[red_admiral]

I have mixed feelings about this anniversary. RMS is both the reason that the free software movement is where it is today, and the reason that it has so few women involved. If we could turn back the clock, I wish we could keep the good parts but leave out the bad parts.

[safety1st]

RMS has been subjected to a defamatory smear campaign which has falsely accused him of being transphobic, sympathetic to pedophiles and hostile to women. The attacks targeting him have largely come from people who aren't involved in free software and in some cases not even involved in the tech industry. While his behavior has been awkward at times he is absolutely none of these things and he deserves respect for his contributions to our field.

Please read:

https://stallmansupport.org/richard-stallman-is-not-transpho... - Leah Rowe, who accused the FSF of being transphobic, defending Richard Stallman as not transphobic.

https://stallmansupport.org/nadine-strossen-hannah-wolfman-r... - Nadine Strossen, former President of the ACLU and a feminist icon, affirming Richard Stallman's support for women and her support for many of his positions.

[red_admiral]

I'm not sure about transphobic, as that allegation did not come up when the original "package" that led to RMS' resignation was published. It could be that new evidence has come to light since, or it could be that the allegation of transphobia is unfounded.

Some of the original allegations that I think are proven correct are that RMS:

  - defended Marvin Minsky on a mailing list when Minsky was accused of sex with an underage woman, and made similar comments in defense of Cody Wilson. I believe Stallman's quote on the MIT listserv was that "[it is] normal for adults to be physically attracted to adolescents" when referring specifically to an allegation concerning someone under the legal age of consent. I think "sympathetic to paedophiles" is a defensible interpretation of such comments.

  - The accusations of sexism are also supported by evidence, such as the "EMACS virgins" incident in July 2009 which RMS himself admitted the basic facts of (while claiming it was meant to have been a joke). One version of the lines involved reads "The virgin of emacs is any female who has not yet learned how to use emacs. And in the church of emacs we believe that taking her emacs virginity away is a blessed act." @daringfireball (John Gruber) also quotes a Wired article claiming RMS had a card on his door at MIT saying "Knight for Justice (Also: Hot Ladies)". I think "hostile to women" is a defensible interpretation of these facts, especially as there is testimony from women in tech who say they find this sort of thing hostile.

On the basis of the evidence I have seen, some of which I have quoted above, I rebut the allegation that the accusations against RMS are a smear campaign, though I make no comment on the allegations specifically of transphobia as I have not fact-checked that part myself.

[safety1st]

Please read claims 1-5 on this page. I could rehash them but the page does a better job with these issues than I would:

https://stallmansupport.org/debunking-false-accusations-agai...

Regarding the "Cult of the Emacs Virgin" issue, here is Stallman's statement about it: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-women-list/2009-Novemb... - this was a reference to the Cult of the Virgin Mary. Along with references to the "Church of St. IGNUtius" he was parodying what he saw as cult-like elements of Christianity. Because Mary was female, he referenced females.

When he was informed in 2009 that some women found this joke offensive, he changed it to be gender neutral, because as he said in 2009, and continues to say today, he supports involving women in free software as much as possible.

Stallman has a long history of advocating for womens' rights and it's unfortunate for all women that a few women have decided to attack a supporter of womens' rights over a joke that probably didn't make anyone bat an eyelash when he first started using it. Standards have changed today, but he amended the joke 14 years ago....

Nadine Strossen's comments really hit the nail on the head about how poisonous this inability to forgive people for awkward statements made almost 20 years ago (and later recanted or apologized for) has become. If people on the other side are not allowed to apologize, reform and join your team, how do you ever win? If you brand them as enemies for life, short of your movement imprisoning, exiling or killing them, how does society as a whole ever make progress?

[d_tr]

> Stallman has a long history of advocating for womens' rights ...

I 'd like to add that he regularly posts political notes on his website which make this pretty clear to anyone who cares to take a look.

[foldr]

There is more to the weird 'emacs virgin' thing than just the joke itself.

https://opensourcetogo.blogspot.com/2009/07/emailing-richard...

[eesmith]

I have not heard the transphobic claims either.

I have come across multiple sources which describe Stallman's creepy behavior towards women, which I listed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21008835 .

