| I'm not arguing to put him in charge of FSF nor that he is the right person to do PR. I'm arguing against "cancelling" him altogether because of few stupid opinions he held and few others that got blown out of proportion. Let me refer to them one by one. On pedophilia- his original opinion is not defensible. He eventually understood and admitted his error. Personally I believe the change is genuine. Can one blame someone for holding a wrong opinion based on genuine lack of knowledge of the subject specially when that person changes that opinion when presented with facts contradicting it? I don't think so. On sexual assault - you said he is/was redefining the definition to exclude many victims. I assume this stems from his email in defense of Marvin Minsky in which he wrote: "The announcement of the Friday event does an injustice to Marvin Minsky: “deceased AI ‘pioneer’ Marvin Minsky (who is accused of assaulting one of Epstein’s victims [2])” The injustice is in the word “assaulting”. The term “sexual assault” is so vague and slippery that it facilitates accusation inflation: taking claims that someone did X and leading people to think of it as Y, which is much worse than X... The word “assaulting” presumes that he applied force or violence, in some unspecified way, but the article itself says no such thing... We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing. Assuming she was being coerced by Epstein, he would have had every reason to tell her to conceal that from most of his associates…" It is not the kindest way to discuss situations of abuse, but factually I see no attempt to redefine sexual assault as a term. Just an objection to its use in one very particular situation. A situation in which the victim herself didn't know if the alleged perpetrator is aware she is being coerced. Additionally, "sexual assault" is already a very imprecise term. It means different things in different places. My opinion of Epstein is based on a Netflix documentary. I assume the information given there is truthful. Based on that it is unknown if "visitors" on the island were aware of the coercion. Recently I heard in the local news a gang of criminals was caught by police. Those criminals forced prostitutes to pay them "protection", forced unwilling (often trafficked) women into prostitution, and attacked independent prostitutes that didn't pay them. Did men that unknowingly used services of trafficked/coerced women abuse them? They definitely did, but is the term sexual assault adequate to describe both what they did and an encounter where unsuspecting victim is violently attacked? Hell no. Am I now guilty of redefining the term in a way that excludes many victims? Age of consent-I think this has to be linked with his opinion on pedophilia which I already did comment on. Coming back to Foss.
>We don't need Stallman anymore. There's plenty of great voices and developers in Free Software. Stallman is what, 68? He's past retirement age in my country. He won't be around forever. If anything, we should be looking to successors for him. As mentioned before I don't want him in the driving seat of FSF, but at the same time I don't think he should be cancelled from the Internet. I do think this whole current vendetta against the guy was created by one "activist" as a tool to make her famous/or to make her feel good. |
I think this is the only part of the reply worth focusing on; we're in agreement here. Stallman is free to be... Stallman really. He just shouldn't be in a position of power like he is right now with the FSF and GNU.
He should step down along with the rest of the board (who have shown themselves to be compromised in properly addressing issues involving him), but after that he's really free to do whatever. Hell, I wouldn't even object to putting him on a completely powerless "honor" position as Founder Emeritus or something.
Beyond that, there isn't much to argue. Nobody is saying that Stallman can't run stallman.org or represent himself, that's his own website and as long as he's not breaking the law by keeping it up, I see no grounds to object to that.
It's simply that his current presence in the FSF is actively hurting promotion and adoption rates of Free Software.
> I do think this whole current vendetta against the guy was created by one "activist" as a tool to make her famous/or to make her feel good.
Which one? The one that got him fired in 2019? That person isn't involved with the current controversy. The current controversy is purely because Stallman announced that he was back in the drivers seat of the FSF without even so much as an apology for the literal decades of all the other reasons that people think he's an asshat (beyond even the pedophile shit).