For some context, Thomas Bushnell was the chief architect of the HURD from its founding in 1990 until 2003. He understands the FSF and Richard Stallman as well as anyone does.
> Thomas Bushnell was the chief architect of the HURD from its founding in 1990 until 2003. He understands the FSF and Richard Stallman as well as anyone does.
I invited Stallman to speak at my law school, along with other high ranking FSF members. I may have worshiped him at the time, but many of the tight-laced budding lawyers in attendance thought he was weird, mildly anti-social, and did not understand his relevance. Developers "got it", but most law students didn't connect. The traits that endeared him to the software community cut against him when trying to reach a broader audience.
Even though "open source" is everywhere right now, the GPL and true sharing of code is not. The Apache license, which allows you to do what you want and not share any changes, rules the day. I wonder if a more mainstream leader, who was just as committed to copyleft software would have been more effective.
I'm pretty sure RMS exhibits most of all of the symptoms of Asperger's and would immediately get the diagnosis if he walked into a psychiatrists' office.
It's a bit ignorant for Bushnell to be degrading RMS by calling him a "a whiny child who has never reached the emotional maturity to treat people decently" when the man 99.9% likely cannot cognitively do so.
It's really unfortunate that people with Asperger's (potentially like RMS) are at a massive disadvantage when holding positions of any kind of power in a public setting.
> It's a bit ignorant for Bushnell to be degrading RMS by calling him a "a whiny child who has never reached the emotional maturity to treat people decently" when the man 99.9% likely cannot cognitively do so.
Have you interacted with RMS? Do you know what his cognitive limitations are?
Bushnell has. (And he doubtless knows plenty of people with Asperger's - it is certainly true that Asperger's is disproportionately common in this industry.)
Matthew Garrett, another person who has worked closely with RMS (in his case, on the board of the FSF), has said that he does, indeed, have the cognitive capacity to understand the impact of his actions, but chooses not to care: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/52587.html "I've spent a lot of time working with him to help him understand why various positions he holds are harmful. I've reached the conclusion that it's not that he's unable to understand, he's just unwilling to change his mind."
It seems like it is both unfair to RMS, unfair to people who have worked with him, and unfair to people with Asperger's to make this comparison.
Some smart people do have Asperger's, per a professional diagnosis.
It does not help those people to just take anyone who acts weird but seems smart and say "they probably have Asperger's."
Mental disorders should be taken seriously. That means helping and accommodating people who suffer from disorders, including Asperger's. But it also means resisting the temptation to invent pop diagnoses in order to excuse behavior that would otherwise be objectionable.
> "a whiny child who has never reached the emotional maturity to treat people decently" when the man 99.9% likely cannot cognitively do so.
This is simply not a black and white situation. I'm familiar with people with Asperger's who can both behave nicely to others and who are aware of their limitations and actively work on thinking through their situation to counteract those limits. Being diagnosed is not a license to be a dick. If someone actually can't handle this, then it is a disadvantage for a public position and they likely shouldn't hold it.
since there is no known therapy this comment can easily be construed as wrongly blaming those with autism spectrum disorder for not having solved their autism spectrum disorder simply out of laziness and lack of motivation. I'm not a fan of RMS in general, but we're saying that the apparently untreatable condition he is allegedly affected by is effectively his own choice and own fault, an attitude that at the very best fails to help anyone with untreatable mental conditions and is also not uncommon. It may help those without such condition feel like they're living in a just world, on the other hand.
Why should those that are aspie modify themselves to satisfy those that are neurotypical instead of those that are neurotypical learning how to work with aspies?
Not saying the aspies shouldn't work on themselves, but it should be a two way street, where NTs also learn to recognize and tolerate aspies.
> Why should those that are aspie modify themselves to satisfy those that are neurotypical instead of those that are neurotypical learning how to work with aspies?
This isn't an either-or question. Everyone needs to learn how to work productively with other people, if they wish to succeed at multi-person endeavors. For some people it's harder, sure, but that doesn't change the reality on the ground that you can't just say "The fifty of us have decided that we prefer being antisocial, and therefore we're going to start a community for it" and expect it to work.
Also, this argument does quite a disservice to women with Asperger's who are harassed out of communities because they lack the inherent social confidence to stand up for themselves when a powerful man acts abusive and other people defend him by saying "He probably has Asperger's." Maybe neurotypicals should learn how to recognize those aspies and stand up for them?