One of them worked in the same building as Stallman. She writes software under an open source license and co-organizes an open source conference, so definitely "involved in free software."

You can't trust me though. Stallman said I'm an enemy of free software since I wouldn't say "GNU/Linux" to him.

[didntcheck]

As is usually the case with these "sex pest" witch hunts, these claims require traversing several layers of hyperlinks and "someone told me" just to find a vague claim of "I just find him creepy (in a way that I can't describe!)", which seems to simply mean "dares to exist and talk while awkward and unattractive". Flirting is also not bad behavior, how else would relationships form without someone indicating interest first?

Nobody is denying that rms is an exceedingly eccentric person, often to the extent of rudeness, but this does not justify the serious insinuations of sexual harassment

[eesmith]

Whoa, who said any of this was "sexual harassment"?

The topic was the "reason [free software] has so few women involved", and the claim is that Stallman's behavior towards women was a non-trivial contributing factor.

That does not require sexual harassment.

The counter-claim is that such allegations are "a defamatory smear campaign which has falsely accused him of being transphobic, sympathetic to pedophiles and hostile to women. The attacks targeting him have largely come from people who aren't involved in free software and in some cases not even involved in the tech industry."

I've heard about his creepy behavior towards women since around 2003, from people working in open source software. Thus, that counter-claim cannot be the complete story.

[safety1st]

Yes, at this point the current generation of feminism has an awful track record: by conflating online rumors about "creeps" and "sex pests" with actual women's rights concerns, they've ceded cultural ground to conservatives who have promptly used their new influence to do stuff like limit access to abortions. (Stallman is unwaveringly pro choice.)

Nadine Strossen comments on this problem in one of the links I posted:

> So we see the term sexual assault and sexual harrassment used for example, when a guy asks a woman out on a date and she doesn’t find that an appealing invitation. Maybe he used poor judgement in asking her out, maybe he didn’t, but in any case that is NOT sexual assault or harassment. To call it that is to really demean the huge horror and violence and predation that does exist when you are talking about violent sexual assault. People use the term sexual assault / sexual harassment to refer to any comment about gender or sexuality issues that they disagree with or a joke that might not be in the best taste, again is that to be commended? No! But to condemn it and equate it with a violent sexual assault again is really denying and demeaning the actual suffering that people who are victims of sexual assault endure. It trivializes the serious infractions that are committed by people like Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein. So that is one point that [Stallman] made that I think is very important that I strongly agree with.

[eesmith]

> So we see the term sexual assault and sexual harrassment used for example, when a guy asks a woman out on a date and she doesn’t find that an appealing invitation.

It's a bit humorous that you agree with the assessment "several layers of hyperlinks and "someone told me" just to find a vague claim" then don't even provide that much support for your own third-hand, fourth-hand, or higher comment.

We know from EEOC training that there are indeed ways to ask someone for a date and have it be workplace sexual harassment.

Scenario #1: "Wanna go on a date tonight? I think I can get you off night shift if you say yes." is straight-forward quid pro quo sexual harassment.

Scenario #2: Whenever employee X sees a new, young, female employee he goes up to her and, while staring at her breasts the whole time, asks her out on a date. The staff get annoyed about the continual sexual objectification and complain about X's rude behavior. Under EEOC guidelines, management acts to prevent claims they have a hostile workplace.

Both of these unappealing invitations are forms of workplace sexual harassment, which has a higher legal requirement than other uses of the phrase.

These laws have been in place for decades .. and you're right, the anti-abortion movement has been around for decades too. But it's not due to online rumors but part of a broader anti-feminist movement wanting "traditional" male power over women.

Can you dig through the hyperlinks and find a less vague account of your example?

Given the 100s of millions of men who have asked women out, this should be millions of times easier to find than the ones I found about Stallman. Examples should be everywhere, not just men's rights forums.

Given I know someone with a first-hand account about Stallman, and don't know anyone matching your story, tells me your scenario is rare.

[teddyh]

See also <https://sterling-archermedes.github.io/>.

[asddubs]

RMS has definitely been sympathetic to pedophiles in his writing in the past. I don't know what his stance is now, but saying it was a false accusation is revisionism, IMO.

