| > Other than that, just because Stallman did a good thing once... Come on: this is a massive trivialisation of RMS's achievements. I have often disagreed with him but his contributions to OSS, and to the wider foundations of modern software and software development, are huge and are the product of decades of devotion - of consistent, motivated effort - from him. Like it or not, all of us who work in software - even those of us who aren't necessarily strong advocates of free software - benefit from RMS's work. I've also got bad news for you: we all exhibit _patterns_ of bad behaviour. Fortunately, we are all equipped with the capacity to change even long ingrained habits and patterns. (To be clear: I am in no way defending any bad behaviour from RMS towards other people, or suggesting that he shouldn't change that behaviour.) |
Like, I recognize that what he did back in the 80s matters, but somewhere around the turn of the millenium, he seems to have done very little of actual note and in the past 3 years or so seems to have become an active liability since the main things that got him attention were:
- Using his rights as GNU lead to veto the removal of a bad, outdated, US-centric, abortion joke from the glibc manual. This is after all other project maintainers agreed to remove it.
- Made appalling comments about the Epstein case (yes the media spun the story badly, that doesn't change that what Stallman said was horrible).
Even outside of that, there's also literal years of the following:
- Many examples of Stallman being a creep to women and an insensitive dickhead in general is something that existed before but really came to a head.
- The FSF maintaining a very egocentric approach to FOSS (thinking it's the sole relevant authority on advancing thoughts and ideas behind FOSS, as well as getting very cranky when projects don't want to join the GNU), something which seems near universally pushed by Stallman since every case of this somehow ended up involving him.
- Consistently vetoing plugin framework support for GCC out of an ideological fear that seems to consistently be cited as the main cause for it being superseded by clang/llvm.
> Fortunately, we are all equipped with the capacity to change even long ingrained habits and patterns.
It does come at the prerequisite that the person in question actually wants to change. Stallman is notoriously stubborn and it took him literally getting fired from the FSF to even admit that the most outstanding problem with his views (his stance on pedophilia) was wrong and he's never even bothered to address any of the others.