geofft

128 ms·

931.
by geofft 6y ago
> It's not stuck for mysterious reasons related to a long history of humans cruelly exploiting other humans. It's not? I thought the boat is stuck because it's too long and the canal is too narrow, and the boat is too lo
932.
by geofft 6y ago
This article is factually inaccurate because it says that "the storm begins" in September 2019. This is untrue, but the media won't tell you that, for two simple reasons: the media likes an easy, catchy story about terrible p
933.
by geofft 6y ago
> Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the
934.
by geofft 6y ago
It's kind of incredible that the position of "we're here to code" is being attributed to RMS. He strenuously fought against that position for so long. It's why he objected to accepting the term "open source,&qu
935.
by geofft 6y ago
> I'm tired of social culture spokespeople flogging technologists over the head The FSF is a social culture organization. The board of directors of the FSF should not be pure technologists! Here's what RMS has to say about it
936.
by geofft 6y ago
He hasn't said anything, and moreover the FSF was awfully secretive about the fact that he was rejoining: https://twitter.com/fsf/status/1374399897558917128 It is certainly possible that between 2019 and no
937.
by geofft 6y ago
... that's exactly why the headline points out that among those names on the original petition are some major organizations producing free software. It even names the specific organizations. It's not "clickbait" in the u
938.
by geofft 6y ago
I personally find the open letter a bit short on these sorts of details. I think better sources are these: http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2019/10/15/fsf-rms.html (October 2019, by a former FSF board memb
939.
by geofft 6y ago
Perhaps a better way of putting this is that while autism doesn't need a "cure," being an asshole is absolutely a thing that - if it is indeed caused by a medical condition - a medical professional can help with. (And if
940.
by geofft 6y ago
It hasn't been since at least fall 2019, when he stepped down. He hasn't been involved (at least on paper!) for over a year now, and the FSF has presumably been functioning between then and last Saturday. It hasn't been since
941.
by geofft 6y ago
The letter got posted yesterday and flagged ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26558348 ), which is probably why it can't be posted again, because of HN's dupe policies. But it was also posted basically immediat
942.
by geofft 6y ago
Quoting from their website, "The FSF is a charity with a worldwide mission to advance software freedom." The question for the FSF Board isn't whether Stallman deserves to be punished, or anything - they're not a court of
943.
by geofft 6y ago
Many things, over many years. The free software community was deeply unhappy with him for a long while. Here's a subset: http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2019/10/15/fsf-rms.html https://win
944.
by geofft 6y ago
What would semantic versioning for a UI even mean? What's the API promise?
945.
by geofft 6y ago
Chromium is almost everything. The easiest way to test it is to grab a Chromium binary https://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/download-chromium and see what it feels like. The short answer is that it feels just like
946.
by geofft 6y ago
> Mother of all that's holy what are you all doing At FSF? Winning the FSF's Award for the Advancement of Free Software? https://sfconservancy.org/news/2021/mar/22/fsf-award-bkuhn/ h
947.
by geofft 6y ago
The best thing about this line of argument is that anyone can be interfering with free software, no matter what they do. Nine former/current Debian project leaders are on this list, as well as several Debian technical committee membe
948.
by geofft 6y ago
If you accidentally commit your PyPI private token to git and push it to GitHub, PyPI will detect this and disable the token within seconds (because there are absolutely bots who will try to find it and abuse it).
949.
by geofft 6y ago
The X.org foundation board is made up of hackers.
950.
by geofft 6y ago
It was absolutely not just the Minsky thing. The media, doing what the media does best, told an incomplete and misleading story that relied on public sources (including themselves). At best the media coverage made it obvious that RMS's
951.
by geofft 6y ago
Is this true , though? I don't think there was ever "I saw Joe Bystander selling a loaf of bread to Goody Proctor!" in historical witch hunts, whether the Salem one or the McCarthy. I mean, sure, it might be a sign of poor j
952.
by geofft 6y ago
There's some extremely heavy subtext in Conservancy's press release about it, which was published after the news: https://sfconservancy.org/news/2021/mar/22/fsf-award-bkuhn/ > In his a
953.
by geofft 6y ago
That link does not tell the complete story: http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2019/10/15/fsf-rms.html https://wingolog.org/archives/2019/10/08/thoughts-on-rms-and... ht
954.
by geofft 6y ago
There was non-public pressure, from members of the FSF board in fact, in the past, when he stepped down: http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2019/10/15/fsf-rms.html It's clear that didn't work.
955.
by geofft 6y ago
By "move computer science forward," you mean the part where he intentionally technically weakened GCC because of his ideology and refused to accept LLVM (an academic project to build a better compiler) because he thought it was to
956.
by geofft 6y ago
Then there is no distinction between the free software movement and RMS, and then longstanding, well-respected contributors (the author of that first post literally won the Free Software Award from the FSF two days ago) can be cast aside an
957.
by geofft 6y ago
> it was his awkward wording in the defense of Minsky that was the source of this. It was not the source. It was the catalyst - there was a media firestorm that precipitated the action, but the free software movement had been deeply un
958.
by geofft 6y ago
Maybe someone with an extremely low emotional IQ should not be the public face of an activism organization whose primariy job is to persuade the public, then? A lot of the internal-to-the-free-software-community frustration with RMS was how
959.
by geofft 6y ago
This is an abridged view looking at a couple of statements and news articles from a few days in September 2019. The free software community's frustration with Richard Stallman had been going on for many, many years before then. The mos
960.
by geofft 6y ago
If we're going to be understanding towards neurodivergent people, a good place to start is not defining "autism" as "the inability to be anything other than an asshole, the inability to understand after people patiently

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