Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
The board will be conducting a search for a new president, beginning immediately. Further details of the search will be published on fsf.org".
Posted Sep 17, 2019 7:00 UTC (Tue)
by colo (guest, #45564)
[Link] (186 responses)
A moral man's life's work soiled by hordes of online bullies, because he tried to stand up for a deceased friend of his, who couldn't have defended himself against any accusations raised. Despicable, in my view.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 7:41 UTC (Tue)
by TheGopher (subscriber, #59256)
[Link] (113 responses)
Posted Sep 17, 2019 8:18 UTC (Tue)
by colo (guest, #45564)
[Link]
Posted Sep 17, 2019 8:20 UTC (Tue)
by rschroev (subscriber, #4164)
[Link] (101 responses)
> Context: In a recently unsealed deposition a woman testified that, at the age of 17, Epstein told her to have sex with Marvin Minsky. Minsky was a founder of the MIT Media Lab and pioneer in A.I. who died in 2016. Stallman argued on a mailing list (in response to a statement from a protest organizer accusing Minsky of sexual assault) that, while he condemned Epstein, Minsky likely did not know she was being coerced:
>> We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing. Assuming she was being coerced by Epstein, he would have had every reason to tell her to conceal that from most of his associates.
> Some SJW responded by writing a Medium post called "Remove Richard Stallman". Media outlets like Vice and The Daily Beast then lied and misquoted Stallman as saying that the woman was likely "entirely willing" and as "defending Epstein". He has now been pressured to resign from MIT
> Furthermore the deposition doesn't say she had sex with Minsky, only that Epstein told her to do so, and according to physicist Greg Benford she propositioned Minsky and he turned her down:
>> I know; I was there. Minsky turned her down. Told me about it. She saw us talking and didn’t approach me.
> This seems like a complete validation of the distinction Stallman was making. If what Minsky knew doesn't matter, if there's no difference between "Minsky sexually assaulted a woman" and "Epstein told a 17-year-old to have sex with Minsky without his knowledge or consent", then why did he turn her down?
> Edit: He has also resigned from the Free Software Foundation, which he founded. Grim news for free software, since I think true-believing purists like Stallman are vital to prevent various kinds of co-option.
If that's too be believed, I don't see what RMS has done wrong, and also not why he decided too resign.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 8:23 UTC (Tue)
by DrMcCoy (subscriber, #86699)
[Link] (7 responses)
Posted Sep 17, 2019 8:30 UTC (Tue)
by rschroev (subscriber, #4164)
[Link] (5 responses)
Posted Sep 17, 2019 20:01 UTC (Tue)
by Yui (guest, #118557)
[Link] (4 responses)
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6405929/091320...
Posted Sep 17, 2019 22:29 UTC (Tue)
by k8to (guest, #15413)
[Link] (3 responses)
If you aren't aware of this, you aren't digging very much into the various claims made using the term. If you aren't aware of how this pattern of behavior comes to exist, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
Posted Sep 18, 2019 5:17 UTC (Wed)
by Yui (guest, #118557)
[Link] (2 responses)
There are also plenty of people who have adopted it to describe themeselves. Those people match pretty much perfectly the profile.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 23:00 UTC (Wed)
by flussence (guest, #85566)
[Link]
Posted Sep 20, 2019 0:14 UTC (Fri)
by rahvin (guest, #16953)
[Link]
Posted Sep 17, 2019 12:14 UTC (Tue)
by Deleted user 129183 (guest, #129183)
[Link]
And more generally, a post on social media. They are always bad sources when you want to develop a nuanced opinion on anything, because the way they work is that they almost always turn into an automated outrage machine for *all* sides.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 9:56 UTC (Tue)
by rschroev (subscriber, #4164)
[Link] (88 responses)
> A lot of people are acting like this is just about the Epstein comments. The MIT community was up in arms not just over that but at the mountain of shit Stallman has gotten away with over the last few decades, including crap like telling female researchers he'd kill himself unless they dated him, keeping a mattress in his office and inviting people to lay topless on it, defending pedophilia and child rape. He's been making women at MIT uncomfortable for years, and it just finally caught up with him. This Epstein shit is the tip of a sexist shitberg, and it finally capsized.
> A whole lot of people sayin stuff like "VICE has misrepresented what he actually wrote in his email!" I mean, maybe you're right, but this latest controversy is like 1% of why he's finally being ousted.
> Source: went to MIT, several of my female friends in CSAIL have been complaining about this for years.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 13:02 UTC (Tue)
by Glaucon (guest, #134460)
[Link] (87 responses)
Let's get this straight. Anonymous allegations can be made by anybody about anybody. They are worthless. Any person with more common sense than an oyster will ignore them.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 16:29 UTC (Tue)
by SEJeff (guest, #51588)
[Link] (86 responses)
https://stallman.org/archives/2006-mar-jun.html#05%20June...
"""
https://stallman.org/archives/2012-jul-oct.html#15_Septem...
"""
Posted Sep 17, 2019 16:52 UTC (Tue)
by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
[Link] (81 responses)
Posted Sep 17, 2019 16:58 UTC (Tue)
by SEJeff (guest, #51588)
[Link] (54 responses)
Posted Sep 17, 2019 19:40 UTC (Tue)
by coriordan (guest, #7544)
[Link] (35 responses)
In the last 5 years, the male to female ratio has been 10:3, 8:5, 9:3, 5:5, 6:5 (sources below). And there's been plenty of male and female employees from minority sexual orientations/identities. And I know there were at least three female employees who were there more than ten years. But who needs facts...
https://www.fsf.org/about/staff-and-board/
Posted Sep 18, 2019 0:34 UTC (Wed)
by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
[Link] (34 responses)
Posted Sep 18, 2019 6:03 UTC (Wed)
by coriordan (guest, #7544)
[Link] (33 responses)
There were implications that Richard is blocking diversity, and there were implications that he could be abusing a position of power, so I pointed to evidence for specific facts that suggest that the opposite is true.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 10:01 UTC (Wed)
by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
[Link] (32 responses)
The question is not whether FSF was diverse. The question is whether he made even a few women uncomfortable, or worse, with his behaviour. The evidence is overwhelming he did. Plus he had self-documented creepy views.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 11:36 UTC (Wed)
by niner (subscriber, #26151)
[Link] (31 responses)
Posted Sep 18, 2019 12:24 UTC (Wed)
by pv (guest, #112619)
[Link] (13 responses)
Posted Sep 18, 2019 12:32 UTC (Wed)
by niner (subscriber, #26151)
[Link] (12 responses)
I dare say no one goes to conferences specifically to be hit on by anyone. Nevertheless romantic couplings can and do occur on occasion. As with all social gatherings, especially involving alcohol.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 12:52 UTC (Wed)
by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
[Link]
Posted Sep 18, 2019 12:58 UTC (Wed)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link]
I'm not a woman and I have nothing whatsoever against good food etc., but if Richard Stallman handed me such a card at a conference I would feel extremely creeped out.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 15:09 UTC (Wed)
by pv (guest, #112619)
[Link] (9 responses)
Posted Sep 18, 2019 15:19 UTC (Wed)
by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
[Link] (8 responses)
I'd just like to add: other comments suggest RMS is autistic/aspie. Autistic people have difficulty intuiting social rules -- but for that reason, when the rules are explained to them, they follow the rules totally. RMS, when told those cards are inappropriate at a conference (and I'm very sure someone somewhere told him exactly why, in terms similar to what you said), hands them out across the road. That's not autism. That's entitlement. And worse.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 18:46 UTC (Wed)
by k8to (guest, #15413)
[Link]
Posted Sep 18, 2019 21:39 UTC (Wed)
by coriordan (guest, #7544)
[Link] (1 responses)
So you think someone can explain to Greta Thunberg the reasons for most people's inaction on climate change, and then she'll "follow along totally"? She won't. Her unusual actions are because she looks at what people are doing and it makes no sense to her, not because she's waiting for you to explain to her the normal way to behave.
I'm not commenting on whether Richard has this or any kind of syndrome. But I do know that you can't just tell him "stop being direct" or "don't ask women on dates" and expect your words to change him.
Posted Sep 19, 2019 3:12 UTC (Thu)
by roc (subscriber, #30627)
[Link]
That is a good reason to isolate him.
Posted Sep 19, 2019 21:05 UTC (Thu)
by HenrikH (subscriber, #31152)
[Link] (1 responses)
For things where he has no interest or haven't made up his mind you can tell him that "the rules for Y is X" and then he will follow those rules just like you wrote but this does not work if he already have invented an internal rule by himself or if the rule requires him to break something else that he likes to do or not to do.
So e.g he very much likes to play games and watch Youtube videos, there is no rule in the world that I could create that he would follow that in any way would prohibit him from playing games or watching videos when he wants to. Aka I cannot create a new rule that says that for every 10 videos you have to go outside for 10 minutes, even implying something like that would just make him mad.
Posted Sep 20, 2019 14:58 UTC (Fri)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link]
As an actual aspie the rules I make up are very much modifiable, but I don't do so just because people say so. The replacements need to satisfy the internal need that led to the creation of the original rules, and those needs may well not be needs I understand. It was a very long time -- decades -- before I figured out the stuff I mention in this comment, but the needs and even many of the same coping mechanisms were present from about the age of five, and if you'd tried to take them away I would have been epically unhappy and quite unable to explain why. Autistics have very poor visibility into our own internal states. Equally, he'd probably be able to express this himself in a few decades. But this is my guess! :)
Of course, part of that need is for control of a chaotic world, and rules qua rules provide that control in and of themselves, as long as they are not rules imposed from outside: i.e. it is quite possible that a rule your son made up would be acceptable to him where *exactly the same rule* would not be acceptable coming from anyone else, because a key part of it was that the rule was not externally imposed!
> So e.g he very much likes to play games and watch Youtube videos, there is no rule in the world that I could create that he would follow that in any way would prohibit him from playing games or watching videos when he wants to. Aka I cannot create a new rule that says that for every 10 videos you have to go outside for 10 minutes, even implying something like that would just make him mad.
And there's a good reason for that. If this stuff serves the same purpose as reading and hacking does for me -- and I very much suspect it does, it feels exactly the same and I use gameplaying for the same purpose sometimes -- this is not *optional* or even exactly fun: it's an essential cooldown method, a way to shut out the chaotic outside world and restrict sensory input to something you control completely (even a youtube video -- you have control of pause and rewind, so it's a controlled sensory feed: and computer games are something you can redo without real-world consequences until you get it right, which might take *far* longer than for anyone else), until the chaos of your far-too-intense emotions recedes back to something no longer overwhelming. Ripping yourself out of that every ten videos or every half hour or whatever and hurling yourself back into the uncontrolled, glaring, noisy outside would feel very much like... well, I don't know what the world is like to people without sensory filtration problems. Being torn out of a classical music concert every half hour and having your head shut in a tin can that is repeatedly hammered by maddened giants, perhaps?
You might find he's happier if you suggest alternating with something else with similarly self-controlled content and sensory input. Reading? Music? I'm not sure: I am after all 40+ and thus out of touch with what the young do these days! But not other people and not outside and not uncontrolled input. :)
Posted Sep 26, 2019 20:24 UTC (Thu)
by rodgerd (guest, #58896)
[Link] (1 responses)
An ironic defence, given rms is a long-standing proponent of eugenics who agues allowing the disabled to live is a form of cruelty and likens the disabled to pets.
Posted Sep 26, 2019 20:56 UTC (Thu)
by karkhaz (subscriber, #99844)
[Link]
Posted Sep 29, 2019 12:01 UTC (Sun)
by immibis (guest, #105511)
[Link]
Posted Sep 18, 2019 12:47 UTC (Wed)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
[Link] (8 responses)
Pleasure is one of those loaded words; it's fine as a noun, but as a verb it distinctly implies a sexual component; I can please you or entertain you or relax with you in a non-sexual fashion, but to pleasure you carries the implication that sexual activity is involved.
As a result, when used as a noun in a context where it's not immediately obvious that another meaning is intended, it carries sexual connotations that are undesireable. Calling it a "leisure card" instead would have avoided those connotations.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 12:52 UTC (Wed)
by niner (subscriber, #26151)
[Link]
Posted Sep 20, 2019 6:06 UTC (Fri)
by gmaxwell (guest, #30048)
[Link] (6 responses)
Humor is subjective, but IMO "Pleasure card" is a pretty funny turn on "Business card", too bad it can be interpreted in more serious way.
FWIW, I've witnessed RMS giving out his pleasure card. He was a perfect gentleman and I can only imagine that it was significantly less awkward than how many socially awkward geeks would indicate an interest in continued personal communication.
As a third party I thought it was a clever, non-confrontational, respectful way to navigate a situation that might have otherwise not been the best match for his skills.
Posted Sep 20, 2019 7:42 UTC (Fri)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
[Link]
I don't doubt that there's zero malice to it, and that RMS does his best to be a gentleman and not make it awkward for the people he targets, but I can also see that, because of the relative numbers of women and men in software, the Petrie multiplier results in his actions being seen as much worse by his targets than he intends, simply because they get hit on far more often than is at first obvious.
And I am also quite willing to believe that, had RMS understood how it would be perceived, he'd have done something different and even less likely to be misunderstood. It's just that, given his role, 20/20 hindsight, informed by a 2019 understanding of the shifts in social norms, would have had him step back from the figurehead role in about 2000 or so, leave him in the FSF as an "emeritus director" or similar, and let someone who's better at the social side take over the image of the FSF, while RMS continues to produce the great thinking exemplified in The Right to Read. That way, when his unusual behaviour crosses over from "better than expected" (as it would have been in the 1980s) to "not acceptable" (as it is now), the Free Software movement he set in motion would not have been tarnished by his personal quirks.
My fear is that Free Software and RMS are now too generally linked in the general population of people who are aware of these things at all. And thus, what could have been a great thing, is going to die out with RMS and his generation of developers; at least Open Source was able to jettison ESR when he became a liability to the perception of Open Source.
Posted Sep 24, 2019 22:09 UTC (Tue)
by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted Sep 24, 2019 22:15 UTC (Tue)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Sep 25, 2019 0:42 UTC (Wed)
by mgb (guest, #3226)
[Link] (1 responses)
In Ye Olde Days border agents always used to ask "Business or Pleasure?".
Nowadays you may instead be asked to specify one of dozens of subcategories on an electronic form:
If you travel only between states within a single block such as Schengen/EU or USA you may not have encountered this.
Posted Sep 26, 2019 13:52 UTC (Thu)
by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
[Link]
Posted Sep 26, 2019 23:24 UTC (Thu)
by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604)
[Link]
Posted Sep 18, 2019 12:54 UTC (Wed)
by programcounter (guest, #134486)
[Link] (7 responses)
It is a wordplay on "Business card" and the stereotypical way movies and TV show immigration officers asking why people are entering a given country. In films, a character just gets into the immigration officer's booth and gives the passport while the officer asks "Business or pleasure?"; then the character answers, get the passport stamped and moves forward. Just a few seconds of screen time to show the character arriving at some new country without holding the plot unnecessarily.
Neither text on the card nor the pun seems offensive in any way,
Posted Sep 18, 2019 13:27 UTC (Wed)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
[Link] (6 responses)
FWIW, I've never been asked "business or pleasure?" on arrival to any country (spread across 4 continents, so a reasonable sampling of nations), including the USA; I've always been asked "business or leisure?", which is what's asked of me on the entry paperwork for countries I'm visiting, too.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 13:34 UTC (Wed)
by programcounter (guest, #134486)
[Link] (5 responses)
I was asked a few times (mostly in non-english sepaking countries) out of a lot of travels, so it seems to be a very rare thing. But the stereotype from the question being used in movies remains.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 13:46 UTC (Wed)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
[Link] (4 responses)
The movies I've seen it in are also ones like the Bond movies, in which young women mostly exist to be attractive to men. That's not exactly helping the case that this is inclusive - it's something from films in which men are competent and women are pretty things for men to play with.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 21:56 UTC (Wed)
by coriordan (guest, #7544)
[Link] (3 responses)
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=%22...
(And frankly, I think it says a lot about your case if you rely on connecting Richard to James Bond!)
Posted Sep 18, 2019 21:59 UTC (Wed)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
[Link] (2 responses)
I know it's far more common - however, every single context I've seen it used in includes the connotation that, in this context, women exist to service men's pleasure.
And quite frankly, I think it says a lot about your case that you're determined to defend every little oddity of RMS's as "not actually a weirdness" against people telling you that, in the general context of daily life, he's missed a significant nuance.
Note that I'm not claiming that RMS is a monster in any way, shape or form - I'm just claiming that for this joke of his, he's missed a lot of social nuance. That doesn't make him evil - it makes him bad at social nuance.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 22:26 UTC (Wed)
by coriordan (guest, #7544)
[Link] (1 responses)
I don't mean to lump those things together, I'm just noting that he has multiple unusual features which are related to not being able to judge what other people are thinking or will think.
> he's missed a significant nuance
Of course he did! And he always will. He's blind to those nuances, always has been. You can't just tell him about the nuance and expect him to start noticing it.
Posted Sep 19, 2019 7:44 UTC (Thu)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
[Link]
So here's the thing - he picked up on what's mere strangeness and what's unacceptable behaviour back in the 1970s and 1980s when he was in his 20s and 30s. This is normal - most people get stuck to some degree on "what the world was like when I was young" as they get older. However, social norms, especially on the differential treatment of men and women, have changed in the last 20 years to a considerable degree (so 2000 to 2020 period).
The trouble is that RMS has remained the figurehead for the FSF, while no longer picking up on the modern difference between strange and unacceptable. That's an issue for the FSF - ideally, and with 20/20 hindsight (i.e. no blame attaches here, I don't have the context for why this didn't happen), he'd have found a new FSF director in the early 2000s to take on the figurehead role (speaking for the FSF, putting out press releases, going to conferences on behalf of the FSF etc), and been able to move to an "emeritus" role, where he can do the prophecy part of his role, but is no longer the face of the FSF.
