Where was Sumana when Jeffrey Epstein funded all sorts of centers at MIT? His proclivities and activities were well known since 2005, yet the social justice crowd stayed quiet. Epstein was in a position to cause damage, and he did. Prostitution, death threats, little black books, you name it. Donald Trump was sufficiently put out by his activities to ban him from Mar-do-Lago!
But the woke crowd instead targets Stallman because he is an easy target, he looks like a vagrant and has disgusting habits. Can please someone point out what he did? (No, off-colour jokes don't count, only real-life troubles for another person).
D & I much? Pass the bucket, I'm going to throw up.
I am quite sure the witch hunt is the actual goal of the woke crowd. Not much good to say about them.
This morning I was listening to a radio program about a black woman making theater and podcasts and such things about the history of slavery. Of course, as such this is a topic worthy of attention. But the whole victim mentality in it was quite disgusting. She never quite went as far as literally saying that she hated white people but the implication was there multiple times.
> Where was Sumana when Jeffrey Epstein funded all sorts of centers at MIT?
Uh, you mean when Joi Ito was intentionally obfuscating the source of funds because he knew the university wasn't supposed to accept donations from Epstein?
I think this comes down to people having differences of opinion on what is important.
I read these complaints and don’t think they are very important. Especially over a period of decades. If this is the worse that people can bring up, then I just don’t get it.
In the future will we have two kinds of organizations, one where people file complaints about “ such as taking over sessions through loud disruptions” and one where people don’t care?
I suppose that people care about different things, but then for people who don’t care will we all end up being in one end, and everyone who wants “ Safe Space Policy” I partially applied in other orgs.
The challenge I face is that I don’t want the Postel’s law group full of only jerks. But I also don’t want to be part of an org that spends so much time on what I see as administrative bikeshedding.
Of course people are free to do whatever they like, but I certainly won’t donate to FSF if they go the way I disagree with. And I don’t think a safe FSF will further free software in the best way.
I don’t think we’ll see an (even) split. It’s more likely that all (most) orgs will have safe spaces. Like how all fruit juice is kosher: it makes no difference to people who don’t keep kosher.
> Like how all fruit juice is kosher: it makes no difference to people who don’t keep kosher
I don't believe this approach has only positive outcomes. Taleb wrote[0] "It suffices for an intransigent minority –a certain type of intransigent minorities –to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences"
To say this leaves me feeling deeply uncomfortable would be putting it mildly.
This rule only applies when the majority don't care about the outcome, though. Halal meat: small minority cares deeply, majority doesn't care or even notice; therefore it's easiest for all meat to be halal. If the minority preference actually impinged on something the majority wanted, like "no meat at all", then the minority would certainly not have this influence (and there might be conflict). Notice that vegans, a small and passionate minority, have not imposed their preference on society at large.
If it's a "dictatorship", it's a very, very soft one.
> This rule only applies when the majority don't care about the outcome
"Don't care" or "aren't told" ?
> Halal meat: small minority cares deeply, majority doesn't care or even notice
I suspect this - as in so many cases - comes down to a labelling issue. Are consumers able to make an informed judgement if they're unable to see what product they're buying?
"Leading [UK] supermarkets [said] some of the meat they sell could qualify as halal but is not labelled as such"[0]
If there is a large constituency that refuses to eat halal meat, it's just out of hostility towards the minority, not because of any quality of the meat. Your quote is evidence for this.
Not really. What if people thought the method used for slaughtering was inhumane and they preferred a different method. Then the motivation is not based on hostility towards a minority.
This is exactly the point. If no-one even notices without being explicitly told, then it's a completely innocuous distinction from the point of view of the non-halal majority.
But one key reason all fruit juice is kosher is that it's pretty easy to get it certified as kosher. You don't have to use any special ingredients or add any special processing steps, and the rabbi won't insist that you personally keep kosher convert to Judaism. That isn't true in this context, where most advocates of "safe spaces" are quite open about the fact that they expect everyone to follow their cultural practices, and that the purpose of a safe space is to help them coordinate this. So pillarization (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillarisation) seems like a more likely outcome.