Yeaaaa...how about we don't use "The Autism Spectrum" (pseudoscience's latest pump-my-kids-full-of-drugs excuse for what ails anyone who's a little slow or a full blown snowflake) to levy criticism without having a clue? As someone else mentioned, its not fair to RMS and its not fair to the genuinely mentally affected.
It's far more than 'ignorant', Bushnell knows better than that. He's demonstrating a severe lack of empathy - and let's just say, he's not the only person who has shown tell-tale signs of this trait so far (and leave it at that). What I have to wonder is whether the radical activist politics that's becoming all-too-common in academia and elsewhere is making people less empathetic, or simply selecting for the least empathetic of us.
(As an aside, the notion that Aspergers sufferers "cannot cognitively" reach "the emotional maturity to treat people decently" is a deeply, deeply unfair stereotype that reflects a severe misconception as to Aspergers behavior. Autism and Aspergers has nothing, zip, zilch to do with sociopathy! The way sufferers might treat people may be less-than-satisfactory to us, perhaps even socially-impaired in some sense; but to say or to even imply that they they lack decency is simply outrageous. Sorry for the admittedly-pedantic nitpicking.)
From what I can tell, it's Stallman who lacks empathy here. If he had ever thought about the impact of his behavior on the people around him, maybe he wouldn't have driven them all away.
I have addressed this in another comment. Yes, one can certainly argue that RMS ought to have been cognizant of his social faults, and perhaps his moral failings as well. But there's at least a colorable argument to be made the other way, given how he was (to quote the article) coddled while at MIT. (Keep in mind that until very recently, MIT did not even have a policy on e.g. employee training wrt. sexually appropriate behavior in the workplace, if we are to believe activists' claims! There's plenty of institutional failure to go around in that place. So, no, I'm not going to blame the guy in the absence of deeper knowledge about the actual facts of the matter.)
I'm quite willing to entertain the notion that RMS was a problem in some sense (though, if he has been 'coddled' for decades, one has to wonder if that problem was due to any fault of his own that he ought to have been cognizant of!) But pay attention to what this post is actually saying. It's inappropriate to defend Minsky in the wake of the Epstein scandal? (And there are people, considered reliable by others, who have said that when sex was inappropriately offered to Minsky, he turned the offer down! Of course RMS did not say that, and what he did say was rather tone deaf to say the least. But still...) RMS must go because he is fat and ugly, and thus makes women uncomfortable (the horror!) even when he's simply trying to joke around and be charming? Come on.
"The fall of the clueless nerd" indeed. The headline in the wired story linked triggers the hell out of me. I suppose we have come full circle, Nerds suck, then they were cool and now they have been consigned back to uncool again.
For the life of me, based on the snippets i've seen regarding his interactions with women, the only advice I can give him and ppl like him if they could have a do-over is stay away from women period. Which causes other problems but I will gladly have those problems than have an icon of an industry/space that I love be exiled in such an ignominious fashion.
> the only advice I can give him and ppl like him if they could have a do-over is stay away from women period
Stallman could have been a quirky, uncompromising, and passionate personality and still treat women like equals. Being a "genius" is not a good (or even sensical) excuse to treat people poorly. If anything, it shows you're not really a genius after all.
> If anything, it shows you're not really a genius after all.
Plenty of geniuses have not treated people well. Newton was a complete asshole. Even Einstein, who was a staunch defender of civil liberties at a time when most of his peers weren't, wrote some rather unpleasant things about the Chinese in his personal journal.
I agree completely that being a genius is no excuse for treating people poorly. But unfortunately history is littered with such people.
> Plenty of geniuses have not treated people well. Newton was a complete asshole. Even Einstein ... wrote some rather unpleasant things about the Chinese in his personal journal. ... being a genius is no excuse for treating people poorly. But unfortunately history is littered with such people.
I suspect that many of these "geniuses" only became difficult personalities after they recieved recognition and had a taste for power. Power corrupts, it allows people to do things without regarding people that may be affected by their actions.
I don't think there's just a simple correlation between people deemed geniuses and them having difficult personalities. Rather, I suspect there's a causal effect between being granted the "genius" title and abusing the accompanying power that leads to a difficult personality.