And it's the prophecy part of his role that he's good at, and that really plays to his strengths; take a course, extrapolate it, remove the bits that are implausible, and say "if we do not fix things, this is the bad place we end up in". Had he moved across to just doing that in the early 2000s, this would be a non-issue; he'd still be weird by social standards, but he would not also be the FSF's face to the world.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 0:51 UTC (Wed)
by landley (guest, #6789)
[Link] (17 responses)
Grace Hopper wrote the first compiler in 1952, Unix was created in 1969, but the Berne convention didn't extend copyright to cover source code until about 1977, and _binaries_ were considered "just a number" and uncopyrightable until the Apple vs Franklin legal decision in 1983. before that there was no common word for "free software" because there was no NON-FREE software. It hadn't been invented yet. There were decades of "freeware" before retail software sales were even legally possible. (People like Bill Gates unhappy with that reality, ala https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists did contracts with hardware manufacturers to bundle their software with hardware sales, because making copies simply wasn't illegal. Heck, there's an mp3 of a 1980 audio interview with bill gates on http://landley.net/history/mirror/ where he whines about testifying before congress and not being able to change the law.)
By the time Stallman announced he was cloning Unix again, the _first_ clone of Unix (Coherent from the Mark Williams company; new kernel, command line tools, libc, and compiler, took about 3 years to create) had been out for 3 years. Stallman's project wasn't the only Unix clone started in response to Apple vs Franklin, Minix started at the same time and shipped its first release in 1986 (again, ~3 years to create) because professor Andrew Tanenbaum couldn't use the Lyons book to teach his courses anymore, so he wrote his own clone as a teaching tool. Linus Torvalds then wrote Linux under Minix 5 years later, and announced its existence on comp.os.minix, and basically swallowed the Minix development community whole to bootstrap Linux. (Tanenbaum published the source code but didn't take patches upstream because he wanted a teaching tool, not a real-world usable system. Linus _did_ take patches, and the devs had years of backlog they were happy to port over, that's why Linux surged forward so fast.)
Meanwhile BSD started distributing open source code in the late 70's and in 1979 got the contract to replace all the internet routers (see https://www.salon.com/2000/05/16/chapter_2_part_one/), and in 1983 they responded to Apple vs Franklin by cleaning the legacy AT&T code out of their Unix fork, but had to survive a lawsuit from AT&T to establish their right to distribute and it took them years to fight that off (https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/kirkmck...) .
Heck, gcc only took off because Sun VP Ed Zander "unbundled" the compiler from the base OS during the SunOS->Solaris switch and sold it seperately, and the solaris users got mad about that and _refused_ to pay extra for what HAD been part of the base OS before, so they found a freely downloadable m68k compiler (it was 1987) that was _crap_ but almost sort of worked worked, and flooded it with patches to fix everything. (Remember Fabrice Bellard got tinycc to build the Linux kernel in 3 years from a standing start (https://bellard.org/tcc/tccboot.html), and coherent and minix had their own compilers written from scratch in the same amount of time. The only reason Linus didn't use the minix compiler the same way he used the minix filesystem is it targeted 16 bit output like the rest of minix (since the PDP-11 the Lyons book had targeted was 16 bit), by 1990 moore's law had made >640k ram cheap enough the world had gone 32 bit.)
Stallman is great at blowing his own horn, but he is not REMOTELY as important to the history of Linux has he makes himself out to be. In 1998 when Netscape released its source and pointed to The Cathedral and the bazaar as the reason why (which was a 1997 Usenix paper explaining why Linux's "bazaar" development model was superior to the FSF's copyright assignment "cathedral"; yes it was explicitly comparing THOSE TWO development models and said so in the paper), the "anything but microsoft" crowd that Netscape had collected together into Java development poured into Linux instead, famously growing the Linux community 212% in one year. That TRIPLED the size of the community, and the Linux devs had their hands full bringing them up to speed technically and didn't have time to explain history to them.
Stallman saw his chance and started telling the ignorant newbies about the history of the GNU project, which was not and never WAS the history of Linux, but he lied and said it was. Heck, he had a page on his website basically saying "Linux is just a fad, stop talking about it, my vaporware project I announced 15 years ago will be way better" (https://web.archive.org/web/19980126185426/http://www.gnu...).
Nobody ever had to "defend ken thompson's legacy", or defend Linus's or Larry Wall's or anybody else who actually did stuff. But stallman was CONSTANTLY defending "his" legacy because it WASN'T TRUE. It was revisionist history. He wasn't "forgotten", he was _irrelevant_.
He went around the country giving speeches about how great he was, but the founding of the GNU project was a conservative reactionary movement attempting to recapture a glorious past. When copyright law changed out from under the industry he went "no, change bad, I want to roll back the clock to the 1970's by cloning existing software projects". The fact the change _was_ bad (and burned itself out with proprietary software collapsing into a single monopoly and leaving waves of abandonware) doesn't make him a visionary, and every year that's passed since 1983 that "vision" has been a poorer match with modern reality.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 1:04 UTC (Wed)
by mgb (guest, #3226)
[Link] (13 responses)
(1) You seem to be confusing freedom - Stallman's focus - with zero cost.
(2) Even so, why were businesses paying large sums of money for software that you imagine was free?
Posted Sep 18, 2019 1:47 UTC (Wed)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link]
At that time there were basically no pure software products. Almost everything was sold as hardware+software combinations, or as development services to customize software for a particular use-case.
This even allowed IBM's competitors run OS/360 on their own hardware without IBM's licenses.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 3:17 UTC (Wed)
by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
[Link] (11 responses)
No, the parent comment most certainly is not doing that. It is correctly noting that , before 1983, no software was covered by copyright. Therefore, anyone coming into contact with the software could exercise all four freedoms (and do plenty of other stuff besides), long before Stallman even wrote them down.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 6:17 UTC (Wed)
by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
[Link] (8 responses)
As pointed out in this subthread, many software projects had source code available, gave freedom to tinker, etc before and after GNU (notably, BSD, X, TeX -- all of which were co-opted by GNU as part of the "GNU OS" though they are unrelated projects).
Posted Sep 18, 2019 9:42 UTC (Wed)
by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958)
[Link] (7 responses)
Posted Sep 18, 2019 12:51 UTC (Wed)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link] (5 responses)
The nice thing about an open standard is that it transcends individual implementations. Without a standard, it is difficult to tell mandated behaviour from implementation quirks, and that makes it very difficult to come up with an alternative implementation of something even if you have access to its source code (which you may not be able to use directly because of copyright restrictions).
We like free/open-source implementations of open standards.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 14:22 UTC (Wed)
by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958)
[Link] (4 responses)
That doesn't classify as open source, let alone being libre software. So yeah a good license would solve the issue.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 15:08 UTC (Wed)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link] (3 responses)
Not necessarily. The code you want to be compatible with might be under that most libre of licences, the GPL, but you may not be in a position where you are allowed to use GPL code in your own software (for example, you might be an Android application programmer at Google).
In that case the free licence doesn't help you a lot; you can analyse the GPL code (or have the team in the office next door analyse the GPL code if you don't want to be tainted by looking at it yourself), but without an independent standard that defines what the code is supposed to do, you still can't tell the mandated behaviour from the implementation quirks.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 15:32 UTC (Wed)
by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958)
[Link] (2 responses)
The issue just exists because of non-free software.
Free software=no issue.
How is it wrong to focus on free software?
Posted Sep 18, 2019 15:40 UTC (Wed)
by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
[Link]
As observed by GP
Posted Sep 18, 2019 15:55 UTC (Wed)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link]
That's beside the point.
Your original contention was that “open standards are not needed when the code is open”. You have repeatedly failed to address the objection that without a specification of what the code is supposed to do (e.g., a – hopefully open – standard) it is impossible to distinguish wanted behaviour from unintended implementation quirks. This becomes particularly relevant in situations where it isn't possible to use the freely available code directly – either because of the copyright issues I have outlined earlier, or, for example, because the freely available code is written in the XYZ programming language but you want an implementation of the same functionality on a system for which that programming language is not available. In that case an (open) standard that specifies the desired functionality directly is arguably more helpful than a free implementation that embellishes it with quirks (even though it may be useful to have the free implementation around for reference).
As I said, free/open-source software is nice but free/open-source software that implements an open standard is nicer. And having an open standard increases the likelihood that free/open-source software will be written that implements that standard, compared to having to replicate all the quirks of some proprietary piece of software (OOXML notwithstanding), so open standards are a good thing even if the corresponding free/open-source software doesn't (yet) exist.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 14:22 UTC (Wed)
by ledow (guest, #11753)
[Link]
Posted Sep 18, 2019 7:09 UTC (Wed)
by jwilk (subscriber, #63328)
[Link]
Posted Sep 20, 2019 16:25 UTC (Fri)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link]
No software IN AMERICA! It was always covered by Berne, right from the start.
Which was part of the problem with Unix in that AT&T famously removed copyright messages, including a lot from two Universities - University College London, and one in Australia who's name escapes me. Trying to sell Unix in the "Rest Of the World" when it contained a load of code with illegally removed copyright notices could have been, well, awkward to say the least ...
Cheers,
Posted Sep 19, 2019 13:38 UTC (Thu)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link]
As far as I can tell, everything he says on that page is true. Some of it is overoptimistic (because no programmers have ever been guilty of that before), but he is careful to give BSD its due as well rather than just pushing his own stuff. Your damning all this as vapourware con artistry reflects poorly on you, not on him. If you're that biased in reading a simple, easy-to-read webpage, how can we trust anything else you say?
It is also instructive to ask why you dug around on the Internet Archive rather than linking to the latest version of that page, still up on the GNU site. Could it possibly be because RMS responded to past criticisms by adding more nuance to the page, but you wanted to keep damning him for a decades-older version that he couldn't modify without access to a time machine? The appearance of selective quotation and bias here is overwhelming, and it's not RMS who comes across as biased.
Posted Sep 21, 2019 0:01 UTC (Sat)
by rickmoen (subscriber, #6943)
[Link] (1 responses)
However, in addition, Berne wasn't the beginning of copyright encumbrance to source code. I'm pretty sure it was considered a copyrightable 'literary work' persuant to 17 U.S.C. § 102, way back to the days of ur-programming, though I'd have to dig deep to find the caselaw. Berne merely changed the mechanism of notice/registration, duration, and a number of other details to comply with international practice, but didn't change what works are covered.
Posted Sep 21, 2019 0:42 UTC (Sat)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
[Link]
Granted caselaw may have established it as copyrightable before that.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 16:20 UTC (Wed)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link] (20 responses)
Turkish law says you can consent at the age of 12.
British law says it's 16.
Dunno whether it's Federal or State but I believe American law says its 18.
Ultra-feminists say "all sex is rape".
Where would YOU put the age of consent? Who gave YOU the right to determine the meaning of the phrase "consenting adult" FOR OTHER PEOPLE?
Is it right that a happily married person can be charged with "statutory rape" (as I think the Americans term it) for consenting with their spouse?
This is the problem I have with all this - the only age I can think of that doesn't involve drawing a totally ARBITRARY line is just to make sex illegal full stop. I think RMS has exactly the same problem. And because it is logical and takes a Vulcan viewpoint that is grounds for saying that he's a horrible person? SHAME ON YOU!
I may not like the consequences, but logic has a habit of forcing you to face up to unpleasant facts.
Cheers,
Posted Sep 18, 2019 16:31 UTC (Wed)
by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
[Link] (3 responses)
OK, I stopped reading there (though my eyes spotted some shouting below).
Wish LWN had a block option. Oh, yes, it does.
Bye.
Posted Sep 21, 2019 10:11 UTC (Sat)
by paxillus (guest, #79451)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Sep 21, 2019 10:46 UTC (Sat)
by bosyber (guest, #84963)
[Link] (1 responses)
With the internet, yes, it is louder once again, but that's not the same as widespread, nor a real problem (extremist are extreme), just as much as the Proud Boys shouldn't be the norm to fight against (apart from them actually marching, and having a sympathetic president and people in power!).
Posted Sep 21, 2019 10:49 UTC (Sat)
by bosyber (guest, #84963)
[Link]
Posted Sep 18, 2019 17:48 UTC (Wed)
by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)
[Link] (11 responses)
Posted Sep 18, 2019 18:42 UTC (Wed)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link] (4 responses)
Has it changed recently? I know it was headline news not that long ago about a Turkish couple coming to the UK when the legally married wife was about 12 - definitely below our age of consent.
(Okay, I can't speak for the quality of reporting of our tabloid press.)
Cheers,
Posted Sep 18, 2019 20:02 UTC (Wed)
by excors (subscriber, #95769)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Sep 19, 2019 15:22 UTC (Thu)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link] (1 responses)
I think only ONE person addressed the substantive point which is that we are all pushing OUR opinion on OTHER PEOPLE.
And I firmly believe that what OTHER people do should be of NO CONCERN to me unless it has an impact on me. The trouble with sex is that all too often the consequences rebound on other people - my life has been turned upside down, a colleague lost her job and nearly killed herself in an accident, an acquaintance was the victim of a domestic murder leaving three motherless pre-school daughters ...
At the end of the day it boils down to "what right do WE have to curtail OTHER PEOPLES' freedom". I would hope we can all agree with "when bystanders get hurt" or "when one person is an obvious victim", but the problem with this debate is it assumes ALL children MUST be victims by definition, but then fails to define what a child is (I'd be inclined to include my daughter, who is married with two teenage kids !!! :-), or a victim for that matter.
Cheers,
Posted Sep 20, 2019 9:38 UTC (Fri)
by dunlapg (guest, #57764)
[Link]
Just so you know, there are two distinct issues here. The first is, "What is an appropriate age difference"; there's a sense that a 70-year-old sleeping with an 18-year old is creepy, even if it's legal. Hence the "half your age plus seven" guideline given somewhere else in this thread. There's room here for an argument that if a 70-year-old and an 18-year-old want to do something, then it's nobody else's business.
The second, more important issue, is about consent. The argument for age-of-consent laws in the States is that a 25-year-old inevitably has more "leverage" over a 16-year-old; enough so that whatever happens between them cannot really be considered to be "consent"; and sex without consent is rape, and rape certainly is everybody's business.
Are people visited by the "Consent Fairy" on their 18th birthday, magically conferring them with the ability to consent? Of course not; not any more than they're visited by the "Responsibility Fairy" which magically confers them with the ability to make sign contracts and such. But somewhere between 25, which is certainly old enough for both, and 12, which is certainly not old enough for either, you have to draw a line. Most places in the US draw that at 18 for both; apparently most places in Europe draw the line for consent at 16 or even earlier.
Posted Sep 21, 2019 12:25 UTC (Sat)
by paxillus (guest, #79451)
[Link]
The age of consent in Turkey is indeed 18. From Wikipedia
"Article 103 regulates any kind of sexual activity with minors under 15 (or minors under 18 who lack the ability to understand the legal meanings and consequences of such actions) as child sexual abuse.[130]"]
The citation is from a 2014 Turkish government document.
However, in 2016, in order to remove a perceived unfairness, whereby "(T)he law makes no difference regardless whether an adult has sex with a 14-year old or a 4-year old", meaning that there are no "(L)egal consequences for the 'consent' of victims in cases where the child victim is from 12 to 15 years of age and able to understand the meaning of the sexual act ... Turkey’s Constitutional Court annulled legislation that prohibits all sexual acts with minors under the age of 15 as sexual abuse"
The aim seems to have been to provide more proportionality in accordance with their constitution, as a Turkish government press release explains.
Posted Sep 20, 2019 9:16 UTC (Fri)
by dunlapg (guest, #57764)
[Link] (5 responses)
But if this Wikipedia article is correct, Turkey is an outlier in Europe. In nearly all countries in Europe, a 16-year-old is considered to be able to consent; in France it's 15, and in Germany and Italy it's 14.
That kind of shocks me; I don't see how anyone could think a 15-year-old could consent to sleeping with (say) a 25-year-old. But the fact is that most of Europe seems to think differently. If thinking that a 17-year-old can give consent is a reason to exclude someone from our community, we'd better ask Linus what he thinks about his home country's laws (which set the age of consent at 16), or some of our Italian maintainers what they think of their country's laws (14). Or alternately, we can agree that reasonable people can differ on the question, and drop it as a reason for reviling RMS.
(To be clear, I think that RMS's "but is it really assault" defense of Minsky is definitely a problem; and combined with his long history of this kind of problems, it's time he stepped down. But his question about consent at age 17 is far from a "settled issue" at this point.)
Posted Sep 20, 2019 9:41 UTC (Fri)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
[Link]
Part of this is the difference between legality and morality; in any system of law, the law sets a minimum acceptable standard, but people are expected to have their own standards that differ hugely. The police and justice systems may not care that a 15 year old and a 55 year old are having sex regularly, but the local community may well intervene.
In that context, a lower age of consent implies that the community is effective at policing its own moral norms, and thus 15/55 relationships don't happen for other reasons; a higher age of consent implies that the community wants state power to assist in policing the moral norms.
For similar reasons, it's not illegal for me to be rude to RMS just for the sake of being mean; however, I can't expect the Free Software community to love me if I make RMS the butt of all my nasty jokes just for the sake of needling at RMS.
Posted Sep 20, 2019 12:01 UTC (Fri)
by NAR (subscriber, #1313)
[Link]
Posted Sep 20, 2019 15:33 UTC (Fri)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (1 responses)
Really, the age of consent varies by individual (I've known people who could definitely have consented -- or very loudly not consented, if need be with the aid of martial arts skills, and known perfectly well what they were doing) at about age eleven. I'm not sure I was up to it at age thirty. But the law cannot possibly express this, so it does what it can. It's arguably not good enough but I cannot see any way to improve things.
But going into legal/philosophical disquisitions like this at the time and place RMS did was epically insensitive even by my standards, and doubly so for someone in a spokesposition.
Posted Sep 20, 2019 16:10 UTC (Fri)
by dunlapg (guest, #57764)
[Link]
This is my current take on what the real issue with Stallman's "but is it really assault" argument. There has been question about whether Minsky actually slept with Guiffre; but Stallman's argument was framed in a hypothetical world in which he did. I.e.: "Suppose Guiffre was coerced. And suppose that Minsky did in fact sleep with her, but without knowing she was coerced. Is that really so bad?"
Well, yes, it would be bad. In the hypothetical situation described, Minsky should have seen lots of red flags. That hypothetical situation is the behavior that Stallman is downplaying. When a person in power makes that kind of defense, it protects sexual predators and silences their victims: it signals that the next time there is this situation, similar behavior will be defended and similar complaints ignored.
Regardless of whether or not Minsky slept with Guiffre, Stallman's comments were a harmful thing for someone in his position to have said.
And what makes me angry about the "hit pieces" is that this angle is completely lost -- he's being attacked for saying Guiffre "was entirely willing" (which he never said) and for thinking maybe 17 is old enough to consent (which apparently all of Europe agrees with). Nobody is going to learn about how to avoid accidentally using your influence to protect sexual predators; all they're going to learn is not to touch any contentious topic with a barge pole for fear of being heinously misrepresented.
