[marijn]

He wasn't blacklisted for committing thought crime. The dumb Epstein email triggered a reevaluation of his consistent creepy and inappropriate behavior against current community standards, which resulted in a large part of the community deciding they didn't want anything to do with him anymore. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from social consequences.

[hdfbdtbcdg]

There is another large part of the community that wants no part in the community as a result of events like this. I guess we will end up with two communities one focused on software the other focused on social justice (wokeware). It looks like the social justice community will get the code and trademarks. Fortunately thanks to RMS the code is available to fork.

I guess things aren't organised yet but I and others I have spoken to IRL have already stopped interacting with certain projects.

I was wondering if some of the community's thought leaders might jump ship - but I guess they will be purged anyway so that should help!

EDIT: Would any downvoters care to comment on why they think this won't happen? Do they think we will continue to participate against our will...

[marijn]

The assumption that those who care about treating others decently can not at the same time be good technologists speaks volumes.

[hdfbdtbcdg]

In my experience social justice equates to the opposite of treating people decently.

[krapp]

People like RMS and Linus Torvalds are responsible for normalizing the premise that to be a good hacker you can't care about things like treating other people decently - that's just giving in to politically correct wrongthink from SJWs and normie scum after all.

[lostjohnny]

I still have to testimony an useful contribution (or proof of donation) from those attacking open source projects for not using gender neutral pronouns.

I'm not young anymore, in my 40s, but I have hope that in the next 40 years some of them will stop being a dick and do actual work.

It's never too late to change.

[flatb]

Can you detail, without strawmen or anecdotes, the thought process by which you equate asking to use gender neutral pronouns, or discussing the possibility of it, with "attacks"?

[hdfbdtbcdg]

Its not asking though. Its screaming, threatening and drumming people out of their jobs if they don't comply.

I say this as someone that uses gender neutral pronouns etc.

[flatb]

Can you provide some examples that prove the existence a common pattern in the software development industry of people being "screamed at", "threatened", and "drummed out of their jobs" for not using gender neutral pronouns, please?

I'm more than ready to agree with you if you can.

I would also like to know, if you don't mind, what you consider to be good reason to "refuse to comply" with addressing someone in a way they prefer to be addressed, by using a three-letter word instead of another three-letter word.

[apocolyps6]

I'm out of the loop. Was someone fired over this?

[homonculus1]

You're experiencing the motte and bailey in action, my friend. "It's only asking people to be nice, nothing more!"

[underwater]

You're hoping that the next generation will see the light and adjust their behaviour to your expectations?

It ain't gonna happen. This is the struggle of every single generation.

[stelonix]

Interesting, I've been thinking about this myself: whether a new foundation or movement will be created around RMS and without the stigmas that allow people to be "cancelled" over their thoughts or opinions. I have to say, the FSF without RMS simply makes no sense. It's one of those institutions where more than 51% of its effectiveness came from a single person. I firmly believe a "fork" for the FSF is coming soon.

[gwd]

> I have to say, the FSF without RMS simply makes no sense. It's one of those institutions where more than 51% of its effectiveness came from a single person.

If that's true, then Stallman has completely failed as a leader. There are 7 billion people in the world; if after 40 years there is nobody of similar caliber at the FSF, it is because he has either not attracted them, not trained them, or has driven them away. (Perhaps by asking them on a date or handing them a card that said "tender embraces" the very first time he met them.)

I sincerely hope that there will be people in the FSF that can make it more robust, and set it up for long-term success.

[craigsmansion]

> I sincerely hope that there will be people in the FSF

There are: https://www.fsfla.org/%7Elxoliva/

But apart from being next in line, he's also next in line: https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/1174371580547223553

[lostjohnny]

> If that's true, then Stallman has completely failed as a leader

He's been under constant attack for the past 40 years.

Nobody wants to be friend with the smart friend who's also unpopular.

And that's what he failed, he trusted people would be decent.

They are not.