Interesting——we’ll find out. So far I see evidence in e.g. the much-discussed switch from “master” to “main” on GitHub and the now omnipresent community codes of conduct. To my mind this is a cheap kosher certification that the vast majority of organizations comply with. Do you have contrary examples of pillarization to date?
I'd point to the Coinbase kerfluffle as a clear example, where the CEO explicitly staked out a position as a "mission focused company" that wouldn't deal with "societal issues" or "political causes". Whether it's a trend or an outlier... yeah, I'm less sure as I think about it.
I think it’s reasonable for people who care about free software to dislike their figurehead being the brash, toe lint eating RMS. I met him in person once and he was rude to serving staff and he stank.
Does this make him a bad person, or imply he has bad technical judgement? No. I don’t think someone less opinionated could have started the free software movement like he did. I’m glad I met him and I have appreciation for the work he did.
But I don’t want him to represent me or the work I do. Most software engineers in the opensource / free software world are polite, well read, practical and shower from time to time. And, especially in leadership we accept that at the end of the day it’s critically important that we follow our own rules and decision processes, no matter our own opinions.
To me it’s not about cancelling rms. (I hate cancel culture). I just think the FSF (and opensource as a whole) would be more successful with someone other than RMS as the figurehead. He’s a bad role model. And claiming he’s above the rules undermines the very organisation he’s trying to run. If the federal government wants to call up the “leaders” of the opensource community to decide if Linux is good fit, I don’t want RMS to be the person they talk to. He’s a great visionary type person. But the FSF needs dependable, stable and mature. RMS just isn’t that guy.
It seems like the obvious strategy there is to just make someone else the figurehead, and I'd argue that's largely already happened. When I first learned about the free software movement, I was taught that Linus Torvalds is the spiritual figurehead because he wrote the Linux operating system we all use; it was only years after that that I learned about rms and the whole GNU/Linux argument.
I’m not sure he represents you, or even free software. He represents, in this instance, the FSF, an organisation he himself set up. It’s now one of many promotors of open software (broadly speaking), and frankly quite a fringe one. I’m an Emacs user, and despite that, FSF’s articles fill me with cringe.
I think your argument would apply in its entirety if he was representing some kind of umbrella organisation for FOSS, but that’s not the case. It would also then be reasonable for members of such an umbrella to pressure the FSF into who should be on its board. But it is not the case.
Perhaps this argument shows that we need such an organisation, with RMS not heading it.
> I just think the FSF (and opensource as a whole) would be more successful with someone other than RMS as the figurehead.
I appreciate the moderation you show in your comment. That's why I'm going to answer that here rather than on a less thoughtful comment: free software and open source are not the same. Open source is a movement that today is trying to increase rentability and profits via information and code sharing. The rules that apply make it completely straightforward for a company to share only the part of code that they feel won't diminish profits, or even will increase them.
On the other hand, free software is a militant movement and ideology that is seeking to destroy a large part of the proprietary software that exists. While you would expect an open source proponent to shower, and even wear a tie, because he has to be entreprise friendly, the same codes don't necessarily apply to militantism. Going further, what you seek as the figurehead of some kind of consensual vision of open source will probably not be the same as for a militant organization.
I'm of course exaggerating a bit, but this is at the core of a lot of misguided arguments I see here and there. RMS is basically being accused of being shocking in his viewpoints and in who he is. Well, the very idea of free software was extremely shocking 30 years ago, so maybe it's no coincidence. I'm not condoning all he did or all he said, but I certainly wouldn't like some watered down open source ideologist as the head of the FSF, which has so far been a necessary uncompromising force in the ideological landscape of open source software.
Thanks; this is an insightful perspective and I appreciate the thoughtful reply.
My question then is this: would the FSF be more or less effective in their political goals with someone else at the helm?
My worry is that RMS’s prickliness and generally poor social skills harm the free software movement more than they help it. Every story about RMS from people who actually interact with him seems to be really cringe inducing. And that’s not what I want from a leader. And I don’t see how abandoning respectability outside the software/political arena helps them campaign for their goals.