Posted Sep 24, 2019 7:22 UTC (Tue)
by valhalla (guest, #56634)
[Link]
afaik there is something similar in German law, but I don't know the details.
The idea is to allow people to start having sex among their peers without being criminalized for that, while still protecting them from exploitation.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 23:42 UTC (Wed)
by flussence (guest, #85566)
[Link] (2 responses)
Half the oldest person's age plus seven, in addition to age of majority. Hardly a difficult or objectionable rule to follow.
Posted Sep 19, 2019 7:13 UTC (Thu)
by koenkooi (subscriber, #71861)
[Link] (1 responses)
So my question is: how many of you are aware of this formula and when/where did you first learn of it?
Posted Sep 20, 2019 14:23 UTC (Fri)
by mtaht (subscriber, #11087)
[Link]
I think all that is shifting - and we do have a major cultural change in the always-online-under-25s that is difficult to understand. I do often wish I'd had kids so I'd "get it" more instinctively, as making the needed post-50 shift to sexless-father figure consistently - has taken me a couple years and I'm still not quite done with it.
It's doubly hard when you shift around various cultures outside america as I do, and also have a completely different life in the musical world. There's professional mode, theres other modes - and if you've ever seen the movie zelig, it's really hard when in a group of mixed ages, cultures, and interests to not screw up something with someone, male or female, in that group, when tackling a difficult issue.
Flirting is a high art in europe, what you can say, or when you kiss or hug or touch someone to make a point varies enormously by country (it does in the states, too - I've spent a lot of time in the south, where addressing someone of the opposite sex as "darling" is pretty normal, but on the west coast verboten)
Relationships between the sexes are rediculously tricky, more so across an age or cultural barrier, and thus I also think half your age + 7 is a good basic rule (for either sex) before assuming you might share enough cultural values to interact without having to be very, very, careful.
I like that more formal rules for "consent" and robust communication have arrived for a group of 30-40 year olds that I sometimes hang out with. There's some good books, too, like one on "love language". I learned that "you look nice today" was not particularly good anymore after someone took offense, but a direct complement - "great shoes" or something like that, was ok. Which was great to learn because otherwise treating people as if they were all wearing sexless burlap sacks is not a world I want to live in, a world where the only dopamine hit you get is from a like button.
But you have to really work at it to present as the person you want to be at all times,
I actually like much of the "code of conduct" thing, for professional rules, except that I wish everyone had the same view of soft language that george carlin did.
Imagine a world where rms had found love; someone to balance him out. It could still happen.
Posted Sep 20, 2019 19:50 UTC (Fri)
by rahvin (guest, #16953)
[Link]
In other words, there is no hard and fast rule on age of consent in the US. It's entirely dependent on what state your are in.
Posted Sep 19, 2019 6:59 UTC (Thu)
by ale2018 (guest, #128727)
[Link] (4 responses)
Do you realize that you're condemning a person for what he thinks?
Pedophilia is a controversial subject. Different countries have different laws. Some, for example, condemn the age difference rather than the absolute age. But anyway, how would a parliament legislate about such subject if talking about it is banned? The sentence you quoted about a rapist having a better fate than his photographic witness for the prosecution is a thought. Stallman would be condemnable if he actually raped a child, or shot someone who was doing it.
Playing bigot is not going to help free software.
Posted Sep 20, 2019 16:03 UTC (Fri)
by flussence (guest, #85566)
[Link] (2 responses)
Yes, as is our right. Nobody here gave Terry Davis a free pass for his words either.
Posted Sep 20, 2019 18:01 UTC (Fri)
by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784)
[Link] (1 responses)
Speech and writing, where they can be heard/seen, are action.
Posted Sep 21, 2019 9:36 UTC (Sat)
by ale2018 (guest, #128727)
[Link]
Now it turns out hate speech is getting banned by US companies like Facebook. Oh, well...
Child porn? Am I chargeable for writing that? Is that tantamount child trafficking?
Posted Sep 26, 2019 20:28 UTC (Thu)
by rodgerd (guest, #58896)
[Link]
Not really, outside of NAMBLA and its fellow-travellers, or those finding an individual they adore is a paedophile.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 20:28 UTC (Tue)
by johntmpsky28 (guest, #134469)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Sep 17, 2019 20:52 UTC (Tue)
by flussence (guest, #85566)
[Link]
Posted Sep 17, 2019 21:44 UTC (Tue)
by SEJeff (guest, #51588)
[Link]
Posted Sep 26, 2019 20:29 UTC (Thu)
by rodgerd (guest, #58896)
[Link]
He "changed his mind" a few days before this blew up in his face.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 16:12 UTC (Tue)
by gdt (subscriber, #6284)
[Link] (3 responses)
These claims can be fact checked: (1) some pages of the deposition have been released; (2) LWN's journalists could place a call to Greg Benford. Furthermore the deposition doesn't say she had sex with Minsky, only that Epstein told her to do so is not supported by p.204, 205 of the deposition. (1) On those pages the questions refer to Maxwell, not to Epstein. (2) The deposition has Menninger, Maxwell's defence, cross-examining Giuffre. Why this expectation that Menninger would ask a question for which Giuffre's answer could only harm Maxwell's defence? It's not avoiding giving an answer which is happening here, it is avoiding asking a question — as Menninger should, as it's not the defence's role to make the plaintiff's case.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 22:56 UTC (Tue)
by pebolle (guest, #35204)
[Link] (1 responses)
Has LWN ever done anything like that? I don't remember reading an article on LWN which suggested they contacted the people they reported on. So I'd be glad to be shown examples of LWN doing just that.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 12:40 UTC (Wed)
by karkhaz (subscriber, #99844)
[Link]
https://lwn.net/Articles/266594/
> When rumors floated my way, I loved actually going out and contacting the people involved first hand by telephone -- short-circuiting email and the rest, to discuss the issues and get their first-hand viewpoints.
Posted Sep 20, 2019 6:53 UTC (Fri)
by gmaxwell (guest, #30048)
[Link]
Posted Sep 17, 2019 11:18 UTC (Tue)
by joekiller (guest, #126069)
[Link] (9 responses)
Posted Sep 17, 2019 12:44 UTC (Tue)
by Gabriel5235 (guest, #133430)
[Link]
Posted Sep 17, 2019 17:35 UTC (Tue)
by luto (guest, #39314)
[Link] (7 responses)
> and then he says that an enslaved child could, somehow, be “entirely willing”.
RMS did *not* say that. The email quoted
I’m not saying that RMS’s email was in good taste. But if you’re going to write a diatribe calling for someone’s resignation, you shouldn’t just read all the trigger words in the triggering email — you should at least read the entire sentences containing them.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 19:03 UTC (Tue)
by SEJeff (guest, #51588)
[Link] (6 responses)
https://lwn.net/Articles/799538/
And this one is even more disturbing (to me):
https://stallman.org/archives/2003-may-aug.html#28%20June...()
Posted Sep 17, 2019 19:08 UTC (Tue)
by luto (guest, #39314)
[Link] (1 responses)
I find it rather bizarre that the Stallman situation blew up now. It seems like there were plenty of problems, but they've been going on for a long time, and his latest emails actually seem rather less problematic to me than many of the things he's said in the past.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 4:06 UTC (Wed)
by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
[Link]
It's a "straw that broke the camel's back" situation. Just like Weinstein, and many others in the #metoo movement. Just because it has been (basically) ignored for so long doesn't mean that those things don't matter.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 3:55 UTC (Wed)
by gnu (guest, #65)
[Link] (3 responses)
https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html#14_Septem...(Sex_between_an_adult_and_a_child_is_wrong)
which you and others conveniently chose to ignore.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 4:04 UTC (Wed)
by luto (guest, #39314)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Sep 18, 2019 6:25 UTC (Wed)
by gnu (guest, #65)
[Link]
Posted Sep 18, 2019 11:56 UTC (Wed)
by niner (subscriber, #26151)
[Link]
Posted Sep 17, 2019 7:55 UTC (Tue)
by cevin666 (guest, #960)
[Link] (38 responses)
Posted Sep 17, 2019 8:06 UTC (Tue)
by tchernobog (guest, #73595)
[Link] (1 responses)
I also share several of his overall political views.
However, he is the spokeperson of a non-profit organization, and a public figure. You cannot represent the FSF as president and behave like he did now and in the past. Else you are hurting the movement. And there is no excuse for that. You know people will use you as a straw man to discount everything done by the FSF If you don't step down.
So I applaud the choice of resigning.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 8:23 UTC (Tue)
by rschroev (subscriber, #4164)
[Link]
Can you elaborate a bit on what you mean exactly with "behave like he did now and in the past"? Not knowing the details of RMS' life or the details of this story, I don't know what you're referring to. From what I have read (https://old.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/d5axzu/w...), which may or may not misrepresent the facts, I got the impression he has done nothing wrong whatsoever.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 8:12 UTC (Tue)
by Pinaraf (subscriber, #33153)
[Link] (35 responses)
Where did he say anything like that? The most "offensive" comment I found was saying that no matter the age, a rape is a rape. This is not an excuse for child abuse, as many people want to understand it.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 8:30 UTC (Tue)
by azumanga (subscriber, #90158)
[Link] (34 responses)
Posted Sep 17, 2019 8:45 UTC (Tue)
by evad (subscriber, #60553)
[Link] (31 responses)
Posted Sep 17, 2019 8:58 UTC (Tue)
by krig (guest, #92101)
[Link] (7 responses)
It has absolutely nothing to do with freedom of expression.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 12:13 UTC (Tue)
by evad (subscriber, #60553)
[Link] (6 responses)
His opinions are not a problem for you as a supporter of the FSF, its only a problem if you disagree and you're a supporter of him personally. Otherwise you'll soon find you cannot support basically any organisation because there will always be people in an organisation who and express beliefs you disagree with.
You're essentially arguing for a society where anybody in any leadership role must hide their opinions and must renounce their right to freedom of expression, and that is not a society you'd want to live in, and certainly not one I want to live in.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 16:03 UTC (Tue)
by krig (guest, #92101)
[Link]
I don't understand how this is difficult.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 12:01 UTC (Wed)
by niner (subscriber, #26151)
[Link]
Posted Sep 19, 2019 7:15 UTC (Thu)
by gfernandes (subscriber, #119910)
[Link] (2 responses)
Your position is a bit like saying: most married people cheat, so what's the big deal about the POTUS cheating?
Maybe that's why it isn't fine for the President of the FSF to be expressing personal opinions that are unsound?
Posted Sep 22, 2019 10:46 UTC (Sun)
by mfuzzey (subscriber, #57966)
[Link] (1 responses)
I mean it's not a nice thing to do sure but it was a problem between him and his wife and not illegal so I don't see why it became a public problem.
Though I think part of it too was lying to a court when asked about it and that I *can* understand being a problem.
But Americans seem to have strange views on this type of thing to most Europeans.
Posted Sep 22, 2019 15:02 UTC (Sun)
by madscientist (subscriber, #16861)
[Link]
It became a public problem because the Republican-appointed special counsel investigator made it a witch-hunt when they couldn't prove the original crimes the special investigation was set up to look into (related to real estate deals etc.) They discovered the affair and decided they could box him into lying about it, and succeeded. There was nothing illegal about what he did, only in the fact that he lied about it.
As with everything in American politics it seems, the cover-up is what does you in not the act itself and no one ever seems to learn the lesson. Clinton's vaunted political instincts definitely failed him here: his ego was big enough to believe he could get away with it. He should have admitted the affair, said it was a private matter, then turned around and discredited the special counsel by saying he was just trying to dig up personal dirt on the president rather than finding real crimes. Even with Republicans sending out the report just before the elections, they ended up losing five seats on the House of Representatives so clearly the public was not on board.
Posted Sep 20, 2019 16:15 UTC (Fri)
by Dissident (guest, #134517)
[Link]
I'm afraid we /already/ live in such a society. As evidenced by countless examples that could be cited, exactly what you have described has increasingly been the reality for some time now. (The case of Brendan Eich is the most salient one I am aware of in the FLOSS world.) And it's not limited-to those in /leadership/ roles either. Any employee who expresses a view or makes a remark that runs afoul of the ever-narrowing, ever more totalitarian confines of the prevailing PC/"Woke" orthodoxy can expect to lose his job. Business-owners and the self-employed are not immune either but subject to threats such as denial of essential services by the dominant tech and finance monopolies.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 9:03 UTC (Tue)
by DrMcCoy (subscriber, #86699)
[Link] (5 responses)
(Also, legal depends on the jurisdiction. Take holocaust denial, for a crass example. Not legal in many European countries, legal in the US, but should still be unacceptable everywhere.)
Posted Sep 17, 2019 12:25 UTC (Tue)
by evad (subscriber, #60553)
[Link] (3 responses)
What does that mean in practice? If its legal, and thus the mechanisms of courts and police are not relevant, what does it matter if you or I believe them acceptable or not?
I'm trying to understand what you're saying or perhaps proposing? Do you mean its not acceptable to you, and thus, its your opinion that his opinions are not acceptable, or something else?
Posted Sep 17, 2019 12:37 UTC (Tue)
by DrMcCoy (subscriber, #86699)
[Link] (2 responses)
Take, again, the holocaust denial example. Assume there's a person that denies the holocaust happens (or even says that it should have happen) in a country were it is legal to say this out loud. Would you then shrug and let this person be a elementary school teacher, because after all, it's legal so it's fine?
Posted Sep 17, 2019 13:21 UTC (Tue)
by evad (subscriber, #60553)
[Link] (1 responses)
To answer your question; I would hope that schools and educational facilities have appropriate remedies to ensure that teachers are teaching facts, as best we can define them. This is a very different scenario though. In this case he has opinions on an entirely different subject to his role (or rather, what was his role).
Posted Sep 18, 2019 16:47 UTC (Wed)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link]
Campaigning without bothering to think through the LOGICAL CONSEQUENCES of your own beliefs? That is pretty much the definition of the word "prejudice", and it leaves the world very much the poorer.
We're heading back into a world of thought police and "the tyranny of the majority" where it is a crime to dissent against the prejudices of those in power (whomever those may be). A complete travesty of "freedom of speech" - which was intended to protect the dissidents from those in power!
Cheers,
Posted Sep 18, 2019 16:43 UTC (Wed)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link]
The difference between holocaust denial and the age of consent is that the holocaust is a historical fact. The evidence says it happened (I've known and met Auschwitz survivors. I was lucky that, to the best of my knowledge, none of my family ended up there - it was a close run thing).
The age of consent is a social thing. What is acceptable to one society in one age is not acceptable to another society or another age. Interactions in the law cause weirdos like a British honeymoon couple in the US could be arrested for child sex. And even just in one country (Britain), the mere change of date could cause what *was* perfectly legal (an under-age couple) into a crime because one of them turned 16.
PLEASE use some logic. You may not like the consequences, but don't let YOUR prejudices condemn someone else because their prejudices are DIFFERENT. That way lies witch-hunts and lynchings, and YOU could be the victim ...
Cheers,
Posted Sep 17, 2019 9:12 UTC (Tue)
by cevin666 (guest, #960)
[Link] (6 responses)
Posted Sep 17, 2019 12:10 UTC (Tue)
by evad (subscriber, #60553)
[Link] (5 responses)
I agree, but I also didn't say that. I said we should not castigate (punish) him.
We can contradict him, and we can call him horrible, but we should not *punish*.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 15:39 UTC (Tue)
by jzb (editor, #7867)
[Link] (3 responses)
If Stallman had said "you know, I've decided proprietary software is OK sometimes" a lot of the people defending him for his current statements would be calling for his dismissal. It's ridiculous for people to defend him for saying things far, far, far worse that actually pose real harm to people who should instead be protected by society.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 20:05 UTC (Tue)
by mfuzzey (subscriber, #57966)
[Link]
Yes but that would be in direct contradiction with the aims of the FSF.
But I don't think that most people should be forced to leave an organisation for any opinions they may hold that have nothing to do with the domain of activity of that organisation.
It's a bit different for politicians because they, by definition, handle everything.
If there is *legal* case to be made then he should be prosecuted, otherwise left alone.
That's not to say I agree with his previous opinions on pedophilia. I certainly don't, but I don't think it has anything to do with FSF.
Removing people for unpopular opinions that have nothing to do with their function sets a very dangerous precedent .
Posted Sep 18, 2019 16:55 UTC (Wed)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link] (1 responses)
Are they harmed by the fact that they CONSENTED.
Or are they harmed by the fact that society said they should not be allowed to consent.
Or are they harmed by the fact that they realised, POST FACTO, that society disapproved of their actions.
Personally, I think the third one is far more harmful than the first. BUT I DON'T KNOW. And more importantly, you don't know either! As is so common, you are taking speculation as fact, probably confusing cause with effect, and as the saying goes, "for every complex problem, there is a solution which is both simple and WRONG".
As I said elsewhere, where do you draw the line? The only SAFE place is to outlaw sex completely ... :-)
Cheers,
Posted Sep 19, 2019 7:28 UTC (Thu)
by gfernandes (subscriber, #119910)
[Link]
If you don't agree with the line, you are free to raise logical objections.
However, if you raise unfounded, or unsupportable objections, you should not be surprised at general backlash, particularly if you happen to be a public figure.
Stallman publicly expressed opinions of dubious psychological value, on deeply sensitive social issues. Stallman was President of the FSF.
Hardly surprising then, that there was this backlash.
Posted Sep 20, 2019 20:08 UTC (Fri)
by rahvin (guest, #16953)
[Link]
Posted Sep 17, 2019 10:49 UTC (Tue)
by camhusmj38 (subscriber, #99234)
[Link] (7 responses)
Posted Sep 17, 2019 12:15 UTC (Tue)
by evad (subscriber, #60553)
[Link] (6 responses)
The opinion that 'vaccines cause Autism' is not dangerous. Claiming there is proof, and evidence, that vaccines cause autism, or seeking to persaude others not to vaccinate children, *that* is what is dangerous.
The mere opinion, by itself, is not itself dangerous.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 14:18 UTC (Tue)
by edomaur (subscriber, #14520)
[Link] (4 responses)
A dangerous opinion is a danger by itself. Claiming that vaccines cause Autism is dangerous, because it is a lie that cause harm.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 16:58 UTC (Wed)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link] (3 responses)
As someone with personal experience, I would actually say that the opinion "vaccines are safe" is extremely dangerous. (And no, I'm not anti-vaccine. Vaccines ARE dangerous. But the alternative is worse.)