[johnny22]

i didn't wanna be his friend after meeting him personally. Nothing to do with him being unpopular, since i I (at the time) was an unpopular nerd too.

[hdfbdtbcdg]

We are not alone. It takes a brave person to put their head above the parapet in the current climate.

[lostjohnny]

it already happened.

As usual, not trying to be prejudicial here, it happened in the U.S. where different 501(c)(3) formed to attract donation capital, but that actually have been an enemy of large part of the FSF community.

There can't be one strong FSF they want many small feuds, it's like greenwashing, open washing is happening, which, BTW, "misses the point of free software".

Look at what happened to Eben Moglen, a person that nobody can describe as harsh, impolite, unempathetic, creepy or whatever BS they are throwing now at RMS.

And still in 2017 he was declared "no longer a friend of the free software community" by mjg59.

Why?

Because Moglen expressed his lawyer opinion in a way that Garret did not like.

Garret works at Google, Moglen still offers pro bono legal representation at the Software Freedom Law Center, which he founded.

It's not hard to take parts for me.

[flatb]

> harsh, impolite, unempathetic, creepy or whatever BS they are throwing now at RMS.

He has been accused, by several independent parties, of, among other things:

-Asking female coworkers to lay down topless on a mattress in his office.

-Threatening a colleague to kill himself if he/she didn't go on a date with him.

-Posting up signs in his workplace along the lines of "Knight for Justice (Also: Hot Ladies)".

Do you think that reprieving someone for threatening a colleague to kill yourself if they don't give in to your romantic/sexual advances is "throwing BS"? It's an honest question.

[concordDance]

Can I have a reliable source on the suicide threat? In particular something indicating it was genuine rather than jocular.

[flatb]

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/d59r46/richard...

From someone who worked at MIT.

[andrekandre]

> Because Moglen expressed his lawyer opinion in a way that Garret did not like.

any article about what happened?

[Mikhail_Edoshin]

> Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from social consequences.

I often see this phrase and it looks like a fallacy to me. Does anyone question its validity? Social consequences are a severe thing, in practice they mean losing a job or position, boycotting, etc. In ancient Greece to expel a person was a very strong punishment. Nowadays the associated hardbacks are milder perhaps, but still are pretty severe.

If speech is so potent a weapon that to protect against it we have to use extreme social defenses like expulsion, why not to use the same weapon against the perpetrators? Why not to speak in return? Stallman says something, you say something. Take that, Richard Stallman!

I would say that the only appropriate social consequence of free speech could be other free speech.

Also, a distinct characteristic of a true community is that it's inclusive. It can expel its members, but this has to be a very rare event, only when that person's action are actually destroying the community. "Creepy and inappropriate behavior" that went along for many years is hardly that. It's a mere personality quirk. [Addition] And I'd say that this expulsion endangers the community much more than whatever Stallman was inappropriately doing all these years.

[namarie]

> If speech is so potent a weapon that to protect against it we have to use extreme social defenses like expulsion, why not to use the same weapon against the perpetrators? Why not to speak in return? Stallman says something, you say something. Take that, Richard Stallman!

Because the power of the speech in question depends upon the power of the speaker. This isn't rocket science. If I as a random human person say something creepy to you on the street you can just go away. If Stallman does it and you are working under him you have to weigh a whole lot of things (academic standing, his prestige, the possibility that a whole lot of people will defend him just because of who he is and accuse you of accusing him of a "thoughtcrime") in your response. It's an assymetrical situation.

[doubleunplussed]

In a world that respects free speech, you would be more empowered to criticise authority, not less. You're basically saying that Stallman’s speech must have consequences otherwise the little guy might face consequences by criticising him. But the pro free speech crowd are advocating for a world where you and stallman criticise each other harshly, but both get to keep your jobs, it being a strong norm that whoever calls for the other to lose their job over speech automatically loses the argument.

I can't believe people are so short sighted about free speech. The people who are happy with control of speech will regret advocating for it as soon as it spreads outside of the domains where their allies presently have power.