[blueflow]

> and the reason that it has so few women involved

It is repeated and repeated again that because there aren't as many women as men in IT, there must be some kind of badness going on.

I offer a more charitable explanation: Women don't want to, the same way Men don't want to go to yoga courses. No badness involved, just people making their decisions.

[yvdriess]

The problem with that explanation is that in the past, there were a lot more women in computing. First as operators and programmer/mathematicians, later the gender mix was following the same upward trend as other sciences.

I've seen two explanations for the dearth of women in computing: engineering culture becoming dominant in the '60s (where it was more the domain of mathematics before) and the rise of personal computers that were advertised and marketed to young boys in the '80s. The latter is very noticeable in CS enrollment numbers.

[blueflow]

Back when people bought their punched tapes to the computers, being that computers operator was a social job, comparable to a secretary.

Look at jobs like optician, where the reverse happened: It used to be a crafts job when glasses were hand-manufactured. Today glasses are produced automatically, so the consultation and sales part has taken over and it changed from a men-dominated domain into a women-dominated domain.

No badness involved, either.

[stjohnswarts]

It was also much easier to "get into" it without a degree, unlike now when they want 5 years experience in CS as soon as you leave college.

[red_admiral]

The interpretation in the book "Programmed Inequality", albeit specific to the UK, is that in the early days programming and adjacent tasks involved a lot of manual labor (punching cards, moving tapes around), for which companies employed women to do it as cheaply as possible.

When tech jobs switched to requiring fewer humans, but ones with much more responsibilities and the ability to make operational/strategic decisions and to contribute to the design of the systems as part of implementing them, then companies moved to hiring men.

[pgeorgi]

> in computing: engineering culture becoming dominant in the '60s (where it was more the domain of mathematics before)

That would suggest that countries in which that transition didn't happen (such as Germany: Informatik was and is a math-oriented field, the engineering side mostly ended up with electrical engineering) should see different trends. At least for Germany: no.

[CJefferson]

Have you spoken to women who have joined open source groups (I’m thinking GNU / FSF led projects, not just programs that happen to be open source)? I have, and without exception the ones I know well personally have had awful experiences, and the ones who complained were just told “Oh, that’s just how person X is”. (There is not a single X here I am hiding, it’s a pattern).

[pgeorgi]

Have you spoken to men who have joined yoga courses? Same thing there: it's uncomfortable when you're the odd one out, and assholes who are going to asshole are most egregious towards those who are "other."

The underlying reason for the disparity can still be "group A people are somewhat less interested in that thing than group B people" and not "group B people actively drive out group A people." Everything else just follows because humans suck.

[blueflow]

Show that this is a gender-specific issue because i have the exact same reasoning. I love the coding and bug hunting, but i don't want to arrange myself with certain people.

[CJefferson]

How could I do that? I can say the comments and issues were gendered, but I can’t think how to prove what you are asking.

[blueflow]

You are right, that bar to prove it is too high. Apparently that doesn't stop people from claiming it nevertheless.

[globular-toast]

I develop free/open source software and I've never joined an open source group. I'd say that goes for the majority of contributors.

[red_admiral]

I disagree. If the proportion of women in FSF was the same as "tech" in general, then your interpetation would be "colorable" [1].

However, the accusation is more specifically that the proportion of women in the FSF and FOSS in general is (or at least was under Stallman) significantly lower than that of women in programming jobs in general, which suggests that there is something more going on.

Following a 2009 FSF women's mini-summit in Boston, Bruce Perens acknowledged this difference, even offering an explanation: "... there are more women who hold technical jobs than there are women who so love the technology that they will work on it whether they get paid or not. That seems to be an especially male thing."

However, that was very much not the conclusion of discussions among women in tech at the time, who were more likely to cite the sexist behaviour of some prominent men as reasons they kept out of parts or all of FOSS/FSF. RMS' name certainly came up a lot.

Rachel Kroll also wrote a post back in 2018 with the title "Choosing to stay out of the community", talking about similar issues.

[1] A legal term that means more or less "plausible so far, but we'd need a full trial to get a definite answer".

[2] http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/10/09/moat/

[blueflow]

Take note that Rachel's post is not making any reference to sex, gender, sexism or discrimination. Its about a toxic community and not about gender issues. Its not backing up your point.