Cheers,
Posted Sep 19, 2019 13:46 UTC (Thu)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Sep 19, 2019 15:34 UTC (Thu)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link] (1 responses)
A few days later the parents noticed something more serious. This lad is now nearly 30, and without medication he would need to drink some 20 or 30 litres of water a day to avoid dying of dehydration.
The medical opinion was that "vaccines are safe. This can't have been the vaccine". Circumstantial evidence says "it has to be the vaccine - he had a reaction and was taken ill about that time".
And there are PLENTY of cases (my list is pretty old, I would expect there are plenty of newer ones) where severe adverse reactions have been swept under the carpet - the girl who walked in for a rubella vaccination, was wheeled out in a wheelchair and never walked again - "it can't have been the vaccine's fault!"
Such reactions ARE rare. Without vaccines life would be far worse. But assuming that vaccines are safe causes real harm to real people, and believing the issue away makes that harm much worse than it need be.
Cheers,
Posted Sep 20, 2019 12:19 UTC (Fri)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link]
Vaccines are the single most successful public-health intervention in history. Millions of people per year would succumb to debilitating and often fatal diseases like smallpox, polio, measles, diphtheria, … if it wasn't for vaccines.
Vaccines aren't “safe” in the sense that it is 100% guaranteed that getting vaccinated won't ever cause anyone any problems. But nobody is seriously making that claim – and insisting on perfect 100% safety for vaccines is as foolish as insisting on perfect 100% safety for anything. Certainly for the commonly-administered childhood vaccines the risk/benefit evaluation is overwhelmingly in favour of vaccination.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 15:07 UTC (Tue)
by martinfick (subscriber, #4455)
[Link]
Posted Sep 17, 2019 15:27 UTC (Tue)
by jzb (editor, #7867)
[Link] (1 responses)
And part of that means, if you say something that a lot of people find abhorrent, they're going to express the opinion that they will not support institutions that employ them as a spokesperson.
"I also don't think its wise to charaterise personal opinions published on a personal website as 'harmful'."
Supporters and detractors for Stallman seem to agree on this much, at least: He's influential, and people take his opinions on topics seriously - not just about free software, but on many things.
As such, Stallman's "personal" site is not just read by his immediate circle of friends, but any number of people who want to know more about how he sees the world, etc.
Stallman's comments about underage sex are being distributed to a lot of people, some of whom are going to be influenced by his opinions. Whether they be about free software or politics or the appropriateness of having sex with people who are considered too young to consent.
So - if you find the idea of it being OK to have sex with underage people "harmful" (I do) then it's absolutely harmful for him to be using any platform to spread this idea. It is also creepy, and does not reflect well on any institution he represents.
He, and his supporters, seem to happily accept the positives of his being able to speak on things inside and outside the realm of free software and be taken seriously. You cannot have the one without expecting that if he decides to opine on age of consent and so forth that it will be considered "personal" and out of bounds to consider in the light of his roles with MIT and the FSF.
If, instead of finding these views repugnant, people were in agreement with him I doubt anybody would be rushing to say "oh, no, don't read Richard's private blog. Those thoughts are personal. You shouldn't be paying attention to *that*."
"As soon as we start to categorise some opinions as harmful we start down a road where we can decide which opinions are acceptable, which are not, and catstigate accordingly."
We already live in that world. And we should. Some opinions _are_ harmful, full stop. It's ridiculous in 2019 we're debating whether or not an underage person "presented" as "willing" in the contexts of Epstein's victims. It is time to stop defending this kind of thing. There is no room for debate or discussion - it's wrong.
Posted Sep 20, 2019 16:16 UTC (Fri)
by Dissident (guest, #134517)
[Link]
From whence do you assume the authority to make such pronouncements? Who determines what opinions are "harmful" and which have "room for debate or discussion"?
What is to stop /someone else/ from defining the limits of acceptable debate or discussion in a way that would exclude one or more of /your views/?
You may be smug in the knowledge that none of your views run afoul of the current ever-narrowing, ever more totalitarian PC/"Woke" orthodoxy but what if that were to change? What if you suddenly found yourself deemed a /crimethinker/ by the powers-that-be?
(For examples of how rapidly the Overton window can shift, one need look no further than any number of recent past but since-reversed positions and statements by public figures as prominent, mainstream and widely-respected as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Or have a look at the Paul Krugman column, written in 2006 linked-below:
Posted Sep 20, 2019 6:24 UTC (Fri)
by Dissident (guest, #134517)
[Link] (1 responses)
I note that neither RMS's above-quoted comment nor any other statement of his that I am aware of support the claim that he "finds child abuse excusable". From any honest reading of RMS's words it would be quite clear that his very point was to question the prevailing assumption and assertion that sexual contact between an adult and a minor is, a priori, inherently and invariably child abuse. As wrong, objectionable, abhorrent or reprehensible one may find RMS's thinking to be, to characterize it is as "find[ing] child abuse excusable" is, at best, tendentious. - A close reading of RMS's words (quoted above) show that rather than making any conclusive statements on the matter-in-question, he was quite clearly merely expressing skepticism about and questioning the conventional, prevailing narrative. In addition to RMS beginning his comment with the explicit words, "I am skeptical of the claim", note his use in his second sentence of the qualifying term seem. Finally, even if one maintains that the 2006 comment of RMS that I have quoted in-full and addressed in this post, or any of his other comments or (almost entirely alleged) behaviors or actions prior to his most recent comments constitute legitimate grounds for his removal from his position as head of the FSF, the question remains: Why now? Has the FSF, at any point prior to the present one, publicly disavowed any of the past statements of RMS that are now being cited as justification for his removal?
Posted Sep 21, 2019 17:10 UTC (Sat)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link]
Again, the words "voluntary" and "abuse" aren't defined, but according to any reasonable dictionary I find them mutually exclusive - if it's voluntary it can't be abuse, and if it's abuse it can't be voluntary.
No person in their right mind volunteers to be abused. If they do (or appear to do) so then either they have been coerced or brainwashed - which isn't voluntary - or they aren't in their right mind and need protecting.
Minsky is a case in point - the girl in question may well have appeared to Minsky to be "up for it", but she had been coerced into it. And no, I don't agree with the posters who said Minsky should have seen a bunch of red flags - maybe they were there and that's why he declined, but given that geeks are notorious for not spotting that sort of thing there are plenty of blokes who would have fallen for it.
Note that it was a common tactic of the KGB and Stasi to do exactly this sort of thing to foreign diplomats - I've even heard of cases where the agents married their targets! (Is that tabloid reporting, or actually true I wonder...)
Cheers,
Posted Sep 17, 2019 8:05 UTC (Tue)
by dragonquest (subscriber, #131210)
[Link] (17 responses)
Posted Sep 17, 2019 8:13 UTC (Tue)
by rodgerd (guest, #58896)
[Link] (16 responses)
Posted Sep 17, 2019 8:37 UTC (Tue)
by einar (guest, #98134)
[Link] (2 responses)
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Posted Sep 26, 2019 20:32 UTC (Thu)
by rodgerd (guest, #58896)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Sep 26, 2019 23:26 UTC (Thu)
by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604)
[Link]
Posted Sep 17, 2019 9:36 UTC (Tue)
by dragonquest (subscriber, #131210)
[Link] (12 responses)
Posted Sep 17, 2019 11:41 UTC (Tue)
by aryonoco (guest, #55563)
[Link] (11 responses)
...And being a "knight" to "hot ladies".
According to he himself.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 13:29 UTC (Tue)
by wertigon (guest, #42963)
[Link] (10 responses)
I strongly suspect the comment you are referring to was made in jest, but without context I cannot confirm that nor the opposite.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 13:38 UTC (Tue)
by excors (subscriber, #95769)
[Link] (9 responses)
Posted Sep 17, 2019 14:09 UTC (Tue)
by wertigon (guest, #42963)
[Link] (7 responses)
This is obviously a joke done in poor taste. RMS himself is a man in poor taste. Yes he may be sexist. That's RMS for ya though.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 14:30 UTC (Tue)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (6 responses)
"Yes he may be sexist. That's RMS for ya though." This kind of "ha ha, boys will be boys" attitude is emblematic of the problem.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 14:58 UTC (Tue)
by wertigon (guest, #42963)
[Link] (5 responses)
Seems like many people want to paint RMS as the pervy professor always hittin' on the ladies, but according to first-hand witnesses, he's just a goofball and actually a very thoughtful person once you get to meet him. Oh well. Matters little now I suppose.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 15:42 UTC (Tue)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (4 responses)
According to first-hand witnesses? Well, if you read the Twitter thread posted elsewhere, there are first-hand witnesses who do actually claim he's the "pervy professor" you mentioned.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 19:53 UTC (Tue)
by wertigon (guest, #42963)
[Link] (3 responses)
It's easy to join the hate train when it's going strong, but whatever. Done is dusted.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 20:12 UTC (Tue)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link]
Well, it's a fact that there are two very different pictures of RMS by different people who know him personally. Where does the truth lie? In between? Some of both? Who knows.
Few people are all good or all bad. It's entirely possible for RMS to have made wonderful contributions to the Free Software movement while at the same time being somewhat creepy to women. The problem is that once you reach a certain level of fame and start representing an organization, your personal failings become unacceptable.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 20:55 UTC (Tue)
by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)
[Link]
Me, for one.
> How many reached out and said "I am not okay with your behavior"?
Me, for one. Never got anywhere.
Posted Sep 20, 2019 0:07 UTC (Fri)
by dkg (subscriber, #55359)
[Link]
I have deep respect for the work that he's done in establishing the goals of software freedom and user freedom, but for a long time now his thoughtlessly sexist behavior has been detrimental to the cause. He has alienated far too many people -- of all genders -- who could otherwise be allies, supporters, contributors, and leaders. His retirement is long overdue for those of us who care about the health of the community and movement that he was instrumental in founding.
I've spoken to him about these tradeoffs (multiple times, but not enough, sadly), and I've encouraged him to either change his behavior or to step down for the sake of the bigger picture goals that we do share. His responses tended to be defensive and unempathetic -- and even in the rare cases where he was able to step outside of his own perspective and see how his behavior might have been harmful, his ego got in the way of taking corrective action (let alone making amends).
These are not admirable qualities in anyone -- and definitely not acceptable qualities for the would-be leader of a public movement.
Note that this is an entirely practical perspective that I would hope would be held by anyone who cares about free software -- even if I thought that sexist attitudes or behavior were somehow morally acceptable (I emphatically do not), I would still be applauding his resignation.
Posted Dec 9, 2020 1:39 UTC (Wed)
by IanKelling (subscriber, #89418)
[Link]
Posted Sep 17, 2019 8:17 UTC (Tue)
by rodgerd (guest, #58896)
[Link]
His "defence" is that children are not raped by adults, but are enthusiastic participants. This is certainly a view he's held consistently, but barely deserves the dignity of the work you've assigned to it.
And the only way I could consider the stories that have emerged of his pervasive talent for sexually harassing women in the halls and offices of MIT, at conferences, or indeed apparently any other opportunity, can only be considered "manufactured" if you start from the perspective that women are some sort of sub-humans whose right to get on with their lives without some pervert interfering with them.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 11:55 UTC (Tue)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Sep 17, 2019 12:07 UTC (Tue)
by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604)
[Link]
Posted Sep 17, 2019 12:23 UTC (Tue)
by colo (guest, #45564)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Sep 17, 2019 14:13 UTC (Tue)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link]
OK, thanks for clarifying and apologies for misunderstanding.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 12:07 UTC (Tue)
by Deleted user 129183 (guest, #129183)
[Link] (6 responses)
I like Stallman’s politics and I consider him mostly an ally, but in questions of sexual morality I wouldn’t call him “moral” at all, even though I understand where his views come from. He had always pretty warped views on consent that weren’t really in line with the mainstream consensus.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 13:23 UTC (Tue)
by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604)
[Link] (5 responses)
Posted Sep 17, 2019 15:45 UTC (Tue)
by jzb (editor, #7867)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted Sep 17, 2019 20:22 UTC (Tue)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link]
Not that this case is anything remotely resembling that, but it does appear to be one of the places where RMS's reasoning began, and it is *also* an area where there have been appalling injustices in the past (prosecuting fifteen-year-olds for sexting each other and things like that).
Posted Sep 18, 2019 9:25 UTC (Wed)
by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Sep 18, 2019 12:09 UTC (Wed)
by niner (subscriber, #26151)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Sep 18, 2019 17:25 UTC (Wed)
by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604)
[Link]
Posted Sep 17, 2019 15:47 UTC (Tue)
by cornelio (guest, #117499)
[Link] (1 responses)
RMS and the FSF were one and the same thing. He will not be missed, he was not even a programmer anymore, but now that his morals are in doubt, the FSF will become pretty much irrelevant, despite him leaving.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 20:23 UTC (Tue)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link]
I see no reason to believe that, and hope you're wrong. There are plenty of people who share RMS's opinions of free software (most of them inspired by him) *without* sharing his opinions on consent in sexual relations.
Posted Sep 19, 2019 9:36 UTC (Thu)
by ChrisShort (subscriber, #120695)
[Link]
Posted Sep 17, 2019 9:24 UTC (Tue)
by aryonoco (guest, #55563)
[Link] (5 responses)
Our community is poorer, and our code less elegant, due to RMS.
It's 20 years too late, but I'm glad we can finally put RMS, ESR and others like them to the dustbin of history.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 9:40 UTC (Tue)
by dgm (subscriber, #49227)
[Link] (2 responses)
Now, anyone that lives from a paycheck and stands in a prominent position knowns that are the target of a witch hunt, so they better keep a low profile and their mouths shut.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 10:46 UTC (Tue)
by einar (guest, #98134)
[Link]
For this reason I learnt to keep my mouth shut at all times (online *and* offline) on anything remotely controversial.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 18:46 UTC (Tue)
by jerojasro (guest, #98169)
[Link]
I hope that we get to the point where they don't feel threatened by this rejection of sexist attitudes, "keeping a low profile and their mouths shut" as you say, but instead try to seek help and educate themselves to understand how they are sexist and what can they do about that problem.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 9:40 UTC (Tue)
by HelloWorld (guest, #56129)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Sep 17, 2019 11:22 UTC (Tue)
by oblio (guest, #33465)
[Link]
Posted Sep 17, 2019 9:30 UTC (Tue)
by krig (guest, #92101)
[Link] (34 responses)
I think this follow-up clarification/statement of his opinions really didn't help him:
"Many years ago I posted that I could not see anything wrong about sex between an adult and a child, if the child accepted it.
Through personal conversations in recent years, I've learned to understand how sex with a child can harm per psychologically. This changed my mind about the matter: I think adults should not do that. I am grateful for the conversations that enabled me to understand why."
Posted Sep 17, 2019 11:51 UTC (Tue)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link]
Posted Sep 17, 2019 12:21 UTC (Tue)
by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604)
[Link] (29 responses)
Posted Sep 17, 2019 13:36 UTC (Tue)
by bosyber (guest, #84963)
[Link] (27 responses)
I think it should not be a surprise that, when in a position of relative power, asking someone out might (quite justifiably) be seen, felt, as a demand, so would need to be done respectfully and with care not to come over that way (unless you don't care that it is an abuse of power, and also creepy).
Even for equals, having a relation with someone you work with might happen, but it also is a risk for a lot of reasons. Someone in a position of power persistently 'asking' others to get into such a situation, is not a neutral action, at all.
And that's even if it was done with care, respect, and with an understanding that it's appreciated, and, for success, reciprocated. Certainly not something to make a habit of, if you genuinely care about people. Which all means: if in doubt, just don't go there.
Going there, repeatedly, with a host of people you meet in work related settings, is not that, and seems problematic already. But by all those accounts, that's not the gist of what he did. In fact, he went out of his way to consistently keep doing the same inappropriate thing to people (women), without apparent care how it affected them, people who were there bc. of open source/free software, and who he seemingly had little interest in getting to know as a person, in settings where he was explicitly, repeatedly, told it wasn't wanted.
I mean, being made aware asking wasn't wanted, then going to those cards, and then later, taking someone for a walk to give them the card bc. he wasn't to do it inside? Who can seriously, believe that's all not so bad, or meant innocently, in good faith?
Posted Sep 17, 2019 13:38 UTC (Tue)
by bosyber (guest, #84963)
[Link]
Posted Sep 17, 2019 14:20 UTC (Tue)
by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604)
[Link] (25 responses)
A lot of people are unpleasant to interact with, doesn’t make them all pathological.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 19:57 UTC (Tue)
by Yui (guest, #118557)
[Link] (6 responses)
Posted Sep 20, 2019 10:00 UTC (Fri)
by dunlapg (guest, #57764)
[Link] (5 responses)
The SFC wrote:
I don't think these two people were simply duped by a single incident mischaracterized by "corporate shills". My interpretation of events is that many people have been uncomfortable with RMS's behaviors for a long time (and tried to talk to him about it); and society as a whole has been becoming less and less tolerant of them. This most recent event only triggered something that has been a long time coming.
Posted Sep 20, 2019 17:52 UTC (Fri)
by donbarry (guest, #10485)
[Link] (4 responses)
Stallman ran for the GNOME board in 2001 and 2002, in contentious elections which reflected the gulf which had developed and has continued, despite McGovern's efforts to paper over it. It is disingenuous of McGovern to refer to "severing the historical ties between GNOME, GNU, and the FSF," given that few remained after 2002.
Kuhn, well, what can one say. Stallman's vision attracted its fair share of those in ideological solidarity and fair-weather friends (or opportunists, take your pick). And one of Stallman's limitations was being unable to distinguish the two, though to be fair to him, few have had his strength of vision to swim against the current to his degree and for so long.
Stallman remains, for whatever disagreements I might have with his broader thought, the most consistent and unimpeachable spokesman for the thought which has defined the FSF. The cracking of the edifice can only be interpreted by the most superficial analysis as rooted in Stallman's defense of Minsky or in his occasional broader dissidency from various norms. No, it reflects the outcome of a protracted effort, decades in the making, to weaken Stallman's iron defense of his vision.
In that context, the self-serving nature of oily statements like Redhat's call for a "collaborative, inclusive and respectful" FSF means one which will remain silent or roll over on issues like remaking GCC into a tool which can be built into proprietary compilers.
If there's any good to be said to come of this, it's that many people now stand revealed for who they actually are, and for the limitations to their vision and character that have been revealed.
Posted Sep 20, 2019 20:31 UTC (Fri)
by Zack (guest, #37335)
[Link] (3 responses)
It boggles the mind how long some of these people must have been brooding, sharpening their blades, never forgetting, never forgiving, waiting to strike in that darkest night.