Whenever something like this happens some sort of accusation around this sort of behaviour always seems to emerge, I really have to question the validity of such claims
On a slight tangent to your comment about it being inappropriate to defend Minsky:
Did RMS think that's what he was doing? He accidentally threw Minsky under the bus by a) believing an accusation that hadn't actually been made in court as far as I can tell b) trying to change the word used to describe the act by inventing "plausible" scenarios that make it seem better.
Why RMS thought it plausible that his friend had sex with a 17 year old as long as there was plausible deniability (stretching the word plausible here) that she wasn't an underage sex slave is a question worth asking.
> RMS must go because he is fat and ugly, and thus makes women uncomfortable (the horror!)
That's pretty much the definition of a creep. Women still gushing over Ted Bundy. We forgive pretty people for many sins. Let's not forget that Dolores Umbridges among women. I've had to work with one ... would not let around her a million miles from my dog.
"fat and ugly" is not the definition of a creep. Stallman's "creep" factor comes in part from his way of making inappropriate sexual advances. Here are some examples of people calling him a creep:
"There are many valid criticisms of Richard Stallman: ... he has creeped out some women by making passes at them (or so they tell me). - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2327849 (2011)
> He flirts with anyone who is female, even if they are underage. He is creepy in person, in a way that I cannot adequately describe. I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that he kept women out of open source and free software, and many of his ideas stayed even after he left.
If he was not ugly would you consider his behaviour creeping or mild flirtatiousness?
There was a whole Justin Bieber creeping his followers, where no one seemed to complain.
I'm pretty sure if someone said "No" please stop doing then RMS would stop. Are there cases where he didn't? If so .. I take back my words.
Autistic types or Asperger types whatever you want to call it ... take things very literally. They are visual-oriented and big-picture thinkers. This affects both men and women btw. Verbal thinking is not their strong suit. Body language reading is not their strong suit. Sarcasm and mean communication is not their strong suit. They are blunt and straightforward to a fault. Autistic types will be Autistic even in Rome.
This almost seems like Gallelio being house arrested because the feminist popes couldn't comprehend him.
If the average girl expects psychic powers of body language reading and reading the room before you utter a word ... that's just expecting men to behave like women. It's never going to happen.
Why have whisper network, as one of the quotes I mentioned, if being "fat and ugly" is all that's needed to recognize a creep?
I do not think Stallman is ugly, so I don't know why that's even an issue. He's had at least one girlfriend, so it's not like his physical attributes are a universal turn-off. Can you find women writing they don't like him because he's fat and ugly? Because finding accounts of women who dislike his creepy sexual advances is not hard.
> I'm autistic. I am not good at social cues. I have, in my time, held quite a few shitty, offensive opinions. But when people have pointed out how awful those opinions are to me, I've thought "Oh shit, they're right," apologised, and changed my opinions.
> Being autistic doesn't make you an asshole, certainly not a pedophile. It mostly makes you a little weird.
Your argument, if it makes any sense, means that Stallman should have been kicked out long ago because he was being surrounded by enablers and yes-men who didn't provide the feedback he needed for his position.
Which, as you likely know, is one of the comments made by the linked-to page:
> I was around for most of the 90s, and I can confirm the unfortunate reality that RMS’s behavior was a concern at the time, and that this protection [by Minsky and the AI Lab] was itself part of the problem. He was never held to account; he was himself coddled in his own lower-grade misbehavior and mistreatment of women. He made the place uncomfortable for a lot of people, and especially women.
How can you meaningfully write "Justin Bieber creeping his followers" if you think "creeping" means "fat and ugly"?
> Because finding accounts of women who dislike his creepy sexual advances is not hard.
Sexual advances? I doubt it. Women confuse friendly behaviour with sexual intent all the time. Men do too. Friedly behaviour from ugly people is considered creepy. Most ugly people learn to not do that ... but Autistic people present a problem in this regard.
> Your argument, if it makes any sense, means that Stallman should have been kicked out long ago because he was being surrounded by enablers and yes-men who didn't provide the feedback he needed for his position.
It takes two google searches to find feminist popes who support paedophilia and incest. Let's ruin their entire careers, dreams, ambitions and piss on their graves if they are dead.
> Why have whisper network, as one of the quotes I mentioned, if being "fat and ugly" is all that's needed to recognize a creep?
You think people aren't doing it all the time? Gossiping around folks, calling them fat and ugly behind their back? "Creep" is just the next step in the bullying ladder. (Of course, RMS hasn't exactly made things hard for his bullies. But let's not pretend that this sort of dynamic never happens in such cases.)