Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Posted Sep 17, 2019 8:20 UTC (Tue) by rschroev (subscriber, #4164)In reply to: Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF by TheGopher
Parent article: Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
> 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)
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Posted Sep 20, 2019 0:14 UTC (Fri)
by rahvin (guest, #16953)
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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)
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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)
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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)
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Posted Sep 29, 2019 12:01 UTC (Sun)
by immibis (guest, #105511)
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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)
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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)
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Posted Sep 26, 2019 23:24 UTC (Thu)
by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604)
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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]
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
I can't really see any issues in the summary quoted.
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
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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.
"""
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
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...
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
The facts you cite are irrelevant when talking about a man who
(among many more accusations; but there is no dispute about these)
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
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.
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
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.
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
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Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/nonimmigrant/N...
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
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They were not.
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
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Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
That doesn't classify as open source, let alone being libre software.
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
I think there are reading comprehension issues here.
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
To which I would add
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
How is it wrong to focus on free software?
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
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.)
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
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Wol
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
It may be on the extreme fringes, but this idea is out there. and on the first page of a simple search.
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
" 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. "
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
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Wol
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Wol
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
I think only ONE person addressed the substantive point which is that we are all pushing OUR opinion on OTHER PEOPLE.
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
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).
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
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.
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
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!
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
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