As for what the future holds:
"The SFC wrote:
We...want to underscore that allowing Stallman to continue to hold a leadership position would be an unacceptable compromise.
Connect with Conservancy on Google+, Facebook, and YouTube."
unacceptable compromises indeed.
Posted Sep 21, 2019 2:51 UTC (Sat)
by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
[Link] (2 responses)
> "Connect with Conservancy on Google+, Facebook, and YouTube."
What is really says
"Connect with Conservancy on Mastodon, Twitter, pump.io, Google+, Facebook, and YouTube."
> unacceptable compromises indeed.
Indeed
Posted Sep 21, 2019 14:19 UTC (Sat)
by Zack (guest, #37335)
[Link] (1 responses)
The three I mentioned are indeed unacceptable compromises as far as Software Freedom is concerned.
Posted Sep 21, 2019 20:24 UTC (Sat)
by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
[Link]
Posted Sep 17, 2019 22:45 UTC (Tue)
by k8to (guest, #15413)
[Link] (17 responses)
It's also just kind of gross. I know where such relationships have happened, but never was the superior the one kicking it off, and in all upstanding cases the employees immediately arranged to be out of line of report. That's pretty hard to do with the president of the organization.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 10:06 UTC (Wed)
by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604)
[Link] (16 responses)
I'm always somewhat aghast at how different interpersonal relations seem between (parts of) the US and Europe.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 18:57 UTC (Wed)
by k8to (guest, #15413)
[Link] (1 responses)
It's very well known you just shouldn't be hitting on your reports, from a liability viewpoint, even if you cannot see the social problems. In a sane organization you would have been *required* to complete training ensuring you know this, again from liability drivers if nothing else.
Posted Sep 19, 2019 15:53 UTC (Thu)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link]
Okay, for a teacher to get involved with a pupil is just plain stupid anyway, but whereas consent is 16 most anywhere else, in circumstances like this I understand it has been raised to 18.
The problem with this sort of relationship is that "sleeping with the boss" is seen as paying for personal advantage with sexual favours, and if it's the boss who starts it there are overtones of blackmail.
Which is why no sane person should go anywhere near this scenario without being EXTREMELY careful to protect both yourself AND the person you claim to care about. I'd say the latter is the more important, because you can use that to protect yourself.
Cheers,
Posted Sep 19, 2019 7:23 UTC (Thu)
by fredrik (subscriber, #232)
[Link] (13 responses)
Maybe I missinterpret you, so tell me, in which parts of Europe would you say the kind of interaction between RMS and women exemplified below is welcome and accepted? From the parts where I live, it certainly is not.
Christine Corbett:
Posted Sep 19, 2019 17:34 UTC (Thu)
by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604)
[Link] (12 responses)
No you're right, my sentence was pretty dumb in hindsight. I somewhat trailed off mentally and from the topic. I would say it may be tolerated, certainly not accepted, welcomed or reciprocated. I concede the debate and shall go to the pub.
>> My first interaction with RMS was at a hacker con at 19. He asked my name, I gave it, whether I went to MIT (I had an MIT shirt on), and after confirmation I did, asked me on a date. I said no. That was our entire conversation.
That's pretty bloody awkward. But it ends with "that was our entire conversation". He's getting it out of the way early, takes his humiliation and moves on. I'm sure Christine was offended that he completely lost interest in her as a person, not because someone she deems far beneath her tried to ask her on a date.
Best case scenario: He doesn't approach her at all. I would say that interaction is probably second best. I can imagine a lot worse scenarios. Honestly if that's where you set the bar some people I personally met should probably be executed thrice.
I think RMS came up with a meat space version of Tinder. It's even free as in freedom.
Posted Sep 19, 2019 17:48 UTC (Thu)
by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)
[Link] (10 responses)
Tinder uses are consenting to use Tinder. People attending professional conferences are not consenting to be hit on.
Posted Sep 19, 2019 22:19 UTC (Thu)
by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604)
[Link] (9 responses)
Posted Sep 19, 2019 22:48 UTC (Thu)
by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)
[Link] (8 responses)
Posted Sep 19, 2019 23:58 UTC (Thu)
by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604)
[Link] (7 responses)
Posted Sep 20, 2019 0:02 UTC (Fri)
by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)
[Link] (6 responses)
Posted Sep 20, 2019 0:12 UTC (Fri)
by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604)
[Link] (5 responses)
Posted Sep 20, 2019 0:15 UTC (Fri)
by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted Sep 20, 2019 8:39 UTC (Fri)
by NAR (subscriber, #1313)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Sep 23, 2019 4:29 UTC (Mon)
by dos (guest, #103671)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Sep 23, 2019 4:56 UTC (Mon)
by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Sep 23, 2019 6:08 UTC (Mon)
by neilbrown (subscriber, #359)
[Link]
This is a deep truth that goes way beyond asking people out for dates.
Posted Sep 19, 2019 19:13 UTC (Thu)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
[Link]
The thing is that the Petrie multiplier applies, which changes the moral calculation a little - because men are more common than women in professional software settings, women will disproportionately experience being hit on by men when they are attempting to work as compared to men, even assuming that women are more likely to hit on men at these sorts of events than men are to hit on women.
So, it can be simultaneously true that a small randomly picked sample of men shows that no one woman has been hit on more than once by the sample set, and many women have not been hit on at all, and that the same proportion of women is sufficient to get you a group where, on average, each woman has been hit on at least once (albeit some have not been hit on at all, and others have been hit on multiple times).
This is a problem that Tinder faces, and has to deal with, despite being entirely made up of people who've opted in to being hit on; I can't see it being any better in an environment where the majority of people do not want to be hit on (male or female).
Posted Sep 17, 2019 15:24 UTC (Tue)
by clugstj (subscriber, #4020)
[Link]
Posted Sep 17, 2019 13:41 UTC (Tue)
by wertigon (guest, #42963)
[Link] (2 responses)
I hope no extreme comment of yours from your youth ever comes back to haunt you like this one did for RMS. Because we are all human, we either are or have been young and held stupid beliefs too, and uttered them somewhere.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 15:22 UTC (Tue)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link]
Nonetheless: his youth? At the time in question, he was over fifty years old! I think we can safely say that it is acceptable to hold people over half a century old who've been in a public-facing position for decades to be adults as far as the consequences of their words are concerned! (But it's not just to misread and slant those words to try to put the worst possible face on them and then use that to whip up an Internet shitstorm, which is what seems to me to have happened.)
Posted Sep 17, 2019 17:13 UTC (Tue)
by krig (guest, #92101)
[Link]
Anyway, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect the reaction to "I no longer think paedophilia can be acceptable" to be along the lines of "hang on, you thought it was acceptable up until now!?".
Posted Sep 17, 2019 13:22 UTC (Tue)
by bib (guest, #114736)
[Link] (1 responses)
Most are twisting arguments to verify their own beliefs.
This is why I do not believe in free speech in itself.
I do believe in free speech with responsibility. If you cannot do that, then you do not deserve free speech.
Posted Sep 19, 2019 8:44 UTC (Thu)
by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750)
[Link]
Posted Sep 17, 2019 13:35 UTC (Tue)
by amk (subscriber, #19)
[Link] (10 responses)
Back in 2009, Stallman gave a keynote talk at Wikimania, the conference for Wikipedia editors. At the time I listened to a Wikipedia-oriented podcast, and they discussed the keynote afterwards, concluding that he wasn't very convincing and that Stallman was more of an impediment to the growth of free software than a successful advocate for it.
I mean, the FSF should have been more present over the past decade. They should have been publicly presenting the case that free software is better for basic infrastructure, or going out and getting funding for developers, or commissioning new software to fulfill unmet needs, or presenting free-software ethics to CS students, or getting these issues on the political radar in the US. There's a lot they could do! Instead Stallman wasted a lot of time arguing with people about GNU/Linux and squabbling on the emacs-devel list.
I look forward to seeing what a new president with a better sense of priorities and better advocacy skills can do with the FSF.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 14:12 UTC (Tue)
by zoobab (guest, #9945)
[Link] (7 responses)
The house of freedom is burning, we don't have time for disputes on who is gonna replace the Pope.
FSF and others have been barely active on fighting the new US software patents bill (STRONGER patent act).
In Europe, FSF(E) have been doing too few, too little, too late, especially the threat took a new form with the centralized Unitary Patent Court.
BTW wext week 24 september is World Day Against Software Patents.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 15:24 UTC (Tue)
by paulj (subscriber, #341)
[Link] (6 responses)
Posted Sep 17, 2019 16:38 UTC (Tue)
by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
[Link] (5 responses)
Regardless of how you feel about it, another "upgrade" might well convince a large subset of the Open Source side to take their collective ball and go home the way Linux already did ("You may use this software under version 2 [or 3] of the GPL... and *no* later version."). That would arguably make the FSF even more ineffectual than it already is.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 14:48 UTC (Wed)
by paulj (subscriber, #341)
[Link] (4 responses)
Other copyleft organisations and luminaries have become "captured" by corporate interests, to some degree. The danger is the FSF is too. Which would be not just sad, but potentially very bad, for Free Software, given the licence control it has over much of the already-published GPL software.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 17:10 UTC (Wed)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link] (3 responses)
There's nothing stopping a project changing the licence from "2 or later" to "2 or 3 only". Adding new versions of the GPL requires the consent of all the people who contributed in the past (usually supplied by the "or later" wording). Ditching the "or later" wording and restricting the choice of licence only requires the project team to agree the change to the "COPYING.TXT" file going forward.
Cheers,
Posted Sep 18, 2019 17:17 UTC (Wed)
by paulj (subscriber, #341)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Sep 18, 2019 20:24 UTC (Wed)
by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
[Link] (1 responses)
For quite a while Apple shipped an ancient version of Bash because the more recent ones were GPLv3 only. Eventually, they gave up and switched the default shell to zsh.
Realistically, there are three cases to worry about for any given FOSS project:
To my mind, the real question mark here is the GNU project. If we're about to see a mass-forking of all of those projects at once, it'll be far more disruptive than the Sun acquisition by Oracle. OTOH, it might finally put the "GNU/Linux" naming argument to bed if everyone stops using GNU code to do everything...
Posted Sep 20, 2019 0:52 UTC (Fri)
by murukesh (subscriber, #97031)
[Link]
Posted Sep 17, 2019 15:31 UTC (Tue)
by xophos (subscriber, #75267)
[Link]
Posted Sep 17, 2019 19:08 UTC (Tue)
by bluss (guest, #47454)
[Link]
Posted Sep 17, 2019 14:18 UTC (Tue)
by tuxlovesyou (guest, #134178)
[Link] (1 responses)
I hope rather than fade into obscurity, Stallman can use this time to refocus
I don't want this to be the end of Free Software. Get involved and do your part
Posted Sep 17, 2019 15:42 UTC (Tue)
by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
[Link]
Doubtful. In a recent interview:
> Oh, no, I don't try. I enjoyed programming 30 years ago when I was good at it. But I'm 66 years old. There's no reason to think I could be as good at it now. My memory for all sorts of details of a large piece of code and why I did this and that, it wouldn't be the same. But in any case, there are lots of other people who are doing that. And so in the 1990s, I was involuntarily self-promoted into management. Basically, I recognized that that's what I had to be doing. That's what I was needed for more than for writing the code.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/09/17/richard_stallman...
Posted Sep 17, 2019 14:52 UTC (Tue)
by BirAdam (guest, #132170)
[Link]
I think his contributions in the world of free software should stand for themselves.
That aside, I think that victims have to have provable damages in court of law and baseless accusations of misconduct should not be enough to deprive someone of his/her livelihood. This is the entire concept of “innocent until proven guilty” in the USA. Anyone can make a claim, not anyone can prove it.
That aside as well, the dude has said/done some creepy shit which could prove damage to reputation of his previous employer and therefore I think his resignation is in the best interest of the FSF and the movement as a whole.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 16:13 UTC (Tue)
by frostsnow (subscriber, #114957)
[Link] (5 responses)
Posted Sep 17, 2019 17:20 UTC (Tue)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted Sep 17, 2019 21:37 UTC (Tue)
by donbarry (guest, #10485)
[Link]
They failed the test.
And this capitulation will linger as a significant aspect of the legacy of each and every one of them who do not come forward to protest the FSF board majority's actions.
After all, even a significant figure like Eben Moglen eventually adapted to the vast corporate hostility to the larger Free Software vision.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 15:33 UTC (Wed)
by frostsnow (subscriber, #114957)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Sep 19, 2019 14:00 UTC (Thu)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Sep 19, 2019 16:03 UTC (Thu)
by frostsnow (subscriber, #114957)
[Link]
Posted Sep 17, 2019 17:22 UTC (Tue)
by donbarry (guest, #10485)
[Link] (2 responses)
I notice that the breakdown of those who are pillorying RMS follow largely those who reject his idea that considerations of freedoms, rather than profit, should govern software commons. RMS' innovation has been under increasingly organized attack for over 20 years, and having proved unable to defeat his vision outright, have sought to coopt it. The role that RMS played in clearly articulating their actions cannot be underestimated, and one can well imagine that the witch-hunt is aimed at not only removing him from the leadership of the FSF, but rendering his voice persona non grata in all computer circles, a dream of many for years.
I have principled political differences with Stallman and feel the FSF's position is philosophically idealist in that it architects its ethical vision in the abstract, without a broader and more concrete engagement with the capitalist economic system. But I have always strongly supported Stallman's efforts, so far as they go. His loss is a tragedy for the commons which largely exists as an extension of his efforts.
Outside of software, Stallman's opinions are sometimes out of touch and even disagreeable. Who has looked to him as a leader in such areas? He has certainly not presented himself as such. It is an old maxim, made particularly relevant in the #metoo era of sexual witch-hunts largely aimed at jockeying for personal advantage among the aspirant upper-middle-class while offering little or nothing to the whole of the working class of all genders, that sexual accusations are all-too-often used for settling political scores while obscuring the actual political content.
Minsky is entitled to the presumption of innocence, especially since the only accusation standing against him is a non-sequitur in deposition testimony which has never been adversarially tested in court, and for which countervailing narratives exist. Stallman was entitled to defend his friend, particularly since his basis for doing so is on the merits.
For those obtuse enough to insist that this is all about his distasteful (and, one must note, qualified) aside on pedophilia, or the sudden appearance of "everyone knows" accusations, well, there's now a leaderless 501(c)(3) organization some will be scrambling to occupy and sell out.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 18:28 UTC (Tue)
by bfields (subscriber, #19510)
[Link]
He's been FSF president over 30 years. It's long past time for someone else. I'm sure there are other people who understand software freedom and can do a better job at this point.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 1:26 UTC (Wed)
by blujay (guest, #39961)
[Link]
I've always strongly disagreed with Stallman's opinions on, probably, nearly everything not related to Free Software. At the same time, I've always respected his opinions and work related to Free Software. I think we would be much poorer, in the contexts of technology and Free Software, were it not for him.
I think there is more going on in this story than meets the eye. These purges are like a form of gamesmanship, a means to political and personal gain. They only have power because certain people cede it to them, because certain other people see an opportunity to direct the court of public opinion.
It will be interesting to see how these play out in the bigger picture. It seems to me that either these neo-Puritans[0] will purge themselves out of existence, or society will fracture into parallel societies.
0: Although the Puritans had a concept of repentance, for these, there is no means for propitiation.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 19:48 UTC (Tue)
by Yui (guest, #118557)
[Link] (26 responses)
Here is a PDF of the posts for anyone interested:
Posted Sep 17, 2019 20:06 UTC (Tue)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (22 responses)
Nobody's lynching Stallman. MIT and the FSF (and I, for that matter) think he showed a serious lack of judgement by weighing in on this matter in the way he did and that his actions reflect badly on MIT and the FSF. That's what this is all about... the right of MIT and FSF to determine who they do and do not want to represent them.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 20:16 UTC (Tue)
by Yui (guest, #118557)
[Link] (1 responses)
>MIT and the FSF (and I, for that matter) think he showed a serious lack of judgement by weighing in on this matter in the way he did
>and that his actions reflect badly on MIT and the FSF
>That's what this is all about... the right of MIT and FSF to determine who they do and do not want to represent them.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 20:34 UTC (Tue)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link]
I did read the messages you posted. I downloaded the PDF and went through it all; I'm not sure why you think I didn't. And... I think he showed a serious lack of judgement by weighing in the way he did.
And again, nobody's lynching Stallman. He'd not be alive if that were the case. He was pressured to resign from MIT and FSF. That's it. Your reaction is just a kneejerk reaction against perceived overzealousness by unnamed "corporate shills". It's not a dispassionate portrayal of reality.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 10:14 UTC (Wed)
by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604)
[Link] (19 responses)
Posted Sep 18, 2019 13:09 UTC (Wed)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link] (18 responses)
That may well be the case but in the meantime, “not weird and creepy” should already be a more achievable standard to aim for.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 13:33 UTC (Wed)
by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604)
[Link] (17 responses)
Let's say you get someone who is transgender or non-binary. That also rubs a lot of people the wrong way and is "weird" (or "queer") by a lot of people's standard. Should these people be excluded as well?
Perhaps the better idea is not to have a single person represent a community.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 14:34 UTC (Wed)
by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
[Link] (1 responses)
From those I've talked to, it's usually actually behavior-defined. I've seen attractive men be called creepy too. Social norms may pressure "unattractive" men to exhibit creepy behavior more often, but that's a problem to be solved on a different level.
> Let's say you get someone who is transgender or non-binary. That also rubs a lot of people the wrong way
Maybe so, but that's getting worked up over something someone *is* (like race or gender). Getting worked up over someone's behavior is different because that is something that can change (though there may be psychological reasons it can't, but that then ends up being something closer to the former class).
Posted Sep 18, 2019 18:33 UTC (Wed)
by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604)
[Link]
Or perhaps that is a justification not to deal with their own biases of what they find attractive or not? When it comes to that the brain is pretty much on auto-pilot, justification is filled in later. Most people aren't honest about this.
> Maybe so, but that's getting worked up over something someone *is* (like race or gender).
That's why I left race and sex out of it ;) You can change your behaviour to conform with a certain gender expression. This saves other people some discomfort at the expense of your own comfort. There is a trade-off here somewhere.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 14:55 UTC (Wed)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link] (7 responses)
The customs of polite human interaction, to begin with.