What they need to do is to set out a clear vision for the future, make useful code and inspire young engineers to carry the flame. Reading comments here shows me that some people find RMS inspiring, which is good. And maybe the FSF doesn’t have anyone better suited for the job. But in any case, the FSF as it stands now isn’t an organisation I’ll ever want to be involved with.
Often the visionary is the wrong person to carry the vision beyond some point.
I know people who are serial doers of things - be it starting a business, an organization, a whatever, but are lousy at running and shepherding their creations, if they're lucky, they're aware of these limitations, if not, well... I think RMS is in the not category - and while he can and should continue as the spiritual leader of the movement, he probably should not be the one doing the day to day leader for the future, beyond that, what of succession planning, the man is 68.
Most of the complaints I've seen about RMS are.. well.. pretty normal among geeky people, he's socially clueless, applies logic instead of empathy, etc. He has no doubt, said many problematic things but the paucity of actual harms from these things is notable.
In short, I agree with the sentiments here, FSF needs an effective leader, and whatever annoying/clueless things RMS has said, isn't really relevant to that discussion.
I don't think his behavior towards women should be so easily dismissed as "not actual harms".
That behavior makes women uncomfortable. I suspect he feels like "I made an offer, you said no, and it's done." It doesn't work that way. The best analogy I can draw is if a stranger came up to you before a meeting and asked you to give him your watch. That's going to feel uncomfortable and weird, for the rest of the day and longer.
Even if neurodivergence makes it difficult to discover that for himself, it's surely been explained to him. That means he knows he's making people uncomfortable and doing it anyway.
That is relevant to the discussion. He's driving off half the potential population of people to work on things. That half is under-represented -- and part of the reason they're under-represented is that the community keeps making excuses for people who behave like that. Then they wonder why nobody has ever explained women to them -- and why women keep being upset.
The "problematic" things seem to me like the least of it. He's rude to people whose help he needs -- not just women, but to women in a way that's specific to women in addition to all of the other ones. That's exactly the opposite of what a leader does. Leaders get people to work together, especially when the worker are volunteering.
The free software movement is only militant to a degree. They're not the Black Panthers or the Weather Underground. They're not going to destroy proprietary software by mailing nail bombs to Microsoft or beheading Larry Ellison on video. The war they're fighting is a war of ideas and their ammunition is argument. Having as your figurehead a man who doesn't shower, eats his own skin tags, constantly creeps women out and has, let's say, "controversial" views makes the free software movement look ridiculous, hurts recruiting, and gives ammunition to the enemy.
I would ask you to consider the possibility that one can be an idealist about free software, even a militant extremist, while not being a viscerally offensive human being. You're trying to ascribe nobility and necessity to traits in Richard Stallman which bring no benefits to the cause free software, and which often work to its detriment. And a truly militant organization would recognize when their leader has become a hindrance to the cause and put them out to pasture.
Oh no, of course is not the first time you tried to take down the free software movement. First time was fifteen years ago with the (now a hollow shell) Open Source Initiative. For the record, there is also a list in support of Richard Stallman [1], which right now is signed by more people, but less organizations.
Which comes to show the glaring disconnect between organizations and the user base. As the organizations are too busy showing each other how good and inclusive they are, while at the same time they give fat raises to their CEOs and fire their workers.
Nah, the support letter was drafted in 4chan (I saw early drafts of it in /g/) and promoted in 4chan. It's gotten a bit more support elsewhere now, but it's a 4chan-led initiative, hence why it's signed by a bunch of nobodies (anons, as they prefer to be called).
Maybe it's gotten some steam on Twitter now, but it was drafted in 4chan. I saw early drafts in /g/. I think the 4chan culture is what's motivated the signers of the counterletter to be mostly anonymous or unknown.
The letter I'm citing is also the one against Stallman. Which contains such relevant figures in the Free Software movement as "Z" (signature number 2771), or "stick" (signature number 2528).