[namarie]

> In a world that respects free speech, you would be more empowered to criticise authority, not less.

Sure, I guess. In this case, as far as I can see, Stallman's coworkers' speech about his terrible behavior led to him resigning. Nothing wrong with that.

> You're basically saying that Stallman’s speech must have consequences otherwise the little guy might face consequences by criticising him.

I'm nowhere close to saying that. The "little guy" is already facing the consequences I delineated, as this thread shows. Speeches have consequences, both Stallman's and anyone's.

> But the pro free speech crowd are advocating for a world where you and stallman criticise each other harshly, but both get to keep your jobs, it being a strong norm that whoever calls for the other to lose their job over speech automatically loses the argument.

The thing is, this presupposes that each other's speech or criticism is equivalent, which it isn't. A creepy remark is not equivalent to a criticism of that remark - I really didn't think I'd have to spell this out. If someone is being creepy towards coworkers and subordinates and this behavior continues for years, then yes, this should have consequences - up to and including the person in question losing their job, depending on the severity. Calling for someone to be fired shouldn't lose someone their "argument" if the person should be fired.

There's some equivocation here that this is some sort of intellectual academic dispute that led to him resigning. It isn't. It's reports of his creepy behavior, not two people "criticising" each other.

[Smithalicious]

Amazing how whenever someone does something controversial and gets forced out soon afterwards, it's never the thing they said, but "consistent creepy and inappropriate behavior" based on 10 year old anecdotes that suddenly appear out of nowhere... I'd think that if someone was "consistently" creepy and inappropriate, there would be a pretty good public record for that, but what do I know?

EDIT: Let me give a bit more of a nuanced position, because reading my post back, it looks like I'm saying that Stallman never did anything inappropriate before this.

Of course, I recognize that Stallman is fucking weird. I'm not saying that parrot-fucking, foot-fungus-eating St. IGNUcius never did anything inappropriate before; we'd be here for a long time if we were to make a list of all the times Stallman failed to read the mood.

However, I strongly believe that Stallman is not a creep. He holds some odd views and is pretty autistic, and so he occasionally makes inappropriate advances. Add to that that Stallman has been a very prolific person for decades and you won't relaly have trouble coming up with a list of anecdotes that, when framed a certain way, make him look bad.

I've read quite a few of these anecdotes by now. Some of them look fairly innocent to me. Some of them are clear social blunders. None of them look seriously harmful or in bad faith to me. Even taking all of them together, believing that all of them are remembered 100% correctly and played out as portrayed without any additional context, I don't think the appropirate reaction is to remove Stallman from his position(s).

What ticks me off so much about all this is the way the media deals with it. Stallman is portrayed as some kind of sexist, some kind of patriarch keeping women out of tech. It's ridiculous; Stallman is quite possibly the most inclusionary person I can think of. Stallman has had an immense, direct contribution to making tech more open for everyone.

I can understand the criticism of Stallman. I don't even think he necessarily makes for a good figurehead for Free Software; he has poor social skills, unhelpfully rigid and strong positions, and I feel like he often conflates free software issues with other social issues he cares about. He makes for a better philosopher than a political leader.

In this case, he's being thrown under the bus to score social points. People in tech are very itchy to do whatever they can to seem more inclusive, and condemning Epstein and his ilk is a noble goal (that also makes you look good). Stallman's statements that sparked this controversy were naive and he failed to read the mood, but they were not unacceptable things to believe or say. He did not deserve to have his words twisted, get kicked out of his own organisation based on the strawman, and then have people say that he was always bad, anyways.

[atoav]

One could also see it the other way round: because of the importance of his figure people were more willing to keep their mouths shut and look the other way. Once the tipping point is reached, they don’t see any reason to do that anymore. This is why medival monarchs had jesters to tell them what is really going on.