From a practical POV, I think that finding somebody whose personal hygiene conforms to the generally accepted standard would be a start. This is an area where someone could reasonably be expected to tolerate some personal inconvenience (for example, regular showers and doing the laundry) for the overall benefit of the organisation one is employed to represent. After all, if one's BO is bothering people they are less likely to listen to what one has to say on behalf of one's employer.
Also, as far as the RMS stories I've heard over the years go, if you were in a restaurant with a group of people and insisted on sampling the food on everybody else's plate without first asking for permission, that would probably suffice to make you look weird and creepy by many people's standards (including mine). Let alone the strange come-on cards. No need to get into gender issues at all.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 18:10 UTC (Wed)
by einar (guest, #98134)
[Link] (3 responses)
There are considerable differences in cultures defining what is polite and what not, and reasonable variance between individuals. How we define the custom?
Posted Sep 18, 2019 18:59 UTC (Wed)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link] (2 responses)
In what culture exactly is it considered polite not to wash one's body and clothes for prolonged periods of time, or steal food off other people's plates at social gatherings?
Posted Sep 19, 2019 11:23 UTC (Thu)
by tao (subscriber, #17563)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Sep 19, 2019 11:46 UTC (Thu)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link]
I generally have no issue with sharing food with friends – at a restaurant, I enjoy sampling various dishes, and I like the sort of place where they put lots of different stuff in the middle of the table –, but I would object to a person I hardly know picking food off my own plate, especially without asking beforehand. I suspect that boundaries like that will apply even in cultures where food-sharing as such is normal.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 18:50 UTC (Wed)
by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604)
[Link] (2 responses)
That's pretty much meaningless outside of your cultural circle.
I absolutely agree with your practical point of view. However I wonder if the personality traits that are express themselves in those behaviours are also responsible for the things we find commendable. Someone who is more strongly concerned with what other people think might have shut up about free software when no one listened. People act like it's an a la carte menu in a role playing game.
Is there a version of RMS that lives in a house in the burbs, showers, shaves and puts on a suit in the morning and then drives a car to work 9 to 5?
Posted Sep 18, 2019 19:18 UTC (Wed)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link] (1 responses)
The UN somehow manages to operate a General Assembly where people from many cultures can apparently congregate without offending one another's sensibilities as to dress, behaviour, and personal hygiene. People there quarrel all the time about political issues etc., but we don't tend to hear about “cultural” clashes a lot. That would suggest that there is in fact a minimum standard of polite interaction that pretty much anyone there can find it in themselves to adhere to, if only out of deference to others and in order to be taken seriously. I suspect strongly that exuding a rank odour and wearing dirty clothes (among other endearing personality quirks) aren't part of that minimum standard, and that any offenders would be gently taken aside and told what's what. Why can't we take that as a model?
Posted Sep 19, 2019 23:40 UTC (Thu)
by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604)
[Link]
Posted Sep 18, 2019 15:49 UTC (Wed)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (6 responses)
"Creepiness" refers to behavior, not appearance.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 18:07 UTC (Wed)
by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604)
[Link] (5 responses)
Posted Sep 18, 2019 22:15 UTC (Wed)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (4 responses)
Well, OK, but there's circular reasoning going on because most people would find a creepy person unattractive. But what defines creepiness is behaviour.
Posted Sep 19, 2019 23:15 UTC (Thu)
by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Sep 20, 2019 4:15 UTC (Fri)
by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Sep 26, 2019 23:29 UTC (Thu)
by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Sep 26, 2019 23:53 UTC (Thu)
by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
[Link]
I'm not going to let others dictate to me what I define as creepy behavior, but I can empathize with others as to what they perceive as such. Given time, my definition can evolve too, likely due to experiences of either myself or friends.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 20:42 UTC (Tue)
by flussence (guest, #85566)
[Link] (2 responses)
If you're incapable of context and nuance, it's no wonder you'd start mistaking the comments on sites like HN, Slashdot and Reddit as “sane”.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 21:22 UTC (Tue)
by Yui (guest, #118557)
[Link] (1 responses)
No wonder the views of Stallman who is a hopeless pedant and always gets stuck arguing about the semantics and nuances would seem very outrageous and controversial when most people dissmiss the discussion right away.
>The *decades* of history?
>it's no wonder you'd start mistaking the comments on sites like HN, Slashdot and Reddit as “sane”.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 12:20 UTC (Wed)
by niner (subscriber, #26151)
[Link]
Posted Sep 17, 2019 21:56 UTC (Tue)
by coriordan (guest, #7544)
[Link] (38 responses)
I've met Richard dozens of times, we've talked by mail, I've read a lot of his writings. I was never a close friend or advisor, but I know him somewhat.
I've seen him around women and I've gotten to know a lot of the women that are in Richard's line of work. And I've heard no complaints.
In MIT he teaches no courses and has no staff. He just has a room for responding to email, where he sleeps on the floor. So, talk of his position of power is strange. In the FSF office, they're among the top in terms of gender balance for software organisations. And there he does have power, and has had for 30+ years. Number of complaints? Zero that I know of.
He's missing the skill of guessing what others are thinking. In dating, this means his option 1 is to not try, due to fear of rejection, and live the rest of his life alone, or option 2, which he chooses, is to be direct and ask. Asking someone for a date always means risking personal pain and risking making the other person uncomfortable - disappointing someone whose made themself vulnerable is never fun. I remember collecting him from an airport, around 2004, and he asked me if I knew any women that might be interested in him. I laughed it off because it was an unusual question, but then I realised that he's lonely and he knows women aren't going to just throw themselves at him. Time's not on your side when you're 52 (in 2004), constantly travelling, and lacking a social skill. Fifteen years later, his lack of success has proven he was right that finding a sweetheart (his word) was going to be difficult. His other weakness is his sense of humour, which he loves. He has a page on his website with jokes he's proud of coming up with. The first two are: and
(That said, after years of work, he did manage to put a lot of humour into his speeches and got a lot of laughs from audiences.)
So for him, it's hilarious to have the opposite of a business card. A pleasure card (click, take a look). "Business or pleasure?" a question that hundreds of hotels and airports have asked him over the years, and he found a related joke that he thinks is great.
The mattress in his office is where he sleeps. He lives in his office, when in Boston. Has for years.
So, based on knowing him as well as I do, is he a man of universal charm? No. Is he a gentleman? Yes.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 22:09 UTC (Tue)
by Yui (guest, #118557)
[Link]
Posted Sep 18, 2019 1:35 UTC (Wed)
by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)
[Link] (28 responses)
Posted Sep 18, 2019 5:26 UTC (Wed)
by Yui (guest, #118557)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Sep 18, 2019 5:38 UTC (Wed)
by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)
[Link]
Posted Sep 18, 2019 7:41 UTC (Wed)
by seyman (subscriber, #1172)
[Link]
I'm in the same position as mjg59 and would, like him, not name names for fear of the women in question being dragged through the mud by RMS apologists.
As an aside, a question like the one you ask above (leaving only the choices of purposefully making a vague statement and being careless) is a loaded one. It's an informally fallacy that presupposes facts and encourages entrapment. LWN deserves better.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 5:53 UTC (Wed)
by coriordan (guest, #7544)
[Link] (22 responses)
But when people make such accusations about someone that I do know, and when I've seen that person around women loads of times, and when I know loads of women that have worked and socialised with him and they have no problem with him, I have to highlight this.
I can't prove or disprove rumours and third-party stories. But I will say that in my many first-hand interactions and observations of Richard, the man's a gentleman.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 6:19 UTC (Wed)
by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)
[Link] (21 responses)
Posted Sep 18, 2019 7:14 UTC (Wed)
by coriordan (guest, #7544)
[Link] (19 responses)
Your claim that only people with accusations are allowed to speak (since saying nice things is "inappropriate") is nonsense.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 14:37 UTC (Wed)
by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
[Link] (9 responses)
To put it another way, just because Matt Lauer didn't use his remote door lock in *your* presence doesn't mean it was never used.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 18:57 UTC (Wed)
by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604)
[Link] (6 responses)
Posted Sep 18, 2019 19:31 UTC (Wed)
by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
[Link] (2 responses)
Did you thinko here? This reads just like "heads I win, tails you lose".
In any case, given gentlemanly behavior in the presence of the GP and allegations of unwanted behavior in the presence of others is not mutually exclusive. Given that these are not coming from just one place and seems to be consistent with someone who doesn't understand the effects his actions have on others (especially those different from him), I'm inclined to believe that such things are plausible given the information I've seen.
Posted Sep 19, 2019 22:32 UTC (Thu)
by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Sep 20, 2019 4:12 UTC (Fri)
by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
[Link]
Posted Sep 18, 2019 19:37 UTC (Wed)
by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Sep 19, 2019 22:36 UTC (Thu)
by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604)
[Link]
Posted Sep 20, 2019 21:38 UTC (Fri)
by scientes (guest, #83068)
[Link]
Posted Sep 24, 2019 12:07 UTC (Tue)
by xophos (subscriber, #75267)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Sep 24, 2019 12:34 UTC (Tue)
by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
[Link]
Posted Sep 18, 2019 14:40 UTC (Wed)
by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)
[Link] (8 responses)
Posted Sep 20, 2019 21:39 UTC (Fri)
by scientes (guest, #83068)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Sep 20, 2019 21:50 UTC (Fri)
by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)
[Link]
Posted Sep 24, 2019 12:10 UTC (Tue)
by xophos (subscriber, #75267)
[Link] (5 responses)
Posted Sep 24, 2019 16:17 UTC (Tue)
by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted Sep 24, 2019 19:42 UTC (Tue)
by donbarry (guest, #10485)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Sep 24, 2019 19:46 UTC (Tue)
by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Sep 24, 2019 22:27 UTC (Tue)
by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604)
[Link]
Posted Sep 24, 2019 20:16 UTC (Tue)
by rodgerd (guest, #58896)
[Link]
Posted Sep 20, 2019 21:36 UTC (Fri)
by scientes (guest, #83068)
[Link]
Posted Sep 20, 2019 21:33 UTC (Fri)
by scientes (guest, #83068)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Sep 20, 2019 21:45 UTC (Fri)
by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)
[Link]
Posted Sep 18, 2019 7:05 UTC (Wed)
by colo (guest, #45564)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Sep 18, 2019 10:30 UTC (Wed)
by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604)
[Link]
Posted Sep 18, 2019 10:25 UTC (Wed)
by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604)
[Link] (2 responses)
> Asking someone for a date always means risking personal pain and risking making the other person uncomfortable - disappointing someone whose made themself vulnerable is never fun.
I do think some people take some glee from then humiliating that person further. I certainly read some tweets to that effect. Where's the empathy?
Posted Sep 18, 2019 21:31 UTC (Wed)
by einar (guest, #98134)
[Link] (1 responses)
He's on the "wrong side", so probably those people think he deserves no empathy. They forget that like this, they might be on the "wrong side" too, one day.
"Perhaps I am beginning to, for it suddenly seems to me that the destruction of what should not be, that is, the destruction of what you people call evil, is less just and desirable than the conversion of this evil into what you call good." (Daneel R. Olivaw in "The Caves of Steel" by I.Asimov)
Some people forget this lesson.
Posted Sep 19, 2019 23:08 UTC (Thu)
by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604)
[Link]
Posted Sep 18, 2019 13:25 UTC (Wed)
by bosyber (guest, #84963)
[Link] (1 responses)
And as sorry as I might feel for someone feeling lonely, and misunderstood. When that leads to persistent behaviour others find problematic, and when that has been made clear to him, many times over the years (no, I do not personally know him, but others have, and have spoken/written about that), including that perhaps for others his humor isn't seen, felt, or read in the same way (sure, can happen), at what point might we expect them to note that, and do something about it?
Any resourceful, intelligent person might in such a case, and especially if he has a wide group of people he knows from many walks of live, consider changing the way they express themselves. It's not like he couldn't find counselling and help in that, if he wanted.
For an example of how that might go [though that was it seems more about language, and a bit less about moral stance, I think, which might make it an easier counselling job?], look at Linus Torvalds, who decided that his way of expressing himself needed to change - so far he seems to still be effective, but as far as I can see, now with a less acerbic tone.
That you favor free speech and discussion does still not mean that a lack of (expressed) empathy is a good thing. If you don't feel it or don't know how to express it, well, there's merit to learning to behave like you do. Sure, that could go for some of the comments vehemently vilifying him too, but, it still doesn't make his behaviour better either. Painting him as mostly harmless (or a sad case), doesn't really seem a great way to make yourself, or him, appear in a good light.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 14:24 UTC (Wed)
by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604)
[Link]
It almost makes it sounds like you think the behaviours are deliberate? Like he is consciously engaging in behaviours that others find problematic? To what end? Just to flaunt his great power?
Posted Sep 18, 2019 19:54 UTC (Wed)
by azumanga (subscriber, #90158)
[Link]
You could decide you don't trust them, but any reasonable search will find dozens of complaints going back years. I know at least four of these complainers and have no reason to doubt their stories.
Posted Sep 17, 2019 22:18 UTC (Tue)
by jafd (subscriber, #129642)
[Link] (4 responses)
So y'all keep pushing his writing about children having sex from 2006. Looks like for 13 (thirteen!) years no one has bat an eye to that.
But that bit about Minsky which is huugely stretched to "Epstein apology", the Vice article bordering on slander (let the lawyers tell if that's slander or not), and now everyone is losing their mind.
It's not like his behavioral antipatterns were unknown, or were not a problem for decades. Many of them clearly not compatible with a role of a public figure. Uncanny advances towards women, ffs? Poor personal hygiene? Organizations of all sizes and shapes dealt with precisely that efficiently for decades, if not centuries. But quietly firing people (or dismissing them to "advisory" roles so they are not public, and not on premises, but still generate value) for real problems is so passé these days. Much better is to overblow some barely-an-issue to gargantuan proportions!
What can I say? Let them do it. Let them revel in it. Let the mob of mediocre little people on Twitter whom you never met shit on your career when/if you become inconvenient for any reason at all. Let them lube and polish their hate machine even more, so it's as efficient as it gets. I'm very much looking forward to Schadenfreude watching that very machine turning against them some day.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 7:53 UTC (Wed)
by DrMcCoy (subscriber, #86699)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Sep 18, 2019 8:49 UTC (Wed)
by jafd (subscriber, #129642)
[Link] (2 responses)
There's no good side of this coin because the whole coin is submerged in shit, this is what I want to say. Posted Sep 18, 2019 3:09 UTC (Wed)
by Kamilion (subscriber, #42576)
[Link] (1 responses)
In california, things are different.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySec...
CALIFORNIA CONSTITUTION - ARTICLE I DECLARATION OF RIGHTS [SECTION 2] ( Article 1 adopted 1879. ) (Sec. 2 amended June 3, 1980, by Prop. 5. Res.Ch. 77, 1978.)
I'm used to saying whatever comes to mind, in seriousness or in jest.
On the flip side, it's also what enables things like that Medium post to be so antagonistic, as most of the dotcoms plant their address in silicon valley.
Still, seeing someone get the internet-pain-train run on them like this exposes a lot of skeletons.
And in california that sort of privacy is at least partially protected too... by article 1 section 1... and by the second sentence, it's already getting on thin ice with the way california handles firearms... So I guess even with the armor of law at your back, mere words are still sharp enough to kill a man's career.
SECTION 1.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 4:02 UTC (Wed)
by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
[Link]
> Every person may freely speak, write and publish his or her sentiments on all subjects, being responsible for the abuse of this right.
You can say what you want, but there may be reactions to what you say. You're responsible for that.
> A law may not restrain or abridge liberty of speech or press.
What law has been made?
> And in california that sort of privacy is at least partially protected too...
This specific instance was made to a list with a wide array of subscribers to it (including undergraduates), so I don't know what privacy was expected for this list. For previous instances, they've been on his blog, recounted by others involved in the interactions, or second hand stories (presumably not told in a setting where privacy beyond anonymity of the other interator was wanted).
Posted Sep 18, 2019 8:09 UTC (Wed)
by mtaht (subscriber, #11087)
[Link] (2 responses)
So many events nowadays feel like what was described in one flew over the cookoo' nest, in this case, a "pecking party".
https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/cuckoo/section1/page/2/
Ironically, this movie cannot be streamed over netflix.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 13:54 UTC (Wed)
by jond (subscriber, #37669)
[Link] (1 responses)
Why is that ironic?
Posted Sep 20, 2019 0:15 UTC (Fri)
by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604)
[Link]
Posted Sep 18, 2019 15:56 UTC (Wed)
by frostsnow (subscriber, #114957)
[Link] (5 responses)
I'd like to draw attention to this sentence:
Posted Sep 18, 2019 16:47 UTC (Wed)
by DrMcCoy (subscriber, #86699)
[Link] (2 responses)
Yes
> that has nothing to do with advancing the cause of Free Software
No
Posted Sep 18, 2019 18:18 UTC (Wed)
by einar (guest, #98134)
[Link]
Posted Sep 19, 2019 16:05 UTC (Thu)
by frostsnow (subscriber, #114957)
[Link]
Posted Sep 20, 2019 0:15 UTC (Fri)
by luto (guest, #39314)
[Link]
> This conversation about Epstein, Minsky, and Stallman should motivate other institutions too. Even if they are certain they took no money from Epstein or never hosted Minsky or Stallman...
No one with any knowledge actually appears to accuse Minsky of anything other than associating with Epstein and being offered sex at Epstein’s direction. All evidence suggests that Minsky declined. If universities start purging everyone who merely associated with Epstein and declined to benefit from a crime, without any evidence of actual wrongdoing, it would be an unreasonable purge indeed.
Posted Sep 20, 2019 4:38 UTC (Fri)
by jubal (subscriber, #67202)
[Link]
Posted Sep 18, 2019 17:43 UTC (Wed)
by jberkus (guest, #55561)
[Link] (6 responses)
So, thank you Richard.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 18:37 UTC (Wed)
by donbarry (guest, #10485)
[Link] (5 responses)
There are literally billions of dollars at stake in who controls the next version of the GPL license for the large body of code that enacts the "or later" clause in their invocation of the license. And it's quite noticeable that those companies which are most hostile to the FSF have their figures, well known or not, playing a significant part in throwing stones at the pilloried Stallman.
Some have called for replacing the entire FSF board. And yet nowhere do they declare what the requirements should be for such service, other than mandating gender, race, and other superficial identities. Besides the outright call for racialism defining the choice, there's absolutely no discussion as to what the future FSF leader and board members should represent *politically* in the defense of the goals of the FSF.
And this is by design.