No matter where your preferences lie, it should be obvious that signing a pro-Stallman letter under your real name in the current climate is career ending at RedHat, Microsoft, Facebook and Google.
If you examine which Free Software contributors signed the anti-Stallman letter and you are familiar with the respective projects, it is easy to see that a lot of them are vocal activists.
One project I know has 100 developers, about 8 signed, the rest are silent for good reason (or signed the pro-letter under a pseudonym).
To coopt Bender, why not go start your own [software project] with [diversity] and [inclusion]?
You could fork the entire FSF’s software suite, and mold a culture around it that matches your priorities. That’s the beauty of free software, you don’t need to ask permission. Or write petitions. You just go and do it.
Alas, good awareness of social justice issues does not automatically go hand-in-hand with good technical ability. The unpleasant neckbeards are often surprisingly good at actually writing code.
I think this estimation severely tests conventional wisdom around the quality of code in most of the GNU projects.
Unless, of course, you meant good at writing large volumes of code, which the GNU projects have historically excelled at. But we all know the other bit of conventional wisdom about that.
The primary flaw in that plan is indicated by following the first "in 2009 if not earlier" link. After fairly quoting Stallman, in context, the author says:
"Do I believe that Richard is attempting to deliberately denigrate women? Not in the slightest. But I also don't believe that someone entirely gender-blind would have made the above joke."
If the requirement to be in the WokeFSF is to be, and to always have been, entirely "gender-blind", everybody would be guilty and eligible for expulsion. As this requires selective enforcement, it becomes entirely political.
If I can't have ever expressed the desire to have sex with even a hypothetical woman, even as a metaphor, or have ever said that I wanted to prioritize outreach towards women or minorities in some context, I'm not qualified to join. To be "gender-blind" I have to never have supported affirmative action or quotas, which I have, energetically.
What I'm trying to say is that it isn't specifically that people capable of delivering wouldn't join a WokeFSF, it's that everyone joining a WokeFSF would be in a precarious position. People who remain in an FSF that tolerates it's leader joking about taking away people's Emacs virginity are not in a precarious position, even if they find those jokes gross and don't enjoy engaging with some of the leadership.
Nobody is going to toss you out of the non-woke FSF for being too woke, but the opposite isn't true.
The fact is with these "social justice" initiatives is that they are completely orthogonal issues to the organization and their goals. The FSF is about Free Software, Linux is about Linux. These people want to impose their own specific politics upon others, in this case using intimidation and shame. Of course some organizations will sign these letters, they are much more worried about being on the PR approved right side.
These people should merely create their own organizations. This is what they would often say when for example a red team politician complains about being blocked from twitter.
This is a popular position but software does not rain from the heavens. It is written by people. And the rather convincing argument goes that this sort of behavior drives away many people who could've made valuable contributions.
As far as I can see RMS is a neuroatypical person who just does not have any filters and also applies logic to such interpersonal matters where empathy would be better. I do not think he is malicious but you can't expect women who are constantly harassed to make this distinction -- harassment is just harassment at the end of the day. And this has been made clear to him so many times over the decades and he refuses to change and that's a problem. No matter how much one contributes, they can drive away enough people the lost potential total contribution overweighs that. Trust me, I know :(
When people on one hand want to not be harassed for wherever reason and then are harassing someone neuroatypical for neuroatypical behaviour they are not any better themselves.
Your sentence is insidious. What you call "harassing someone neuroatypical" were requests by colleagues and friends to exhibit less behaviors perceived as harassment. You can not conflate the two. Is it harassment to ask to not put a mattress in your university office?
A mattress in his office is the least of what is said about RMS on HN and elsewhere. The point stands that a lot of people are harassing him for being neuroatypical.
This, however, is a hypothetical. For example, when the Linux project introduced the Code Of Conduct, such threats were made, however, at least as far as I am aware, no such departures have actually happened. Please let me know if I am incorrect.
We have multiple reports on people leaving open source or not starting because of RMS. And other toxic people like Linus Torvalds. Like me.
