Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Posted Sep 17, 2019 16:58 UTC (Tue) by SEJeff (guest, #51588)In reply to: Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF by rsidd
Parent article: Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
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)
[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)
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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.
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
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
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
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
They were not.
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
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
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
