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by padjo 1y ago

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sunshine-o 1y ago
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- saagarjha 1y ago
  It sounds like Stallman had quite the impact on you. Is it really so foreign to you that putting someone in a leadership position that can broaden that reach to people who are unlike you might be worth doing?
  - guerrilla 1y ago
    Their point is obviously that they can't if they aren't qualified. I don't know if that's actually true but it's clear what they're arguing here anyway.
    - qwertox 1y ago
      But how does this relate to gender? Even if you assume only two genders, why would being a feminine person play any role in their qualifications? That's what the comment was about.
      - zo1 1y ago
        I would imagine because women are under-represented in this field, so naturally we have to weight gender over qualifications. It's just the way things are. I wish it wasn't and qualifications/ability played a 100% part in these decisions.
        darkwater 1y ago
        > I would imagine because women are under-represented in this field, So the ones in the field have passed a higher barrier and pressure and are more qualified than the p80 male. This could be another spin on the topic ;)
        cbeach 1y ago
        You're assuming the Left stayed out of technology, and we still run a meritocracy.
    - saagarjha 1y ago
      Stallman has historically done pretty poorly at getting people involved in the free software movement. Before someone goes "surely you are talking about women and other underrepresented groups" no I am not talking about them, although that is also important of course. I'm talking about the people who are not hackers, the people who are stuck using Microsoft Office at their job but want to know about better options, the people who want their computer to not suddenly update and sell them ads but couldn't name a single programming language. Stallman has really dropped the ball for those people. I used to think he was quirky and principled too and I value his contributions but when I zoom out I've stopped finding that he's able to campaign for change effectively. Maybe he was qualified in 1980 but in a world where everyone has a phone in their pocket that is not only proprietary but that they can only really interact with as an appliance, perhaps he is not the most qualified person anymore.
      - dandellion 1y ago
        Even if Stallman had only given given us Emacs and we ignored everything else he has ever done, he'd still have given us more and brought more people involved in free software than this new crop of MBA/communications degree CEOs that has taken over ever will.
        oblio 1y ago
        We need more Torvalds and Van Rossums and Kawaguchis than Stallmans.
        Andrew_nenakhov 1y ago
        Not really. Without Stallman, there would be no Torvalds. After Stallman launched the GNU project, the emergence of GNU licensed kernel for x86 architecture was inevitable. It just happened that Linux became that kernel. Had it not, the GNU project folks led by rms would have inevitably made their own.
        hylaride 1y ago
    - ruszki 1y ago
      There are studies about this. A lot. Many of them garbage, because their reference points were garbage (like 2008), or flat out lied, but it's quite clear that even if it matters on C-level jobs, it's miniscule. It was studied a lot because of Norway, and the following countries in Europe. Either it was pure sexism to have a distorted sex distribution, or C-level jobs don't really matter for companies outlook. I don't think that it's the latter. Btw, these studies also show that "experience", and "qualification" were distorted for no good reason.
      - guerrilla 1y ago
        I don't know what you're trying to say but we weren't talking about companies or countries. We were talking about leadership of a political movement. It's a revolutionary ideology, not a business.
        ruszki 1y ago
        Yes, but that shows that there is no real lack of qualifications by sex, just lack of opportunity. And that’s the best data which you can get today. Do you have any data which shows that the type of leadership must be so different which affects this? Because if not, then you can infer only one thing from that data, and not what you did.
        guerrilla 1y ago
        I think you're lost in the weeds. If you don't know anything about software, you're not qualified to talk about software. The end.
        ruszki 1y ago
        Nobody said otherwise. Even sexists say the same thing because they can hide behind “sex blindness”, just like with racists and color blindness. Are you saying that women with that qualification have the same opportunities as men without external intervention? Then why did you even bring up sex, and why I need to show you how to express it?
  - sunshine-o 1y ago
    I only saw him once and I immediately understood how he could lead such a revolution. It is not about being "like him", he was just some fat old man with a big beard and I remember thinking he probably smells pretty bad. What was broad and inspiring was his vision and leadership as an human.
    - j45 1y ago
      Everyone can develop their own personal leadership too instead of looking to others and judging leadership.