Many people say that people leave bad managers, not bad jobs. The fact that people are still contributing with RMS at the forefront of the FSF indicates that they at least are fine with the way things currently are.
If management changes, there's definitely a chance they won't stick around depending on what they do in terms of the direction of the FSF.
> The fact that people are still contributing with RMS at the forefront of the FSF indicates that they at least are fine with the way things currently are.
In Github's 2017 survey, 50% of the 5,500 respondents claimed they had witnessed toxic interactions while working on open-source projects, and that 18% of them had suffered through a negative interaction. Also, 95% of contributors were men and 3% were women.
Are you sure people are still contributing or is it just men who do with very, very few women who is willing to put up with this?
LOL'd hard at the Sarah Mei "toxicity" post... she's easily the most toxic person I can think about (at least, her online persona, I'm sure in person she cannot be that bad, and maybe she is even kind).
> Are you sure people are still contributing or is it just men who do with very, very few women who is willing to put up with this?
The skewed male to female ratio isn't unique to software developed under the FSF. It's the case throughout the industry and even at the high school/college/graduate school level. Therefore, the lack of women contributing to projects within the FSF isn't because of RMS or the FSF board.
This , again , is a skewing of facts: while it is true there is a gender disparity in tech , with about a very low 20% women in tech engineering, in open source it is 10% or even less.
That doesn't mean that there's an inherent bias against women in open source software development. If what you're saying is true, then there must be an inherent bias against males when comparing preschool teachers (2.7% male) versus public school teachers (24% male). I don't believe there's an inherent bias in either case and the skewed gender ratio which varies depending on the area isn't due to a single person or group of people.
Not sure what you mean here. What I am saying, and this is backed by women self reporting, women leaving and statistics is that the toxicity of some of the leaders in open source lead them not start / leave open source.
Basically, I was comparing an example where the percentage of male teachers is lower when comparing preschool teachers versus public school teachers in general, like you mentioned the lower percentage of female developers contributing to open source software versus the percentage of female developers throughout the industry.
Even if a male preschool teacher self-reported perceived bias against him, that doesn't necessarily mean that there's general trend of bias throughout the area. Just like a female self reporting bias they perceived for a particular open source project doesn't mean that there's a general of bias in that area.
Oh, I know why I recognize this website. I have had the unpleasant experience of meeting Sumana. She is a bully.
I'm a white hetero cis man who attended the Recurse Center before it was renamed from Hacker School (because Hacker wasn't inclusive enough)
Sumana lives out the postmodern platitude that the accused shouldn't need to be educated about what he did wrong and went out of her way to shame me for behaving "incorrectly" according to her ideological standards on multiple occasions, going as far as to tattle multiple times and to tell me it wasn't her responsibility to explain the transgression I had made, that I to this day do not understand. I might have ASD; I'm kinda socially stupid. Figures she wouldn't like me.
Anyway, I don't participate at Recurse anymore specifically because of Sumana and her clique. She's a bully and demands ideological conformity especially among white men.
My biggest worry is that these political fights will lead to a degradation in the quality of Free software products, a slowdown in code and software contributions from developers and coders and a general malaise in the whole Free software movement as the idealogical battles are fought out. I can only see the winners in the long run being those people or organisations that seek to gain from the FSF's weakness.
But this is what this letter is all about. They are not targeting RMS but the whole Free Software Movement. A lot of companies supporting this letter make millions with proprietary software, privacy invasion, user manipulation and planned obsolescence. They aren't targeting Stallman because they want Free Software Movement to succeed. They are targeting Stallman because it can cause a fracture in the movement.
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 156 ms ] threadBut the woke crowd instead targets Stallman because he is an easy target, he looks like a vagrant and has disgusting habits. Can please someone point out what he did? (No, off-colour jokes don't count, only real-life troubles for another person).
D & I much? Pass the bucket, I'm going to throw up.
This morning I was listening to a radio program about a black woman making theater and podcasts and such things about the history of slavery. Of course, as such this is a topic worthy of attention. But the whole victim mentality in it was quite disgusting. She never quite went as far as literally saying that she hated white people but the implication was there multiple times.