Manufactured sex scandals are very useful to hide political attacks while evading accountability for them, and have been for centuries.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 18:57 UTC (Wed)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link]
Whether the contract is actually enforced or not (which is a legal problem) the reality is that the GPL cannot legally be changed that much.
There is a bunch of stuff - part of the implied contract of the GPL - that says its purpose is to enforce the four freedoms. Should there be a takeover of the FSF and an attempt to change the GPL to weaken those freedoms, there will almost certainly be lawsuits - which SHOULD succeed - to have those versions declared invalid successors.
Of course, in law, nothing is certain because we rely on fallible (and prejudiced, even if they don't recognise it and believe themselves impartial) judges to enforce the law.
That to my mind is one of the tragedies of this saga - if we don't accept that we ourselves are biased when discussing this sort of thing - we end up with an "Oh yes he is - oh no he isn't" argument which achieves nothing other than entrenching our prejudices and making the problem worse. I know my posts here may have upset a few people :-) but I'm trying to be logical and I can't come to any *logically* defensible solution. If the answer is "society has decided" then I'm fine with that, but there are people here (in this saga, not on lwn) for whom the only acceptable answer is an extreme one :-(
Cheers,
Posted Sep 18, 2019 19:30 UTC (Wed)
by bfields (subscriber, #19510)
[Link] (1 responses)
https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/open-letter-free-software-...
Good grief.
Sorry, but the idea that this is evidence of a huge shadowy conspiracy to rewrite the GPL is bizarre.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 20:21 UTC (Wed)
by rweikusat2 (subscriber, #117920)
[Link]
Can someone please wake me when this "diverse, collaborative and inclusive environment" finally plans to get rid of online bullying as appropriate way of 'settling' differences of opinion?
Posted Sep 18, 2019 22:58 UTC (Wed)
by flussence (guest, #85566)
[Link] (1 responses)
Have you been asleep for the past 10 years? Microsoft practically owns the concept of “open source”. The Linux Foundation is pure payola. The GPL is utterly irrelevant because it's being replaced by permissively-licensed software left and right. The world runs Electron, not GNOME.
Posted Sep 19, 2019 11:12 UTC (Thu)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
[Link]
Don't forget that the legal environment has also changed, making it legally perilous (in most jurisdictions) to even talk about running modified code on commodity hardware, making the practical distinction between "open source" and "free software" largely moot.
Posted Sep 19, 2019 4:36 UTC (Thu)
by mkaehlcke (guest, #61834)
[Link] (4 responses)
https://medium.com/@thomas.bushnell/a-reflection-on-the-d...
Posted Sep 19, 2019 8:51 UTC (Thu)
by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Sep 20, 2019 15:55 UTC (Fri)
by da4089 (subscriber, #1195)
[Link]
Posted Sep 19, 2019 16:24 UTC (Thu)
by donbarry (guest, #10485)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Sep 19, 2019 17:06 UTC (Thu)
by mkaehlcke (guest, #61834)
[Link]
I don't read the post as coming from someone holding a deep grudge and using the opportunity to pile on. Besides providing his perspective about the situation at MIT (et al) Thomas still expresses a certain sympathy for RMS and tries to understand his side:
"There has been some bad reporting, and that’s a problem. While I have not waded through the entire email thread Selam G. has posted, my reaction was that RMS did not defend Epstein, and did not say that the victim in this case was acting voluntarily."
"He thought that Marvin Minsky was being unfairly accused. Minsky was his friend for many many years, and I think he carries a lot of affection and loyalty for his memory."
"I feel very sad for him. He’s a tragic figure. He is one of the most brilliant people I’ve met, who I have always thought desperately craved friendship and camaraderie, and seems to have less and less of it all the time. This is all his doing; nobody does it to him. But it’s still very sad. As far as I can tell, he believes his entire life’s work is a failure."
To me Thomas sounds more sad and somewhat conflicted, than happy about the opportunity to deal out blows.
Posted Sep 19, 2019 16:02 UTC (Thu)
by kamil (guest, #3802)
[Link] (33 responses)
Posted Sep 19, 2019 19:48 UTC (Thu)
by corbet (editor, #1)
[Link] (32 responses)
Finally, I don't think this resignation is going to change much in the community as a whole. It's the end of an era, but the march toward world domination continues.
Posted Sep 20, 2019 10:42 UTC (Fri)
by dunlapg (guest, #57764)
[Link]
LWN frequently has articles where you wade into some controversial discussion, try to fairly summarize the different viewpoints, and give a reasonable summary judgement. I can certainly see why you might not want to wade into this particular discussion. But I for one would really appreciate such an article.
In particular, I fear that a lot of people's take-away will be "don't touch any contentious topic with a barge-pole, or your words will be twisted and and you'll be a victim of the Internet mob justice", rather than "don't spend years ignoring people's admonitions, and don't unintentionally protect sexual predators by defending obviously problematic behavior".
Posted Sep 20, 2019 14:06 UTC (Fri)
by KaiRo (subscriber, #1987)
[Link]
Posted Sep 20, 2019 14:23 UTC (Fri)
by deater (subscriber, #11746)
[Link] (27 responses)
To be honest, while I was all for world-domination via free software back in the 90s, I am not sure I'd want it anymore with how things currently stand.
Linux itself is even suspect these days. I repeatably have problems where I lose work because firefox triggers OOM on a machine with *4GB* of RAM, either freezing the system for 10+ minutes (or else OOM killing all my terminal windows). This is something we would have rightfully ridiculed a Microsoft OS for doing back in the day, but these days it's a widely known issue that apparently is never going to get fixed.
Posted Sep 20, 2019 15:21 UTC (Fri)
by wnowak1 (subscriber, #113128)
[Link] (25 responses)
https://dev.to/rrampage/surviving-the-linux-oom-killer-2ki9
You don't explain what content you are loading in Firefox to cause your memory usage to rise such that the OOM killer must be used. I wouldn't blame Linux in this case for your lost work.
Posted Sep 20, 2019 18:16 UTC (Fri)
by deater (subscriber, #11746)
[Link] (24 responses)
It shouldn't matter. It should not be possible for a user program to DoS the operating system. It's the whole point of having an operating system.
I first ran Linux on a 66MHz 486 with 20MB of RAM, and yes I ran Netscape on it and was able to browse the web on it successfully without the machine ever locking up. It used to be remarkable if Linux crashed. Now people seem to shrug and say it can't be helped, or at least try to blame you for having "only" 4GB of RAM.
Posted Sep 20, 2019 18:34 UTC (Fri)
by wnowak1 (subscriber, #113128)
[Link] (23 responses)
Browsers have evolved to support a lot more functionality as the web evolved so its memory requirements and consumption have changed. Monitor your memory usage as you open a few browser tabs and play a youtube video or browse a website that is loaded with dynamic content, etc. The memory usage goes way up. Run 'top' or 'htop' or '/proc/meminfo' to get a better idea of what's going on with your system.
Posted Sep 20, 2019 18:50 UTC (Fri)
by kamil (guest, #3802)
[Link] (22 responses)
deater did not imply that Linux is less stable because it's free. He was responding to Jon's apparently serious remark that "march toward world domination continues". I happen to agree that given the sad state of Linux on the desktop (arguably, we've regressed there compared to other OSes, and deater was simply providing an example of that), Jon's statement is rather preposterous.
Posted Sep 20, 2019 19:20 UTC (Fri)
by wnowak1 (subscriber, #113128)
[Link] (21 responses)
How are you comparing the sad sate of the desktop? Windows or OS X require ~ 2 GB+ of RAM. I would argue that your desktop experience using an alternative OS would be worse given the same hardware constraints.
Posted Sep 20, 2019 19:42 UTC (Fri)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link]
Posted Sep 20, 2019 19:47 UTC (Fri)
by kamil (guest, #3802)
[Link] (19 responses)
The way I see it, desktop was always a second-class citizen in the Linux world (server workloads were always more important to, e.g., the kernel community) but now it barely even registers on the radar. Which mainstream Linux distro focuses on the desktop at this point? I don't know how far back you go but I still remember when Ubuntu first came out, and people's initial shock and disbelief at how polished its installation process and out-of-the-box desktop experience was. Back then it really felt like we were making progress in this space. And now?
Go to any Linux/free software/open source conference and count the number of people with Linux on their laptops compared to MacOS. Sadly, many of those people did go through the Linux-on-the-desktop phase, but we lost them. I know lots of people who have used Linux on their laptops for years, even decades, and are now using Macs, or even Windows 10. Now, only the diehards like the readers of LWN still bother (me included, just to make it clear).
Posted Sep 20, 2019 20:18 UTC (Fri)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
[Link] (1 responses)
It's a reflection of corporate IT policies more than anything else.
Using a Mac allows those users full access to corporate IT infrastructure (email, VPNs, support, etc), the hardware is (or at least used to be) generally sane, and they can run Linux in full-screen VMs if need be. As an added bonus, they don't ever have to fight driver or hardware issues.
One other thing -- don't forget that most for most "open source" developers, Linux is just an implementation detail hidden beneath three separate frameworks and a devops container system that SomeoneElse set up.
Meanwhile they are probably using a "code editor" that's actually a javascript application running in a cut-down web browser, that has no real interaction with the local operating system beyond the method used to launch it. Even the source code (and revision control) is stored/managed in the cloud.
....Feeling old yet?
Posted Sep 20, 2019 22:06 UTC (Fri)
by kamil (guest, #3802)
[Link]
That may be your experience but it isn't mine. I work in computer science research; there are few restrictions in such places when it comes to what hardware or OS you can use (IT people have learnt over the years to just "let them play with whatever they want").
Virtually every researcher I talked to who switched away from a Linux desktop said that it was because they got sick and tired of iffy hardware support, bugs that never get fixed, and missing basic features that everybody else takes for granted. To them, Linux desktop was basically abandonware. Sure, other factors also played a role, such as a need to run MS Office (you would be surprised how many CS people don't like LaTeX), although these days they could of course do that in a VM.
I certainly agree with you though that a lot of development these days takes place so far above the kernel that the OS simply doesn't matter...
Posted Sep 20, 2019 20:22 UTC (Fri)
by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
[Link]
The only major success related to space is Chromebooks. Hardly a traditional desktop. Browsers seem to winning the desktop war to the extend there is even a desktop market at all and many of the desktop clients are thin wrappers around web based tech for what it is worth.
Lots of folks have moved on to using mobile phones and some of them are using tablets where they would have been using laptops before. So that's part of what happened as well.
Posted Sep 20, 2019 20:27 UTC (Fri)
by wnowak1 (subscriber, #113128)
[Link] (12 responses)
As far as who / which distro focuses on the desktop, there are several distros that aim to make a pretty and usable desktop.
Chromebooks/ChromeOS is another one if you want to count that.
I don't disagree with you that desktop was/is a second-class citizen but the point is that to ding Linux because a userspace application is killed while running out of memory on a low end system is a bit unfair. It actually doesn't even matter that it was Firefox. It could be anything, apache, or some other software running out of memory and being terminated by the oom killer. I rest my case ...
Posted Sep 20, 2019 21:02 UTC (Fri)
by deater (subscriber, #11746)
[Link] (11 responses)
You are misunderstanding. I *wish* the OOM killer would kick in and kill firefox. What happens on my machine is that once the system hits OOM conditions, the desktop soft-locks, sometimes for over 30 minutes, with the system unresponsive.
This is not disk thrashing, I have swap turned off as I have an SSD drive.
Linux is completely failing in this case, and it's bad enough that after 23 years of Desktop Linux use I'm considering switching to something else.
Posted Sep 20, 2019 21:12 UTC (Fri)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
[Link]
Well, that's heavily exacerbating your problem...
Posted Sep 20, 2019 21:17 UTC (Fri)
by kamil (guest, #3802)
[Link] (1 responses)
As I see it, Linux is not optimized for any desktop hardware. It's optimized for servers. In fact, over the years, it has become more and more desktop-hostile, to mention anti-features pushed on us by enterprise distros such as the "predictable" network interface names as one example. That is why people who used it on desktop for years are switching away -- because they don't see any future in it, any light at the end of the tunnel.
But there's no convincing some people that there is a problem.
Posted Sep 20, 2019 23:56 UTC (Fri)
by HelloWorld (guest, #56129)
[Link]
Posted Sep 20, 2019 21:29 UTC (Fri)
by wnowak1 (subscriber, #113128)
[Link] (1 responses)
You should consider enabling swap.
"A swap file is space on a hard disk used as the virtual memory extension of a computer's real memory (RAM). Having a swap file allows your computer's operating system to pretend that you have more RAM than you actually do."
Posted Sep 20, 2019 21:31 UTC (Fri)
by wnowak1 (subscriber, #113128)
[Link]
Posted Sep 23, 2019 19:56 UTC (Mon)
by flussence (guest, #85566)
[Link] (5 responses)
And that's *far* more likely to kill your SSD.
Posted Sep 23, 2019 20:03 UTC (Mon)
by kamil (guest, #3802)
[Link] (4 responses)
Yes, clean pages will be dropped more often, requiring them to be read again from files in /usr when they are needed, as you said, but nothing will be written there, so his SSD will be just fine.
Posted Sep 23, 2019 20:34 UTC (Mon)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
[Link] (3 responses)
Most pages of demand-paged executables are clean. Without swap configured, all the system can do is discard random pages of an executable (or any other file-backed mmap area) in the knowledge that it can page those back in from the source file as required.
All you do by removing swap is force the system to page out file-backed mmap pages such as executable code in preference to anonymous pages; this is often not what you really want, as paging out a small amount of anonymous data that's not been used in a while can be enough to permit the system to exit paging thrash. See Chris Down's essay in defence of swap for more details on why swap is needed.
Posted Sep 24, 2019 9:12 UTC (Tue)
by james (subscriber, #1325)
[Link] (2 responses)
However, it is erases that wear out an SSD. If you are configuring your system solely to minimise SSD wear, many reads from /usr are far less harmful than one write to swap.
Of course, if you are optimising a system solely to minimise SSD wear, why not get rid of the SSD altogether and go back to spinning rust? We normally buy SSD-based systems for performance reasons; it seems inconsistent to then not take performance into account when configuring it.
Posted Sep 24, 2019 12:44 UTC (Tue)
by deater (subscriber, #11746)
[Link] (1 responses)
anyway, thanks everyone for quoting the wikipedia page on swap files to me, believe it or not I know what they are, how they work, and I have even written my own VM-enabled custom operating system before.
> why not get rid of the SSD altogether and go back to spinning rust?
Sure, next time I rip open this 5-year old macbook air for maintainence maybe I'll shove in some huge 5400rpm 3 1/2" drive. Maybe I'll also solder in some DIMM slots so people can stop accusing me of not having enough RAM.
Really, if your operating system is so poorly written it can't run in 4GB on a multi-gigahertz machine, maybe you need to step back and re-evaluate your coding a bit.
Posted Sep 24, 2019 13:21 UTC (Tue)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
[Link]
...In other words, you deliberately and knowingly chose to mis-configure a system designed around overcommit of memory in a way that causes it to break on your particular application workload?
> Really, if your operating system is so poorly written it can't run in 4GB on a multi-gigahertz machine, maybe you need to step back and re-evaluate your coding a bit.
Just FYI, passive-aggressive insults are not the way to get folks to care about your self-made predicament. You may want to step back and re-evaluate your approach.
Posted Sep 20, 2019 22:55 UTC (Fri)
by da4089 (subscriber, #1195)
[Link] (2 responses)
On servers, on phones, on embedded devices, developers have made Linux the best solution available. This has required both application and kernel work to produce a product that is better than the alternatives.
On the desktop, I think Linux is hamstrung by its limited vision. We seem to always aim to be "as good as" Windows or macOS. This ends up dooming the effort to be, at absolute best, a clone of the last release of those environments.
Desktop Linux needs to envisage a workspace *beyond* what its competitors provide, and deliver it. If that vision is compelling, users will switch. If not, why would they? Users migrate from iOS to Android, from Windows to macOS and macOS to Windows -- different applications, *incompatible* applications aren't an issue, it's the perception that the end goal is better that's required.
Posted Sep 22, 2019 10:12 UTC (Sun)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link]
People do move between iOS and Android, or between Windows and macOS, but they do that by buying new hardware that has the other operating system already on it (in fact you can't even install iOS on hardware that is intended for Android and vice-versa etc.). That is very difficult in the case of desktop Linux as there are generally no computers with pre-installed Linux available where most people go to buy a new computer. Every computer in these places, however, has a reasonably adequate operating system pre-installed already, and Linux would have to be very compelling indeed in order to get people to go to the trouble of installing it themselves, voiding the warranty, and so on. Finally, whether people switch between iOS and Android, or Windows to macOS, exclusively because the operating system's “vision” is so “compelling” is by no means clear – for many people it's a question of what's being offered at what price, whether the hardware looks sleek and well-designed, the availability of application software and peripherals, and (certainly in the case of Apple) a lifestyle choice just as much as a technology choice.
In my experience, people have no problem using desktop Linux if someone knowledgeable installs it for them. In fact, most of the desktop users I support tend to prefer it to Windows once they've got the hang of it – KDE, for example, works pretty well and does offer useful features that Windows doesn't. So as far as I'm concerned the problem isn't “confidence”, it's putting actual Linux desktops in the hands of actual users.
Posted Sep 23, 2019 15:09 UTC (Mon)
by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
[Link]
That work didn't just happen, it was paid for (by volunteers and businesses) to the tune of hundreds of thousands of full-time workers over the years, the sophistication you see is the direct result of the amount of effort put into it. The desktop, while full of passionate developers and containing some businesses, has maybe only had thousands of full-time workers so the scope of the vision needs to be constrained by the reality of the resources available, and comparisons to Apple, Microsoft or Google need to be understood on the relative efficiency of the development effort rather than the absolute amount of work that gets done. Its absurd to complain that the work of 100-500 (GNOME, KDE, XFCE, etc.) developers is less sophisticated than the work of 5,000-10,000 (Apple, MS, Google), but the fact that they can be compared at all is an achievement.
> Desktop Linux needs to envisage a workspace *beyond* what its competitors provide, and deliver it.
I would say that ChromeOS is probably the closest to a success story here, but part of the reason why is that the desktop matters less than it has in the last 20+ years and most current end-user development is in cross-platform JavaScript web browser applications and not in native desktop ones.
Posted Sep 20, 2019 15:54 UTC (Fri)
by flussence (guest, #85566)
[Link]
Posted Sep 20, 2019 14:50 UTC (Fri)
by kamil (guest, #3802)
[Link] (1 responses)
In a way, I agree. What's done is done.