      - guerrilla 1y ago
        If that were true, the world would be a lot better than it is in general.
        j45 1y ago
        It is true for the people who choose to lead themselves. It doesn’t depend on external expression or validation.
    - saagarjha 1y ago
      Again, I appreciate that you found him inspiring. The point is that not everyone does.
    - dariosalvi78 1y ago
      I am also very fond of Stallman, but we need to recognise that he had as many lovers as he had haters. He may have pushed many outside of the free software movement in fact because of his character. I still think that the FSF needs a strong character with a clear vision, man or woman, but maybe with less orthodoxy than RMS.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
  - rgrs 1y ago
    How would you quantify reach? The PR or number of projects delivered?
    - saagarjha 1y ago
      I value effectiveness in manifesting change in the world. This takes many forms. I think one of the most depressing and myopic views that hackers have is that code rules everything, when in fact social movements live and die upon their accessibility and impact. If you think that laboring in a cave and writing the next Free text editor is going to bring about free software, the reality is that three proprietary editors have already eaten its lunch, the latter two of which are VC backed and soon to require cloud registration, and the last which was written using AI trained on your code that you very carefully structured to be unusable to build non-free software on top of.
      - wolvesechoes 1y ago
        You are right, it is not about writing a code. That's the common problem when discussing free software among geeks. Of course it is about political action, putting pressure, being loud etc. But now look at the current state of affairs and tell me - how successful were all those orgs, with more professional management, PR people and proper gender representation? We don't need another man or lady in suit, giving generic word-salad speeches, full of currently fashionable words. Those on the other side of the fence have easily can have much more of those.
- LaGrange 1y ago
  If by impact you mean “turn off people from the movement” then sure. I happen to know multiple people who either met or even hosted him, and not a single one of them was impressed. Stallman was a horrible promoter.
- cbeach 1y ago
  > every time one of those foundations announce a "non coding" woman as their new leader, if you read between the lines, it is because they need to be more "ESG" That might explain why the Scala Center (which oversees the Scala language) has a young political sciences grad as its executive director. She has zero commercial or academic experience in Scala. And this is how she behaves at conferences: https://x.com/jdegoes/status/1633888998434193411 https://x.com/jdegoes/status/1633888998434193411 Leftwing political activism, cancel culture and #metoo-style witchhunts (example: https://pretty.direct/statement https://pretty.direct/statement ) This is what the Scala "community" has become. It's tragic, given how good the language is.
  - ethbr1 1y ago
    Causation does not imply correlation. That there are non-technical leaders who lose the thread does not mean that leaders lose the thread because they're non-technical. There are plenty of technical leaders who have also gone off on personal tangents and vendettas! Maybe a more accurate appraisal would be 'some people suck at a job, and it's unfortunately difficult to dislodge a bad leader anywhere'.
- soulofmischief 1y ago
  Women are more than seductresses. This is an apalling line of reasoning. There are a lot of issues to hate in our industry, and you lose all credibility by attempting to tie these issues to women.
FirmwareBurner 1y ago
[flagged]
- oblio 1y ago
  LOL. Compare and contrast this: > Say what you want about the Stalleman type he was very inspiring and had real leadership. So a lot of hackers followed him in his crazy vision and that gave us a lot. With this: > It is very feminine and obviously doesn't work that well. It's a super sexist comment. A comment born in the 60s, or I guess in our geek land, still in 2025.
  - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
    >It's a super sexist comment. Is it? To answer this, just reverse the genders in the statement and see if it's still sexist. "It's very masculine and obviously doesn't work that well"
    - zdware 1y ago
      Yes - why are these adjectives even coming up at all? There are alternatives that would probably make your point in a succinct manner without being sexist.
    - RIMR 1y ago
      Yeah, that's still sexist. Was that your point, because it kinda feels like you're presenting this as a gotcha or something...
    - padjo 1y ago
      Yeah I think it’s fair to say that in many circumstances people would use masculine as a pejorative and not get called out for being sexist. There’s some historic power imbalance stuff at play there, but it’s still sexist. If you have problems with some type of behaviour it’s much better to say exactly what they are rather than appealing to some platonic notion of sex characteristics, which is both offensive and poorly communicates your position.
    - deleted 1y ago