Uh, you mean when Joi Ito was intentionally obfuscating the source of funds because he knew the university wasn't supposed to accept donations from Epstein?
I read these complaints and don’t think they are very important. Especially over a period of decades. If this is the worse that people can bring up, then I just don’t get it.
In the future will we have two kinds of organizations, one where people file complaints about “ such as taking over sessions through loud disruptions” and one where people don’t care?
I suppose that people care about different things, but then for people who don’t care will we all end up being in one end, and everyone who wants “ Safe Space Policy” I partially applied in other orgs.
The challenge I face is that I don’t want the Postel’s law group full of only jerks. But I also don’t want to be part of an org that spends so much time on what I see as administrative bikeshedding.
Of course people are free to do whatever they like, but I certainly won’t donate to FSF if they go the way I disagree with. And I don’t think a safe FSF will further free software in the best way.
I don’t see myself stop supporting free software, but I’ll want some way to participate to fill that FSF shaped community hole.
I don't believe this approach has only positive outcomes. Taleb wrote[0] "It suffices for an intransigent minority –a certain type of intransigent minorities –to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences"
To say this leaves me feeling deeply uncomfortable would be putting it mildly.
[0] The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
If it's a "dictatorship", it's a very, very soft one.
"Don't care" or "aren't told" ?
> Halal meat: small minority cares deeply, majority doesn't care or even notice
I suspect this - as in so many cases - comes down to a labelling issue. Are consumers able to make an informed judgement if they're unable to see what product they're buying?
"Leading [UK] supermarkets [said] some of the meat they sell could qualify as halal but is not labelled as such"[0]
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-27402428
If there is a large constituency that refuses to eat halal meat, it's just out of hostility towards the minority, not because of any quality of the meat. Your quote is evidence for this.
Two thought experiments:
Would one notice if meat was or wasn't halal if one wasn't explicitly told?
Would one notice if fruit juice was or wasn't kosher if one wasn't explicitly told?
Does this make him a bad person, or imply he has bad technical judgement? No. I don’t think someone less opinionated could have started the free software movement like he did. I’m glad I met him and I have appreciation for the work he did.
But I don’t want him to represent me or the work I do. Most software engineers in the opensource / free software world are polite, well read, practical and shower from time to time. And, especially in leadership we accept that at the end of the day it’s critically important that we follow our own rules and decision processes, no matter our own opinions.
To me it’s not about cancelling rms. (I hate cancel culture). I just think the FSF (and opensource as a whole) would be more successful with someone other than RMS as the figurehead. He’s a bad role model. And claiming he’s above the rules undermines the very organisation he’s trying to run. If the federal government wants to call up the “leaders” of the opensource community to decide if Linux is good fit, I don’t want RMS to be the person they talk to. He’s a great visionary type person. But the FSF needs dependable, stable and mature. RMS just isn’t that guy.
I think your argument would apply in its entirety if he was representing some kind of umbrella organisation for FOSS, but that’s not the case. It would also then be reasonable for members of such an umbrella to pressure the FSF into who should be on its board. But it is not the case.
Perhaps this argument shows that we need such an organisation, with RMS not heading it.
I appreciate the moderation you show in your comment. That's why I'm going to answer that here rather than on a less thoughtful comment: free software and open source are not the same. Open source is a movement that today is trying to increase rentability and profits via information and code sharing. The rules that apply make it completely straightforward for a company to share only the part of code that they feel won't diminish profits, or even will increase them.
On the other hand, free software is a militant movement and ideology that is seeking to destroy a large part of the proprietary software that exists. While you would expect an open source proponent to shower, and even wear a tie, because he has to be entreprise friendly, the same codes don't necessarily apply to militantism. Going further, what you seek as the figurehead of some kind of consensual vision of open source will probably not be the same as for a militant organization.
I'm of course exaggerating a bit, but this is at the core of a lot of misguided arguments I see here and there. RMS is basically being accused of being shocking in his viewpoints and in who he is. Well, the very idea of free software was extremely shocking 30 years ago, so maybe it's no coincidence. I'm not condoning all he did or all he said, but I certainly wouldn't like some watered down open source ideologist as the head of the FSF, which has so far been a necessary uncompromising force in the ideological landscape of open source software.
