[davexunit]

Until you've been as close to rms as the people that have worked with/for him that have tried and failed for years and years to resolve issues privately, whatever silly argument you are trying to make doesn't have a leg to stand on.

[craigsmansion]

> people that have worked with/for him that have tried and failed for years and years to resolve issues privately

Is this about Thomas Bushnell? Because I feel this is about Thomas Bushnell[1].

Bushnell is currently a friar in a religious order and works for google, and there is nothing wrong with that[2].

I can easily work with devout religious people and respect and accept them for their superior knowledge of the matter at hand (say, Don Knuth), but there's nothing wrong with politely declining their opinions when it comes to "issues" or how to become a "better" person.

Again, no disrespect to Bushnell, who I'm sure did a fine job, but I'm not willing to take his assessment of the personality of an avouched atheist at face value.

[1]https://medium.com/@thomas.bushnell/a-reflection-on-the-depa...

[2] well, working for Google can be debatable depending on what you do there.

[BugsJustFindMe]

> Is this about Thomas Bushnell? Because I feel this is about Thomas Bushnell

It doesn't have to be. I've known over a dozen people working at the FSF over the years, and they _all_ had the same stories about trying to avoid RMS as much as physically possible because of his behavior and how he treated people. At some point we have to stop looking for excuses and start listening to the people who are actually there.

> First it was the Epstein connection

Correction: _Last_ it was the Epstein connection, a straw on a pile of many straws.

[craigsmansion]

> start listening to the people who are actually there.

I'd love to, if only these people who are so aggrieved would properly write down their experiences instead of "I didn't like him anyway" after-the-fact tweets.

> Correction: _Last_ it was the Epstein connection, a straw on a pile of many straws.

Yes, quite enough to build a strawperson as an effigy, and now you're doing it, because there was no Epstein connection. In all of MIT, the only person you can trust not to have any sort of connection to Epstein would be rms, but yeah, let's blame him and the dead guy, and take it from there.

[BugsJustFindMe]

> and now you're doing it, because there was no Epstein connection.

If you prefer the phrases "defense of Minsky in his 70s having sex with a minor on a private island where Minksy then later hosted another conference _after_ Epstein's public conviction for sex trafficking and being designated a level three sex offender" or perhaps "refusal to recognize sex with minors as rape" we can use one of those instead. I don't mind. Because Stallman _did_ say he believed that Minsky had sex with a 17 year old on a billionaire's small private island and saw nothing wrong with it, and Minsky _did_ host a conference on Epstein's island after Epstein's crimes became public.

> I'd love to, if only these people who are so aggrieved would...

I think it's weird for you to expect everyone to blog about their daily negative experiences instead of venting to their friends and then trying to forget.

The two sides here are people who work at or with the FSF (or who have close friends who work at or with the FSF) and people whose only exposure is shit blogs that come up on google. And the people who work at or with the FSF are like "RMS is a nightmare for me or for a close friend of mine", and the people who google shit blogs are like "I don't find these shit blogs to be compelling enough to notice the fact that the people saying that RMS has been a nightmare are all the people who have to work with him". Everyone gets to pick their side though.

[craigsmansion]

No, actually I would prefer facts instead of this incessant and tiring framing with laden and erroneous terms.

> I think it's weird for you to expect everyone to blog about their daily negative experiences

And I think it's weird that most with personal grievances against rms can't be bothered to write anything but the shortest of anecdotal tweets and most with pleasant or neutral experiences take the time write long form articles including names, dates, locations, etc.

If one sets out to ruin someone's life one could at least put in some effort to convince those that are not automatically on your side.

[davexunit]

No it's not about that person. This isn't about RMS saying something that some of us disagree with and looking past it. It's much bigger than that. For example, RMS made the working environment at the FSF so bad that the staff unionized. The working environment is still bad (staff either burn out trying to make things better or get fired for some reason) but at least RMS can't fire people on a whim and the staff get bereavement leave (RMS was opposed to it) and cost of living pay adjustments (also opposed).

[africanboy]

So in other words at the FSF workers are free to unionize like in the rest of the civilized World, while if you work at Amazon you have to pee in a bottle and be happy about it.

[dralley]

https://twitter.com/paulnivin/status/1377079987950395393

[africanboy]

I think we should start a discussion about a simple fact: the World is huge, US is only a small part of it.

For example: RMS did not believe in providing raises — prior cost of living adjustments were a battle and not annual. RMS believed that if a precedent was created for increasing wages, the logical conclusion would be that employees would be paid infinity dollars and the FSF would go bankrupt.

That's unlawful in Italy to avoid salary discrimination where people in poorer areas (the South) are paid less for the same job.

It's considered a great victory by Italian huge worker unions.

Or this other one

RMS created non-safe spaces at both MIT & the FSF. When I was at the FSF, RMS had little to no empathy for the staff. The FSF was not a healthy, functional workplace. We formed a union to help protect ourselves from RMS — he controlled our pay, benefits, and workplace conditions.

Again, this is totally subjective.

It's a work place not a kindergarten, you don't like the place you leave, we are talking about software engineers not cleaning staff, they'd have a chance anywhere else.

this is simply this guy personally holding a grudge against RMS, but there's nothing objectively bad here.

You know what's really bad? that it happens at Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple l, but you don't know because workers simply can't talk about it.

Low paid workers fear of losing their salary, high paid workers don't care about them and also don't want to lose their huge benefits and say screw them

What is terrifying is people thinking that knowing something is worse than not knowing because if you talk, it's bad for you.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/may/05/amazon-pr...

What is bad IMO is thinking that unions are inherently a bad thing, but I am glad they exist and I am member myself of one of them in Italy that has 5.5 million other members and I gladly pay monthly to be part of it,even though I rarely need them they offer free services and protection to all the workers.

If nobody has been fired, harrased or threatened for proposing to unionize, that's a great plus in my book that puts the FSF ahead of many other job places in the US.

[dralley]

Bushnell is by no means the only person who has expressed such things.

ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2019/10/15/fsf-rms.html