[flagged]

by padjo 1y ago

[flagged]

sunshine-o 1y ago

[flagged]

saagarjha 1y ago
It sounds like Stallman had quite the impact on you. Is it really so foreign to you that putting someone in a leadership position that can broaden that reach to people who are unlike you might be worth doing?
- guerrilla 1y ago
  Their point is obviously that they can't if they aren't qualified. I don't know if that's actually true but it's clear what they're arguing here anyway.
  - qwertox 1y ago
    But how does this relate to gender? Even if you assume only two genders, why would being a feminine person play any role in their qualifications? That's what the comment was about.
    - zo1 1y ago
      I would imagine because women are under-represented in this field, so naturally we have to weight gender over qualifications. It's just the way things are. I wish it wasn't and qualifications/ability played a 100% part in these decisions.
      - darkwater 1y ago
        > I would imagine because women are under-represented in this field, So the ones in the field have passed a higher barrier and pressure and are more qualified than the p80 male. This could be another spin on the topic ;)
        cbeach 1y ago
        You're assuming the Left stayed out of technology, and we still run a meritocracy.
  - saagarjha 1y ago
    Stallman has historically done pretty poorly at getting people involved in the free software movement. Before someone goes "surely you are talking about women and other underrepresented groups" no I am not talking about them, although that is also important of course. I'm talking about the people who are not hackers, the people who are stuck using Microsoft Office at their job but want to know about better options, the people who want their computer to not suddenly update and sell them ads but couldn't name a single programming language. Stallman has really dropped the ball for those people. I used to think he was quirky and principled too and I value his contributions but when I zoom out I've stopped finding that he's able to campaign for change effectively. Maybe he was qualified in 1980 but in a world where everyone has a phone in their pocket that is not only proprietary but that they can only really interact with as an appliance, perhaps he is not the most qualified person anymore.
    - dandellion 1y ago
      Even if Stallman had only given given us Emacs and we ignored everything else he has ever done, he'd still have given us more and brought more people involved in free software than this new crop of MBA/communications degree CEOs that has taken over ever will.
      - oblio 1y ago
        We need more Torvalds and Van Rossums and Kawaguchis than Stallmans.
        Andrew_nenakhov 1y ago
        Not really. Without Stallman, there would be no Torvalds. After Stallman launched the GNU project, the emergence of GNU licensed kernel for x86 architecture was inevitable. It just happened that Linux became that kernel. Had it not, the GNU project folks led by rms would have inevitably made their own.
        hylaride 1y ago
  - ruszki 1y ago
    There are studies about this. A lot. Many of them garbage, because their reference points were garbage (like 2008), or flat out lied, but it's quite clear that even if it matters on C-level jobs, it's miniscule. It was studied a lot because of Norway, and the following countries in Europe. Either it was pure sexism to have a distorted sex distribution, or C-level jobs don't really matter for companies outlook. I don't think that it's the latter. Btw, these studies also show that "experience", and "qualification" were distorted for no good reason.
    - guerrilla 1y ago
      I don't know what you're trying to say but we weren't talking about companies or countries. We were talking about leadership of a political movement. It's a revolutionary ideology, not a business.
      - ruszki 1y ago
        Yes, but that shows that there is no real lack of qualifications by sex, just lack of opportunity. And that’s the best data which you can get today. Do you have any data which shows that the type of leadership must be so different which affects this? Because if not, then you can infer only one thing from that data, and not what you did.
        guerrilla 1y ago
        I think you're lost in the weeds. If you don't know anything about software, you're not qualified to talk about software. The end.
        ruszki 1y ago
        Nobody said otherwise. Even sexists say the same thing because they can hide behind “sex blindness”, just like with racists and color blindness. Are you saying that women with that qualification have the same opportunities as men without external intervention? Then why did you even bring up sex, and why I need to show you how to express it?
- sunshine-o 1y ago
  I only saw him once and I immediately understood how he could lead such a revolution. It is not about being "like him", he was just some fat old man with a big beard and I remember thinking he probably smells pretty bad. What was broad and inspiring was his vision and leadership as an human.
  - j45 1y ago
    Everyone can develop their own personal leadership too instead of looking to others and judging leadership.