My question then is this: would the FSF be more or less effective in their political goals with someone else at the helm?
My worry is that RMS’s prickliness and generally poor social skills harm the free software movement more than they help it. Every story about RMS from people who actually interact with him seems to be really cringe inducing. And that’s not what I want from a leader. And I don’t see how abandoning respectability outside the software/political arena helps them campaign for their goals.
What they need to do is to set out a clear vision for the future, make useful code and inspire young engineers to carry the flame. Reading comments here shows me that some people find RMS inspiring, which is good. And maybe the FSF doesn’t have anyone better suited for the job. But in any case, the FSF as it stands now isn’t an organisation I’ll ever want to be involved with.
I know people who are serial doers of things - be it starting a business, an organization, a whatever, but are lousy at running and shepherding their creations, if they're lucky, they're aware of these limitations, if not, well... I think RMS is in the not category - and while he can and should continue as the spiritual leader of the movement, he probably should not be the one doing the day to day leader for the future, beyond that, what of succession planning, the man is 68.
Most of the complaints I've seen about RMS are.. well.. pretty normal among geeky people, he's socially clueless, applies logic instead of empathy, etc. He has no doubt, said many problematic things but the paucity of actual harms from these things is notable.
In short, I agree with the sentiments here, FSF needs an effective leader, and whatever annoying/clueless things RMS has said, isn't really relevant to that discussion.
That behavior makes women uncomfortable. I suspect he feels like "I made an offer, you said no, and it's done." It doesn't work that way. The best analogy I can draw is if a stranger came up to you before a meeting and asked you to give him your watch. That's going to feel uncomfortable and weird, for the rest of the day and longer.
Even if neurodivergence makes it difficult to discover that for himself, it's surely been explained to him. That means he knows he's making people uncomfortable and doing it anyway.
That is relevant to the discussion. He's driving off half the potential population of people to work on things. That half is under-represented -- and part of the reason they're under-represented is that the community keeps making excuses for people who behave like that. Then they wonder why nobody has ever explained women to them -- and why women keep being upset.
The "problematic" things seem to me like the least of it. He's rude to people whose help he needs -- not just women, but to women in a way that's specific to women in addition to all of the other ones. That's exactly the opposite of what a leader does. Leaders get people to work together, especially when the worker are volunteering.
I would ask you to consider the possibility that one can be an idealist about free software, even a militant extremist, while not being a viscerally offensive human being. You're trying to ascribe nobility and necessity to traits in Richard Stallman which bring no benefits to the cause free software, and which often work to its detriment. And a truly militant organization would recognize when their leader has become a hindrance to the cause and put them out to pasture.
Which comes to show the glaring disconnect between organizations and the user base. As the organizations are too busy showing each other how good and inclusive they are, while at the same time they give fat raises to their CEOs and fire their workers.
[1] https://rms-support-letter.github.io/
For example, I will absolutely defer to Matthew Garrett and Benjamin Mako Hill and Bradley Kuhn over... uh, "agentOfChaos."
But if you go to /g/ now, you'll see plenty of activity around this letter.
But if you go to /g/ now, you'll see plenty of activity around this letter.
I think the term "free software users" defines them better.
> which is signed by Free Software contributors.
Really? Could you please tell me how "Z" (signature number 2771 right now) contributed to the Free Software movement? I'm intrigued.
If you examine which Free Software contributors signed the anti-Stallman letter and you are familiar with the respective projects, it is easy to see that a lot of them are vocal activists.
One project I know has 100 developers, about 8 signed, the rest are silent for good reason (or signed the pro-letter under a pseudonym).
You could fork the entire FSF’s software suite, and mold a culture around it that matches your priorities. That’s the beauty of free software, you don’t need to ask permission. Or write petitions. You just go and do it.