I think many of us, kind-of, waited for this to happen. During Mozilla's Eich controversy, or maybe it was during the more recent controversy regarding Linus Torvalds, I remember thinking I wonder if RMS will be next. And I didn't even know half the stories back then that came out now. So, in retrospect, it was probably inevitable.
What did surprise me was how quickly RMS resigned. For a person so... detached from reality... I fully expected he would dig his heels in, refuse to budge, and take FSF and maybe even the whole GNU project down with him, leaving nothing but scorched earth in the aftermath. I feel grateful that this is not what actually happened.
Perhaps the article worth writing is indeed not about the process but about the aftermath, and how little we actually expect this change to matter. It just dawned on me how much less important the whole GNU project has become over the years. It's strange because the individual components are still there and are widely used (GCC, glibc, all the utils packages, etc.) yet, somehow, this is not the space where most of the innovation takes place. It feels like GNU stayed the way it was while the rest of the free software/open source community changed and expanded dramatically, making GNU a match smaller piece of the overall pie.
Posted Sep 20, 2019 16:04 UTC (Fri)
by donbarry (guest, #10485)
[Link]
And his board, including several people known for political flexibility under pressure, apparently gave him no choice.
Given their lack of integrity towards Stallman, I can no longer trust their integrity to defend the licenses. I cannot in good faith insert an "or any later version" in software I generate. Recovering this integrity is a significant, and probably unachievable, burden.
If Stallman shows willingness to create a "Free Software Council" from which he can continue to provide his unimpeachable advice for software licensing issues and, if necessary, craft future versions, I would support and welcome his doing so.
Posted Sep 20, 2019 22:07 UTC (Fri)
by tome (subscriber, #3171)
[Link]
Posted Sep 20, 2019 23:59 UTC (Fri)
by jfebrer (guest, #82539)
[Link] (1 responses)
I liked this article, explains many things about RMS personality which I didn't know.
Posted Sep 22, 2019 0:34 UTC (Sun)
by jerojasro (guest, #98169)
[Link]
But then it devolves into ad-hominems and blindly idolizing Stallman. I could not finish reading it.
Posted Sep 26, 2019 23:42 UTC (Thu)
by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604)
[Link]
I recently joined the FSF as an associate member. I think a more fruitful discussion can be had about who follows RMS. And also I wonder why the FSF should have a single President.
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I can't really see any issues in the summary quoted.
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There is a particular type of person that this term is used *by*.
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I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing.
"""
Rick Falkvinge joins me in demanding an end to the censorship of "child pornography", and points out that if in the US you observe the rape of a child, making a video or photo to use as evidence would subject you to a greater penalty than the rapist.
"""
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https://web.archive.org/web/20180323012839/https://www.fs...
https://web.archive.org/web/20170309235220/https://www.fs...
https://web.archive.org/web/20160322022734/https://www.fs...
https://web.archive.org/web/20150318053935/https://www.fs...
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The facts you cite are irrelevant when talking about a man who
(among many more accusations; but there is no dispute about these)
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I'm going to proactively assume this is an honest question and not a troll, and without even beginning to unpile everything here, start off by pointing out that women don't bloody go to conferences to be hit on by nerds.
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Mostly, because I wasn't sure those cards were specifically geared towards women.
In hindsight the tone of my previous comment was more confrontational than I intended, so I want to start by apologizing for that.Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
I'll assume that you mean well, and will try to respond in kind. This is a topic both pretty important and pretty touchy, but I will try my best not to get carried away into an unfriendly manner of speech.
Firstly: some people, regardless of gender, are not comfortable being hit on by strangers and it's their utmost right. If you allow people to bumble around making others uncomfortable, those others will not be coming back even though they're not the ones at fault here. This is a major mechanism through which women, specifically, can feel repelled from events dominated by men with underdeveloped social skills. (Which is not remotely limited to FOSS events, sadly.)
Secondly: if someone lacks the social awareness to recognize the specific contexts where romantic approaches are acceptable, that's okay; but they remain responsible for their actions all the same. If someone can't judge whether a specific context is appropriate, then it's on them to refrain entirely for the duration of that context. And when told explicitly that a specific context is broadly inappropriate, like RMS was, working around the letter of the rule is a major red flag: it shows that he both values his right to seek "pleasure" above the comfort of others, and demonstrates willful disregard for feedback that his actions have negative side-effects for other people. That alone probably should have gotten RMS banned from those events, to be honest.
Thirdly: even in an appropriate context, romance is something that develops as a chemistry between the individualities of two (or more) people. Handing out to strangers cards mass-printed before you even met them signals that you don't care about their individuality, and they're just an interchangeable target to you. And some people will be fine with that, for sure, but others will perceive it as extremely gross. If you lack a way of telling which kind of person you're dealing with, but still go ahead with the card, it implies that you are fine making an interchangeable target out of them by default with no thought and/or care toward their feelings about it. That's a creepy behavior.
Fourthly: let's not disregard the added context that the approach in question comes from someone who does not care enough about the comfort of others to do them the courtesy of personal hygiene.
What all of the above adds up to is: despite it not being the intention, RMS's cards signal that he does not think of the recipients as fellow humans beings, but only as potential objects of (his) pleasure. That's deeply not okay.
Ultimately, and more broadly, failure to understand how your behaviors make others uncomfortable is not an excuse for those behaviors. The fact RMS got away with it for decades is the elephant-in-the-room problem here.
Wow, that's one of the most instructive responses I've ever seen on LWN.
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https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/nonimmigrant/N...
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They were not.
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That doesn't classify as open source, let alone being libre software.
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I think there are reading comprehension issues here.
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To which I would add
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How is it wrong to focus on free software?
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Wol
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No, he's a self-promoting con artist who pushed the _phrase_ free software.
Free social nuance tuition: if you want people to think you unbiased, don't start that way. (My personal impression is that if RMS personally invented a cure for death, you'd find a way to damn him for it.)
Heck, he had a page on his website basically saying "Linux is just a fad, stop talking about it, my vaporware project I announced 15 years ago will be way better"
And now we look at the page you cite. I guess you didn't actually read it, or expected us not to, since it's nothing like you claim. He talks about the GNU project, which by this point was a really very substantial collection of critical toolchain components and other pieces which, as he notes on the very page you link to, constitutes more or less all of the stuff a Unix system needs to be a useful development platform other than the GUI and the kernel. (Sure, he didn't write all of that himself, but he also didn't claim to have done so.)
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Wol
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It may be on the extreme fringes, but this idea is out there. and on the first page of a simple search.
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" I would venture ... to suggest that perhaps any form of sexual intercourse between a male and a female within the patriarchal box is a form of rape"
and
"Because of this, [patriarchal indoctrination from birth] all sexual interactions between a male and a female that comes out of this original rape [indoctrination] is rape"
"... we are literally sleeping with the enemy"
There are supportive comments such as
"I agree that all hetero sex in patriarchy is rape. "
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Wol
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Wol
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I think only ONE person addressed the substantive point which is that we are all pushing OUR opinion on OTHER PEOPLE.
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But his question about consent at age 17 is far from a "settled issue" at this point.
Quite. Frankly the problem here is the fundamental problem of all law: as a written entity it is necessarily imposing black-and-whiteness on a graduated world (and leaving it up to the judge's discretion, as is common outside the US, doesn't really help much: it stops miscarriages of justice but it cannot stop innocent people getting arrested before the judge's discretion is exercised, which is frankly fairly traumatizing in and of itself).
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But going into legal/philosophical disquisitions like this at the time and place RMS did was epically insensitive even by my standards, and doubly so for someone in a spokesposition.
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and really be aware of the other person. I've screwed up many times in my life when I wasn't paying sufficient attention and was very happy when someone corrected me or showed me where I was wrong, and very unhappy when someone ghosted me for something I didn't understand. Nuance is a difficult thing for geeks. And worthy of detailed study!
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Not a good thing.
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in the article clearly contradicts the author’s claim here.
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I mean get real: RMS has done many great things for which he deserves thanks and credit but that does not make him a saint. Or even a nice person. And when you are a public figure like he is than you better watch what you say because to some people its gospel. With great power comes great responsibility.
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>You're essentially arguing for a society where anybody in any leadership role must hide their opinions and must renounce their right to freedom of expression, and that is not a society you'd want to live in, and certainly not one I want to live in.
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Wol
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Wol
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I'm really sorry, if I harm his reputation by that but he harms actual lives by saying stuff like that especially as he is a cultural hero to many of us.
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Obviously if someone's opinions in the field of action of some organisation go against the aims of said organisation there is a problem.
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Wol
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"I think vaccines cause Autism." is dangerous and has lead to people dying.
Also, you are entitled to your opinions but if you express them that doesn't mean you won't experience consequences only that the govt won't punish you.
The FSF is free to say that it doesn't want to associate with someone who expresses such opinions.
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Wol
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Wp;
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>Some opinions _are_ harmful, full stop. It's ridiculous in 2019 we're debating whether or not an underage person "presented" as "willing" in the contexts of Epstein's victims. It is time to stop defending this kind of thing. There is no room for debate or discussion - it's wrong.
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/27/opinion/north-of-the-b... )
Employing obvious sarcasm, "cevin666" wrote,
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Yeah, its a sad day when somebody who finds child abuse excusable faces a shitstorm for saying so.
Challenging that tendentious and quite possibly even libelous characterization of Richard M. Stallman [RMS], "Pinaraf" asked,
Where did he [RMS] say anything like that?
"azumanga" then replied, quoting the first sentence of the now-infamous two-sentence comment that RMS posted to his personal blog in 2006:
I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily [sic] pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing.
Consider, as well:
- RMS defined neither child nor pedophilia in the specific context that he used either term in his statement. Properly defined, the term pedophilia is limited-to cases involving an attraction specifically to prepubescent children. As widely-used, however, the term often includes even fully sexually mature adolescents who have not reached whatever the established age-of-consent happens to be in whatever the case or context in-question is. While there may be near-universal consensus (as well as clearly and objectively delineated boundaries) concerning the former (i.e., true pedophilia), the same cannot be said for the latter (as evidenced by the often considerable regional variation in age-of-consent laws).Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Wol
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>How many know him personally? How many reached out and said "I am not okay with your behavior"?
I have.Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
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Neither would even exist without RMS, so that's simply ludicrous.
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If this incident has proven anything it's that he isn't and never was.
When a few corporate shills can take someone down by mischaracterizing a couple emails you can't really call them powerful.
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
When a few corporate shills can take someone down by mischaracterizing a couple emails you can't really call them powerful.
We...want to underscore that allowing Stallman to continue to hold a leadership position would be an unacceptable compromise.
and Neil McGovern, the Executive Director of the GNOME foundation, wrote:
I... have now reached the point of concluding that the greatest service to the mission of software freedom is for Richard to step down from FSF and GNU and let others continue in his stead.
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Wol
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> I'm always somewhat aghast at how different interpersonal relations seem between (parts of) the US and Europe.
> My first interaction with RMS was at a hacker con at 19. He asked my name, I gave it, whether I went to MIT (I had an MIT shirt on), and after confirmation I did, asked me on a date. I said no. That was our entire conversation.
https://twitter.com/corbett/status/994012399656042496
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To err is human. To admit, apologize, repair - that is what makes community.
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Wol
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The question is: Are they willing to help do the work, or waiting for someone else to do it?
I think the loss of Richard Stallman will be felt for many years to come.
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Stallman? I feel like perhaps an outreach position like he had been in has not
always been the best fit (spoken with love from someone that also is on the
high-functioning end of the Autism spectrum). Perhaps now, given that the FSF
is able to find a suitable successor as president, Stallman will be able to
refocus on what he and his other cohorts have done to make GNU such a great
POSIX+ operating system that improves on POSIX in just about every way. I
had always felt that it was somewhat of a waste of such a great mind to have it
bogged down in PR-related quibbles, when there are plenty of people out there
that could echo his principles to the public at large as well as he could have
(maybe have even done better). In a time where nuance is oft thrown to the
wayside, the FSF more than ever needs a public figure that won't compromise on
what matters, but, at the same time, can meet people where they are in their
understanding of Free Software principles and why they are important. Sometimes
it is hard to not put things bluntly, as people like Stallman, myself and many
others in the field are often both wont to do.
his efforts on helping fix some GNU projects that have been much-neglected over
the years. Savannah and Hurd are two glaring examples, but there are plenty of
others that have fallen by the wayside. Perhaps we can even look forward to
Stallman mentoring less experienced, younger programmers that show promise on
how they can improve and get involved in the community.
to ensure that freedom-respecting software continues to be relevant for many
years to come!
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https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6405929/091320...
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Try reading this thread and say that again. Or any of the numerous threads on HN and Reddit.
Only place that I've seen that's mostly been sane about all of this is Slashdot.
Please read the actual messages he sent before commenting.
This sentence of yours makes it very clear that you haven't done that.
The MIT and FSF blindly believing corporate shills' false accusations without actually making a bit of effort to verify them reflects badly on them.
No it isn't. Not a single person has brought that up as an issue before this comment of yours.
This is all just a character assassination and nothing more, nothing less.
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I don't think there will be a suitable replacement if we expect perfection from people in those positions in every imaginable realm
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By whose definition of weird / creepy?
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That's pretty much meaningless outside of your cultural circle.
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Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
You mean the single comment that everyone keeps bringing up about there being little evidence for the claim that voluntary sexual acts are harmful? That statement of his was pretty reasonable considering there is very little research on the topic and the little there is (rind et al. for example) don't really support the claim either.
Is there something else that he has said on the topic that would be relevant? I've only seen people bring up this single sentence comment he made nearly two decades ago. Single comment can hardly be considered "decades of history".
HN, Reddit and LWN have been pretty insane when it comes to this particular character assassination campaign.
Most of the comments on Slashdot however seem to have been reasonably sane. Perhaps they actually took a moment to understand what he said, who knows.
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
In defence of Richard Stallman
How can you sleep under water?
Use a snore-kel.
Parent 1: My son became a Little Leaguer to play baseball.
Parent 2: Watch out! When the child is a Little Leaguer,
the parents can become hypereager.
In defence of Richard Stallman
That's just heartwarming.
I've always enjoyed his sense of humor.
In defence of Richard Stallman
In defence of Richard Stallman
Leaving statements like this vague is a good way to make people assume these complaints are worse than they actually are. Was that the purpose or were you just careless?
A complaint of unspecified kind from an unspecified person that's relayed by a third party should really not be taken seriously at all.
In defence of Richard Stallman
In defence of Richard Stallman
In defence of Richard Stallman
In defence of Richard Stallman
In defence of Richard Stallman
In defence of Richard Stallman
In defence of Richard Stallman
In defence of Richard Stallman
In defence of Richard Stallman
In defence of Richard Stallman
In defence of Richard Stallman
In defence of Richard Stallman
In defence of Richard Stallman
In defence of Richard Stallman
That's why all sane legal systems have "Innocent until proven guilty (beyond reasonable doubt)".
In defence of Richard Stallman
In defence of Richard Stallman
In defence of Richard Stallman
In defence of Richard Stallman
In defence of Richard Stallman
In defence of Richard Stallman
In defence of Richard Stallman
In defence of Richard Stallman
In defence of Richard Stallman
In defence of Richard Stallman
In defence of Richard Stallman
In defence of Richard Stallman
In defence of Richard Stallman
In defence of Richard Stallman
In defence of Richard Stallman
In defence of Richard Stallman
In defence of Richard Stallman
In defence of Richard Stallman
In defence of Richard Stallman
In defence of Richard Stallman
In defence of Richard Stallman
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
(a) Every person may freely speak, write and publish his or her sentiments on all subjects, being responsible for the abuse of this right. A law may not restrain or abridge liberty of speech or press.
It makes me really uncomfortable to know that Boston and MIT don't get to enjoy the same rights as I do.
All people are by nature free and independent and have inalienable rights. Among these are enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining safety, happiness, and privacy.
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
>I’m writing this both for those people that I spoke with in the past few days, and because this is a teachable moment, a good case study of what institutions should do going forward, how we can sustainably purge and rebuild.
>purge and rebuild
Note the word "purge". RMS has been the target of a political *purge* that has nothing to do with advancing the cause of Free Software. How disgusting.
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
>No
*I* do not acknowledge the political movement's authority with regards to Free Software. They have not earned it.
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Do read the article.
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Wol
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
I find it remarkable how "buried" and low-profile this, let's face it, major news ended up being in this weekly issue of LWN. I can't help but think that this must have been a deliberate choice.
On the one hand, I understand that it's a painful and controversial story and that LWN may not want to be yet another forum for mudslinging.
On the other hand, I was hoping for a thoughtful and introspective commentary from Jon Corbet, one that the long-time readers of this site know he can be so good at. Let's face it, as frequent attendees of Linux conferences, LWN staff must have at the very least heard rumors of RMS' misbehavior, if not witnessed them in person. I seem to remember reading a piece here years ago, title something like What shall we do about Richard Stallman (unfortunately, I can't find it anymore), which touched on some of RMS' problematic behavior...
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
There are a number of reasons why I've not written that article, but it comes down to a couple of things in the end:
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
I'm honestly not sure what I could contribute to that conversation that isn't out there already. Recounting Stallman's past transgressions doesn't seem all that helpful, somehow.
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
> Firefox to cause your memory usage to rise such
> that the OOM killer must be used. I wouldn't blame
> Linux in this case for your lost work.
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Implying that because Linux is free it is somehow less stable because your web browser gets repeatedly killed doesn't make sense.
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
https://fossbytes.com/most-beautiful-linux-distros/
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
> citizen but the point is that to ding Linux because a
> userspace application is killed while running out of memory
> on a low end system is a bit unfair.
Sometimes if I hit control-alt-f1 fast enough it will eventually (maybe after 5 minutes) switch to a console window where I can kill firefox manually if I've left a logged in root console there.
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
You are wasting your time. He will try to tell you, as he already did, that there are all those /proc or /sys files you can tweak to make OOM behave better and that it's your fault that Linux is not optimized for your low-end hardware.Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
What you write is correct (to the best of my knowledge).
SSDs, erasing, and wear rates.
SSDs, erasing, and wear rates.
SSDs, erasing, and wear rates.
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Desktop Linux needs to envisage a workspace *beyond* what its competitors provide, and deliver it. If that vision is compelling, users will switch. If not, why would they? Users migrate from iOS to Android, from Windows to macOS and macOS to Windows -- different applications, *incompatible* applications aren't an issue, it's the perception that the end goal is better that's required.
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