    - guerrilla 1y ago
      If that were true, the world would be a lot better than it is in general.
      - j45 1y ago
        It is true for the people who choose to lead themselves. It doesn’t depend on external expression or validation.
  - saagarjha 1y ago
    Again, I appreciate that you found him inspiring. The point is that not everyone does.
  - dariosalvi78 1y ago
    I am also very fond of Stallman, but we need to recognise that he had as many lovers as he had haters. He may have pushed many outside of the free software movement in fact because of his character. I still think that the FSF needs a strong character with a clear vision, man or woman, but maybe with less orthodoxy than RMS.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
- rgrs 1y ago
  How would you quantify reach? The PR or number of projects delivered?
  - saagarjha 1y ago
    I value effectiveness in manifesting change in the world. This takes many forms. I think one of the most depressing and myopic views that hackers have is that code rules everything, when in fact social movements live and die upon their accessibility and impact. If you think that laboring in a cave and writing the next Free text editor is going to bring about free software, the reality is that three proprietary editors have already eaten its lunch, the latter two of which are VC backed and soon to require cloud registration, and the last which was written using AI trained on your code that you very carefully structured to be unusable to build non-free software on top of.
    - wolvesechoes 1y ago
      You are right, it is not about writing a code. That's the common problem when discussing free software among geeks. Of course it is about political action, putting pressure, being loud etc. But now look at the current state of affairs and tell me - how successful were all those orgs, with more professional management, PR people and proper gender representation? We don't need another man or lady in suit, giving generic word-salad speeches, full of currently fashionable words. Those on the other side of the fence have easily can have much more of those.
LaGrange 1y ago
If by impact you mean “turn off people from the movement” then sure. I happen to know multiple people who either met or even hosted him, and not a single one of them was impressed. Stallman was a horrible promoter.
cbeach 1y ago
> every time one of those foundations announce a "non coding" woman as their new leader, if you read between the lines, it is because they need to be more "ESG" That might explain why the Scala Center (which oversees the Scala language) has a young political sciences grad as its executive director. She has zero commercial or academic experience in Scala. And this is how she behaves at conferences: https://x.com/jdegoes/status/1633888998434193411 https://x.com/jdegoes/status/1633888998434193411 Leftwing political activism, cancel culture and #metoo-style witchhunts (example: https://pretty.direct/statement https://pretty.direct/statement ) This is what the Scala "community" has become. It's tragic, given how good the language is.
- ethbr1 1y ago
  Causation does not imply correlation. That there are non-technical leaders who lose the thread does not mean that leaders lose the thread because they're non-technical. There are plenty of technical leaders who have also gone off on personal tangents and vendettas! Maybe a more accurate appraisal would be 'some people suck at a job, and it's unfortunately difficult to dislodge a bad leader anywhere'.
soulofmischief 1y ago
Women are more than seductresses. This is an apalling line of reasoning. There are a lot of issues to hate in our industry, and you lose all credibility by attempting to tie these issues to women.

FirmwareBurner 1y ago

[flagged]

oblio 1y ago
LOL. Compare and contrast this: > Say what you want about the Stalleman type he was very inspiring and had real leadership. So a lot of hackers followed him in his crazy vision and that gave us a lot. With this: > It is very feminine and obviously doesn't work that well. It's a super sexist comment. A comment born in the 60s, or I guess in our geek land, still in 2025.
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago
  >It's a super sexist comment. Is it? To answer this, just reverse the genders in the statement and see if it's still sexist. "It's very masculine and obviously doesn't work that well"
  - zdware 1y ago
    Yes - why are these adjectives even coming up at all? There are alternatives that would probably make your point in a succinct manner without being sexist.
  - RIMR 1y ago
    Yeah, that's still sexist. Was that your point, because it kinda feels like you're presenting this as a gotcha or something...
  - padjo 1y ago
    Yeah I think it’s fair to say that in many circumstances people would use masculine as a pejorative and not get called out for being sexist. There’s some historic power imbalance stuff at play there, but it’s still sexist. If you have problems with some type of behaviour it’s much better to say exactly what they are rather than appealing to some platonic notion of sex characteristics, which is both offensive and poorly communicates your position.
  - deleted 1y ago