Unless, of course, you meant good at writing large volumes of code, which the GNU projects have historically excelled at. But we all know the other bit of conventional wisdom about that.
"Do I believe that Richard is attempting to deliberately denigrate women? Not in the slightest. But I also don't believe that someone entirely gender-blind would have made the above joke."
If the requirement to be in the WokeFSF is to be, and to always have been, entirely "gender-blind", everybody would be guilty and eligible for expulsion. As this requires selective enforcement, it becomes entirely political.
If I can't have ever expressed the desire to have sex with even a hypothetical woman, even as a metaphor, or have ever said that I wanted to prioritize outreach towards women or minorities in some context, I'm not qualified to join. To be "gender-blind" I have to never have supported affirmative action or quotas, which I have, energetically.
What I'm trying to say is that it isn't specifically that people capable of delivering wouldn't join a WokeFSF, it's that everyone joining a WokeFSF would be in a precarious position. People who remain in an FSF that tolerates it's leader joking about taking away people's Emacs virginity are not in a precarious position, even if they find those jokes gross and don't enjoy engaging with some of the leadership.
Nobody is going to toss you out of the non-woke FSF for being too woke, but the opposite isn't true.
These people should merely create their own organizations. This is what they would often say when for example a red team politician complains about being blocked from twitter.
As far as I can see RMS is a neuroatypical person who just does not have any filters and also applies logic to such interpersonal matters where empathy would be better. I do not think he is malicious but you can't expect women who are constantly harassed to make this distinction -- harassment is just harassment at the end of the day. And this has been made clear to him so many times over the decades and he refuses to change and that's a problem. No matter how much one contributes, they can drive away enough people the lost potential total contribution overweighs that. Trust me, I know :(
You need to elaborate of what you perceive as harassment.
The other thing to consider is that these movements to replace leadership or boards could drive away people who are currently making contributions.
I believe that losing current contributors is a bigger loss than the, arguably hypothetical, new contributor(s) that could be gained.
We have multiple reports on people leaving open source or not starting because of RMS. And other toxic people like Linus Torvalds. Like me.
If management changes, there's definitely a chance they won't stick around depending on what they do in terms of the direction of the FSF.
Some people do. Some do not.
https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/994010501460865025
In Github's 2017 survey, 50% of the 5,500 respondents claimed they had witnessed toxic interactions while working on open-source projects, and that 18% of them had suffered through a negative interaction. Also, 95% of contributors were men and 3% were women.
Are you sure people are still contributing or is it just men who do with very, very few women who is willing to put up with this?
https://www.php.net/credits.php here, count the women. Or rather the woman!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictator_for_life not. a. single. woman.
Not all of this is on Stallman but as he is the figurehead of an entire movement, certainly at least some of it is.
The skewed male to female ratio isn't unique to software developed under the FSF. It's the case throughout the industry and even at the high school/college/graduate school level. Therefore, the lack of women contributing to projects within the FSF isn't because of RMS or the FSF board.
Basically, I was comparing an example where the percentage of male teachers is lower when comparing preschool teachers versus public school teachers in general, like you mentioned the lower percentage of female developers contributing to open source software versus the percentage of female developers throughout the industry.
Even if a male preschool teacher self-reported perceived bias against him, that doesn't necessarily mean that there's general trend of bias throughout the area. Just like a female self reporting bias they perceived for a particular open source project doesn't mean that there's a general of bias in that area.
I'm a white hetero cis man who attended the Recurse Center before it was renamed from Hacker School (because Hacker wasn't inclusive enough)
Sumana lives out the postmodern platitude that the accused shouldn't need to be educated about what he did wrong and went out of her way to shame me for behaving "incorrectly" according to her ideological standards on multiple occasions, going as far as to tattle multiple times and to tell me it wasn't her responsibility to explain the transgression I had made, that I to this day do not understand. I might have ASD; I'm kinda socially stupid. Figures she wouldn't like me.
Anyway, I don't participate at Recurse anymore specifically because of Sumana and her clique. She's a bully and demands ideological conformity especially among white men.
Fuck this post, and fuck Sumana.