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Nobody said we should put him out on an ice floe, dismiss his achievements, or ignore his contributions. The point parent and the essay made is to ask what his

Nobody said we should put him out on an ice floe, dismiss his achievements, or ignore his contributions. The point parent and the essay made is to ask what his new achievements have been. We can respect the work he has done in the past while questioning whether he is contributing well to the work that needs to be done now. In fact many accomplished leaders themselves recognize that they need to be succeeded by a new person at some point. They can retain an emeritus status and participate in the discourse while allowing the baton to pass. Since we all die at some point, this is in truth necessary for a movement or organization to continue.

rolandog 4y ago
I'm of the opinion that he doesn't have to be a perfect human being; sometimes it's hard to disentangle facts from all the character assassination attempts that are thrown at him, and that's why I think we should rein in our emotions and not talk so passionately. I also think that the enemies of free and libre open source software definitely don't want us to be able to have a civil debate, so they probably send shills to derail conversations (it's an asymmetric war, after all). If we look back at historic movements, they weren't always led by people that were perfect by every metric (source: Behind The Bastards multi-volume episodes on Clarence Thomas, where they mention that some people that advanced equality in regards to racism were at the same time misogynistic, and didn't consider it worthwhile to advance women's rights). As long as Stallman is a steward for the things we hold dear, I'm of the opinion that it's a good thing for us... Despite his flaws as a person, but with the condition that he get with the times and improve his behavior.