The right thing to do of course is to speek truth to power openly and before everybody else does it, but this could come with serious consequences for the person speaking up. This is why they’d only do it once they are 100% sure they didn’t misread the situation, the thing that happened was actually big enough and they are willing to carry the consequences this could have for free software.

In other words: people in positions like Stallman can get away with much more than any regular guy, which means they should be extra considerate of their role and their environment if they care about the effects their own power and fame has on it. If it everybody steps up now, it means there was clearly a disconnect between his self image and what his environment thought about him.

[Smithalicious]

> If it everybody steps up now, it means there was clearly a disconnect between his self image and what his environment thought about him.

Oh, certainly. And I'd say the reason for that is

> because of the importance of his figure people were more willing to keep their mouths shut and look the other way

I don't necessarily blame people for not spekaing out if they were troubled by his behaviour, but this is really unfair towards Stallman. Decades worth of small issues that Stallman was mostly unaware of are being condensed into one big issue. That's why I think the situation is crooked; in my view, Stallman never did anything particularly bad, nor did he harbor any ill will, yet he's facing the consequences of a major scandal.

Also, I don't think that Stallman should be held to the standards of a "medieval monarch". I think you're overstating just how powerful Stallman is (was?); I don't think he was actually in charge of many impactful decisions.

Your points are good but perhaps more applicable to someone like Linus Torvalds, who is fully aware of his controversial behaviour and does actually hold a position of substantial power.

[flatb]

> Decades worth of small issues that Stallman was mostly unaware of

As a reminder, the "small issues" you mention include accusations, by several independent parties, of, among other things:

-Asking female coworkers to lay down topless on a mattress in his office.

-Threatening a colleague to kill himself if he/she didn't go on a date with him.

-Posting up signs in his workplace along the lines of "Knight for Justice (Also: Hot Ladies)".

[dang]

Please don't copy/paste the same material on HN. Even if the discussion is getting repetitive, making it more repetitive makes it worse.

More importantly, please don't post in the flamewar style to HN, even if the topic is inflammatory and divisive.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[Smithalicious]

The second is unacceptable if it happened as told. I don't know what to think of the first point without context. The third point seems like an innocent joke to me, if slightly inappropriate.

I don't mean to defend him from any kind it accusation, but all of this is meaningless without full context and hearing the story from both sides.

[Izkata]

> The second is unacceptable if it happened as told.

I've seen enough narrative flipping over the years that this is the one I find least plausible, and requires more information.

[doubleunplussed]

Interestingly, in a world with strong norms against speech having career consequences, people would have been empowered to speak up earlier. The expectation that unpopular speech will have consequences for them makes them keep quiet until they are sure their views are popular.

[Smithalicious]

Oh, certainly. The way it is now encourages both wielding controversy as a weapon as well as remaining silent to avoid a conflict (for their own sake, but also the other party).

[cgriswald]

Would there? A friend of a friend hit on my under age sister at a party at my house. He later hit on my girlfriend in front of me in Spanish because he didn’t know I understood. There were witnesses to both events. I’ve gotten a couple complaints from other women attending my parties as well. And he’s always had a “creep” vibe and being generally inappropriate but my friends think of him as “harmless”. I had to tell mutual friends he wasn’t welcome. They had no idea and I’m not sure they really believed me. I’m sure to them this was all a bunch of stories coming out of the woodwork but to me it was suspected in the beginning and confirmed repeatedly over time.

[distances]

There are accounts of his behaviour going back decades, so I'm not sure what you're claiming with this?

[michaelmrose]

By which you mean a bunch of Twitter nobodies and one somebody who happens to speak for the gnome project.

[lostjohnny]

or that another nobody who actually worked with him?

https://archive.is/https://twitter.com/thomas_lord/status/11...

[concordDance]

A handful of anecdotes over two decades does not make for "consistent creepy and inappropriate behaviour".

I also think those deciding they didn't want anything to do with him are a tiny minority if you exclude those who have never met him (and even then, probably still a small minority).