I saw him at a party at OSCON one year. It was pretty bad. In hindsight, I should have done something, but what exactly I don’t know at this point.
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Oddly enough, RMS’s interview in the Register revolves around consent-- mostly around consenting (or not) to being surveilled.
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It’s certainly a difficult thorny topic. Not to be trite, it seems like he did learn something, in terms of language nuance, and I learned more about the personalities involved, of whom I had little knowledge but mild curiosity. And defining terms around the topics is not a bad thing to express, so that people think about the topic, maybe have more awareness. I learned a lot of Spanish from people patiently listening to my Spanglish, so I feel I owe it to others to cut them slack as well.
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More like “personal friend and mentor for nearly 50 years”. Stallman is not a member of any old boys network, as most of the old boys at MIT can’t interact with him for more than an hour a month, either. The notion that he’s part of some power structure is over-the-top.
So I just read all the news bits on this I could google, to confirm one thing, that nobody else has spoken up for Minsky, and nobody’s spoken up for RMS, not at MIT. So: really, there’s no old-boys network, just Richard.
But I also learned something else: that, holy shit Stallman said more terrible stuff than I realized when I wrote the first note…what the hell?!? … or in other words, I should have done that due-diligence before posting here at all. I just looked at a few quotes from stories, not Stallman’s whole email chain.
OMG, and sorry.
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I’ll put it this way with regards to Mr. Stallman.
There are two groups of people in free software. Those who admire RMS and love him and all his work… and those who have personally met and interacted with him and know what he’s like.
The people who’ve never met him find it very easy to ignore his other issues in the name of “the greater good.” The people who have met and worked with him have different opinions. I’ve long wanted the FSF to fire him because of how he treats people. I’ve felt he’s been holding back valuable voices in the FSF for a long, long time.
I get that he’s on the spectrum, and the like, but he never should have been in the position to hurt the people he’s hurt, and too many people have let this go on far too long. His behavior is inexcusable , even for super geniuses.
I’d suggest anyone who wants to support him still just have him come speak at your university or office or user group meetings. Have him stay at your place. Follow his rider exactly. The smell goes away after a few weeks.
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A bit hard to blame that kind of thing on high-functioning autism, right?
Stallman wasn’t part of an old-boys network at MIT, but the administrators there took the position for decades that the appropriate reaction to his behaviour was to make allowances for it. I recall hearing that in the late 1990s the university paid for off-campus lodging (on top of his normal compensation) because he was living out of his office, not bathing, and wearing the same unlaundered clothes for weeks. I’m sure there are a lot of people there who are happy they don’t have to put up with his BS anymore.
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In a way it is morally absurd to say rape depends on what country you are in. But Stallman’s implication seems to be we should default to the lowest common denominator.
It’s like the probability that a famous person is attracted to children is about the same as the probability as any other person is. What’s different is that famous people usually have more ability to act on their desires and more of a platform to talk about their desires.
Plus one unfortunate thing about dealing with a very smart person with very stupid ideas is that they’ve probably been bringing their significant intellect to bear on the problem of justifying themselves for a long time.
The idea that people ought to take any responsibility for checking that the other party is consenting seems like a tough sell for many people. Instead of asking “might a reasonable person have believed the girl was 18?” we could ask, “wouldn’t a responsible person have simply walked away from the situation, deciding that the risk of abusing someone else was far greater than the reward of [whatever was on the table]?”
That and any other specific behaviour. People with autism are a pretty and diverse group. Sure, they have some propensities that distinguish them from people without autism, but the idea that there is any specific belief or action that a specific person could think or do that you could say, “That’s because of they’re autistic” is a little dehumanizing.
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That was generally not my reading of Hackers.
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He hit on me at Atlanta Linux Conference in … 98? 99? I’m also not surprised.
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That is part of the definition of an old boys network, even if he was only tolerated. He was allowed to do what he did, because he was considered smart, but also because he was a man.
If a woman did that, she’d be fired, not rewarded for driving trollies the office.
We think of the old boys network as just an elite network, but it does include people who are considered by the elites to be valuable to be kept around.
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Not to say he wasn’t part of a old boys network, but it’s more likely that he kind of fell into the “he’d make a scene and we don’t want him to so we just ignore him” mentality. MIT kinda does this with people. They just class them as “geniuses”, and then they become untouchable, until it affects the university’s bottom line. Then they deal with it. But only then.
RMS is probably equally disliked by everyone who has to work in the same building as he did. Nobody wanted to tell him no because he’d throw a fit and then you’d have what you’re going to have as a result of this, a bunch of people threatening MIT.
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Once again, a woman would just be fired.
With men.
And he still managed to carve himself out a wide swath of privilege, none the less. The old boys network is, at it’s heart, empowering the elite inner circles. Whether or not he was liked by his colleagues is irrelevant really. As long as he advantaged them by being there, he was protected. Like has nothing to do with it.
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Fired and held up as an example of how women can’t hack it, and painted as the crazy, hysterical lady. It wouldn’t matter if she’d legitimately solved cold fusion or come up with transporter technology, to cut shipping times down to seconds.
That’s what old boys networks do. This worship of the genius man needs to stop.
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Fair points all of them!
Like I said, I wish this had happened a long time ago. He’s responsible for very good people in the FSF getting fired, and while he set the movement forward, he’s also set it back an equal (if not greater) amount.
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… and not a single thing of value was lost.
(Since someone asked, the stuff at the bottom is PGP key signing data, so you could use that if you wanted to send him an encrypted message.)
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A free OS is for scroungers who can’t afford anything better.
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I don’t subscribe to the Great Man theory. Everyone is replaceable, and innovation is inevitable. There’s no magical person X that is required for the future to occur, and I also feel hero worship leads to myopia on human shortcomings.
Anyway it’s been beyond clear for a decade now that RMS is causing more harm than good, so
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well, yes, the GPL ensures this.
Provided that v4 doesn’t include a morals clause. Which it might.
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I think a good example of that is how much runs on the Linux kernel, and how little the GNU Hurd kernel is used instead.
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