry. Emacs was originally SaaS software if you weren't aware.
dale_glass 4y ago
I think it's clear RMS has some good principles, and an absolutely awful personality that doesn't make for a good leader. There's a solution to that: shove him off somewhere to the side, enshrined as a "spiritual leader" people consult with for nuggets of wisdom, and then 99% of the actual functioning of the organization is done by other people.

justinator 4y ago

I'll begin by quoted this page, https://thenewstack.io/why-almost-everyone-wants-richard-stallman-cancelled/ https://thenewstack.io/why-almost-everyone-wants-richard-sta... And his public behavior has been equally worrisome. According to dozens of witnesses, Stallman actively sexually harassed women students and faculty at MIT, for 30 or more years. To the point that women have passed down RMS-specific avoidance tactics like he hates plants so faculty should fill their offices with them or “If RMS hits on you, just say ‘I’m a vi user’ even if it’s not true.” It had allegedly reached the point that he was asked so many times to stop asking out colleagues and students that he decided to create and hand out a business card to non-verbally harass. Georgia Lyle, who worked at FSF from 2015 to 2018, wrote a long Twitter thread about the exhaustive — and ultimately moot — efforts she and other FSF staff made trying to change Stallman’s toxic behavior and silence his “racist and sexist ‘hacker humor’.” I don't think I can improve upon that.

teddyh 4y ago
From what I can tell, every allegation you repeated is false: https://sterling-archermedes.github.io/ https://sterling-archermedes.github.io/
- cyber_kinetist 4y ago
  This covers the Epstein comment drama, but what about the actual sexual harassment allegations?
  - daveevad 4y ago
  - teddyh 4y ago
    The link I gave does cover those, from what I can tell.
- tptacek 4y ago
  This doesn't rebut any of those allegations, and in fact adds new ones, like the time Stallman threatened to commit suicide if a woman refused to date him.
  - teddyh 4y ago
    - tptacek 4y ago
      No, it was not in fact OK to coerce someone into a date with a threat of suicide in 1985. I was there. It's telling, about this whole Stallman debate, that anyone would even try to make this claim. Anyways, I didn't know anything about the suicide threat before seeing this link, and didn't know my contempt for Stallman could get any deeper. So thanks for that!
      - 4y ago

shadowgovt 4y ago

If anything, I think Stallman represents an increasingly-obsolete view of computer freedom. It is perhaps worth meditating on what happens to the protagonist of A Man For All Seasons. This article gives good reasons why modern financial incentives make it increasingly irrelevant if software is copylefted (the Corps interpret copyleft as damage and route around it; the free software community has not demonstrated enough organizational energy or proactive vision to outpace moneyed development with their copyleft solutions). Meanwhile, some of the Fundamental Freedoms are philosophically undercut in the Cloud era; why should you have the right to view the source code or modify what runs on someone else's computer? The best the GNU philosophy gave us is "don't use Cloud," which is head-in-sand ignorant of how modern developers value things. New approaches are needed, and the approach represented by GNU has run its course. The Overton Window moves regardless of RMS's opinion these days

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
> Meanwhile, some of the Fundamental Freedoms are philosophically undercut in the Cloud era; why should you have the right to view the source code or modify what runs on someone else's computer? Because the user should have that right regardless of where the program happens to execute. > The best the GNU philosophy gave us is "don't use Cloud," Er, no? They wrote the AGPL.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  > Because the user should have that right regardless of where the program happens to execute. Sorry, that makes no sense. I have no right to the source code of the bank's ATM, and even less right to run any software I choose on that hardware.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    You're welcome to that opinion, but you're just arguing against Free Software in general; that's exactly the same argument as saying that the user has no right to inspect or control the software running on their own machine.

flomo 4y ago

People love Stallman as a moral figurehead. A lot of people who have 'worked for' him consider him to be a terrible boss. There has been many posts like this over the years, when a true believer figures out the leader is terrible at leading. You could even look at the history of FOSS organizing as setting up alternative organizations where RMS has no pull. Even Debian was about "laws, not men". I also do not believe Stallman 'got' SaaS or ever even really understood the basic economics of the software industry. Emacs was originally SaaS software if you weren't aware.

dale_glass 4y ago

I think it's clear RMS has some good principles, and an absolutely awful personality that doesn't make for a good leader. There's a solution to that: shove him off somewhere to the side, enshrined as a "spiritual leader" people consult with for nuggets of wisdom, and then 99% of the actual functioning of the organization is done by other people.