[emilsedgh]

the reason that it has so few women involved

Citation needed here.

Free Software movement at this point is much, much larger than FSF, GNU and rms. Many of those communities (Like KDE which I've been involved with) have been very very welcoming and inclusive to woman. However, woman have always been under-represented there just like many other areas in Tech.

Not saying rms has not made GNU/FSF difficult for woman though. Just saying the reasons woman are under-represented go deeper than rms.

[lost_tourist]

I've always wondered, say we have 10-15% of women in open source advocation/programming, why would you expect to see a higher number than that at FSF? At any organization? If you advocate for getting more women into STEM wouldn't you start in grad school/high school/college? Why would you expect it to be higher after the collegiate level when people have very very likely chosen a career path?

[red_admiral]

> Citation needed

FLOSSPOLS 2004-05 found that "proprietary software" was around 28% female, whereas "free software" was around 1.5% female. A presentatation of the results can be found at [1].

I agree with you that FOSS is much larger than GNU/FSF, and that many places are actively welcoming to women - the linked slides reference Debian's efforts; the python community also seems to be fairly good at this.

[1] https://people.cs.umass.edu/~wallach/talks/flosspols.pdf

[globular-toast]

Do you really think all those women in proprietary software jobs aren't doing free software because of one man? They probably haven't even heard of him.

There are many more obvious reasons for the disparity that don't involve anything malicious let alone singling out one person and attaching the blame.

Anybody can make meaningful contributions to free software. Nobody has to interact with RMS or anybody else. I've made many anonymous and pseudonymous contributions just fine.

Given that there are essentially no barriers to entry to developing free software but there are significant barriers to being paid for it, I wonder why proprietary software is only 72% male when free software is 98.5% male. Are there any other fields that exhibit this disparity? Are there more/less paid male/female car mechanics versus car enthusiasts/hobbyists, for example?

[tannhaeuser]

Another interpretation in pre-classic critical gender theory might be that only men have reason to strive for compensating their lack of ability to give birth by a F/OSS magnus opus. Or idk Freudian or even pre-Freudian suppression of sex drive, possibly for later, more intense pleasure?

Oh, and we don't say "women" anymore, preferring gender-neutral language.

Meanwhile, F/OSS zealots are busy subliming (^1) on github, bringing their tickets and clicks and those of their users, as generative and advanced AI takes over CompSci (what has been left by the attention economy anyway).

Seriously, today's problem is more that F/OSS is being used to exploit users and form monopolies. "Cloud providers" and other capital-intense approaches only exist as a direct reaction to F/OSS abundance.

^1: in memoriam of Iain Banks who died ten years ago

[shrubble]

Many women don't want to be around nerds. It's really that simple.

[sbuk]

And what is the reason for that?

[red_admiral]

There is a theory by Simon Baron-Cohen that autistic people have "extremely male brains". I dislike this formulation myself - I think he's confusing the proxy for the root cause, which is that autistic people have extremely _systematising_ brains. (And yes, "autistic" and "nerd" are not synonyms, I know.)

But psychology does acknowledge that an interest in people vs systems/things is one of the most pronounced measurable and replicable sex differences; depending on who you ask this might apply to babies from the day they were born, as measured by the time they spend looking at a photo of a face vs. one of some building blocks.

(Note, the research is about _interests_, not _abilities_. Big difference.)

If you plot people on a people/things interests scale, you might see a male cluster, a female cluster, and if you zoomed in, a "nerd cluster" a bit beyond the normal male cluster.

Female nerds and women with autism do exist, and as far as I can tell, they fit in just fine into any "nerdspace" that does not single them out based on their sex/gender or act too sexist. (Personally, I find the label "extremely male brain" particularly uncharitable for women with autism.) But they are numerically a minority.

[User23]

While it may be entertaining to feign hypotheses, really who cares? It's an observable fact and thus it has to be incorporated into any rational phenomenology.

But the glib answer is many women find nerds annoying. In particular, because of their desire to explain and even worse correct perceived errors without any regard for social niceties. As for why many women ultimately find those behavior patterns annoying, well that's where speculation takes over.

[cdelsolar]

But we nerds are awesome and several of us shower