It’s just sad this is the hill he chooses to die on.
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He’s always chosen this hill, his site was at one time full of these ramblings.
And stuff against Jews, and a bunch of other stuff. He’s no ESR, but he’s pretty close.
The problem is now people are discovering what he has said, as opposed to then where everyone just brushed him off as a literal basement neckbeard.
I mean this is the guy who wore the same clothes for weeks on end, that MIT literally bought a house for so that he’d go home and bathe.
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For people supposedly so committed to liberty and self-determination of individuals, they have a (seemingly) odd difficulty with the concept of meaningful consent.
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Haven’t we been having this conversation about Orson Scott Card for about as long as RMS has been creeping on women at MIT? I feel like “love the art, hate the artist” is something we’ve all gotten comfortable with, but apparently if it’s software we need to start over from scratch for some reason.
There’s a message here that Silicon Valley really needs to receive and hasn’t yet: being a “high achiever” does not grant a person a pass from the norms of adult human behavior. You’re more likely to be fired from a tech company for tripping over a missing stair than being the missing stair, particularly when that missing stair is also considered a key contributor, or is friends with someone who is, and the number of lawsuits that ought to arise over that is squelched by people being required to sign away their right to sue in order to receive their severance and, increasingly, mandatory arbitration clauses for employees.
It’s so prevalent I’ve seen people choose to be abusive at work in cargo-cult emulation of those whose status enables them to get away with it. Sometimes that goes badly for them in the long term. Others they find their place in the pecking order, optimize for the amount of shitty behavior they can get away with, and become fully integrated contributors to yet another poisonous tech org culture.
With recent developments, I’m wondering how much of that toxic culture can be traced directly to MIT and Harvard, the classic “power couple” of startups, with the former comprising technical leadership and the latter business leadership. I’ve been hearing firsthand accounts of the sorts of Stallman stories you won’t read on Hacker News for 25 years. It wasn’t until MIT’s bizarre public statement on Epstein recently that I realized they knew they had a problem, and there was (probably still is) worse to come.
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I use FOSS and support what the FSF does in this world, but his comments were (to put it mildly) out of line. Fuck downplaying sexual assault, especially of teenaged girls. I hope he does some real introspection, but I know he probably won’t, because we live in the age of white male backlash to the rest of us demanding being treated as equals.
For him downtrodden apparently means well off white dudes who don’t like not having access to source code on their networked printer…
You’ll see plenty of people here saying they’ll continue using FOSS after this, though. Is anyone saying “let’s ditch Linux” because RMS has said odious things? Maybe some… but at this point, it’s moved far enough away from him that we can more easily justify using FOSS software.
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" following controvery over his remarks suggeting victims of Jeffrey Epstein were willing participants"
Can we please be precise? Stallman was defending Minsky not Epstein. He was suggesting that Minsky might had the impression that the victims were willing participants.
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I think a large part of it is that we have this remarkably stupid concept that people who are good in one area of achievement must be superior in other ways as well, and that we have to accept the person as a whole if we are to accept a part of their legacy as inspirational.
Stallman is good at programming and his primary contribution to the world was a licensing agreement. This does not make him an overall good person, it means that he had a good idea about a licensing agreement. His views on sexual abuse are bad, and I suspect that much about him is bad.
Campbell was good at editing. He was bad at being a good human being. More of a dumpster fire, really.
Jobs was good at creating a walled ecosystem which had the appearance of simplicity while restricting user actions to a pre-determined path. He was bad at being a good human being.
We need to learn that people have good things and bad things, and that we can respect and take inspiration from the good things while hating the bad things that someone does; and that we can learn from their bad things. We need more acceptance of the concept of the domain of knowledge expertise- that one may be very knowledgeable in something but ignorant in another; and your knowledge in one area does not make your ignorant braying in another any less the voice of a donkey.
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I don’t think it’s odd. The position is a radical, magical notion of consent. If it is given, then it doesn’t matter if there was some power imbalance that brought that about. Age, professional status, whatever. You got to a place of consent and there is no one with the standing to qualify whether that consent is meaningful. This is I think what you get when you take the self determination slider all the way up to 11, not a weird blind spot for someone who is into self determination. Who best to decide who a 17 year old undergrad bones? Most certainly that undergrad, regardless of anything else you might care to introduce into the equation. “Force” is the only real problem that can then be acknowledged. “No” can be taken as “Convince me.” The philosophy is working as designed for them.
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I think if you get to the age and appearance of Minsky, it’d be morally appropriate to question the motives of a young person who says they’re a friend of Epstein and acts suddenly sexually interested. Especially given the 60-70 year age gap. If not, well, there’s a place for you:
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No. That’s not the case.
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When this story ran on Slashdot the comments section became a cesspit of incels and MGTOW types to a nausea inspiring level.
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That’s why I threw in the parenthetical “seemingly” – I was being a bit facetious. We all know that “libertarian” dudes like Stallman carve out all kinds of special exceptions for themselves because they’re geniuses or heroes or otherwise “extraordinary”.
Speaking of that, some of Stallman’s defenders have apparently also claimed that his serial dickhead behaviour should be excused because he’s supposedly on the autism spectrum (apparently this was how a lot of people at MIT justified putting up with his BS). Whether he is or not, the insulting and stereotyping idea that a high-IQ and high-functioning autistic person can be excused for constantly treating other people like dirt really has to end.
Apparently Hacker News is also bending over backwards to defend him.
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I, for one, am SHOCKED that was the case! /s
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Wholeheartedly agreed, but would add that unwavering belief in almost any set of ideals can be problematic.
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To be clear, my comment was meant to describe my understanding of a radical self determination type of position and how this comes about, not advocating for it. I think this means that the premises need to be reevaluated, among folks who might think that they share the starting part but that “other” folks take it bad.
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Massachussets is, and their laws say the age of consent is 16, according to wikipedia. So apparently it is anybody he or she wants.
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That would make RMS so annoyed…because they called it “Linux” 
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Ah… okay. Thanks for the clarifcation.
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So do we burn our copies if EMACS and the parts of GNU/Linux that are GNU?
Stallman has resigned from the FSF.
