Richard Stallman returns to the FSF board

Actions have had consequences since the dawn of man, there is nothing "cancellous" about today that wasn't hundreds of thousands of years ago.

> Oh well, that's the cancellous world we live in today.

It is my opinion that, while we made important progress (although definitely not enough) in raising awareness about misogyny, systemic racism and certain other great evils, there have been a few injustices in between. As in many other situations, the answer is in neither pole---we must listen to everyone and make a synthesis. In that spirit, I welcome many of the ethical advances of the last decades, I greatly oppose unenlightened people such as Trump and Bolsonaro (whom I call "President Joker"---murderous clown), and I generally resent those who take pride in being "politically incorrect" (which often means "ignorant bigot"). Yet at the same time, I believe there have been relevant mistakes in this struggle, and Richard Stallman was caught in a "perfect storm" (sorry for the cliché) that caused his real flaws to be judged far too harshly. Please see the text I carefully wrote on the subject, based on the ideas of the great Nadine Strossen---the prominent feminist and civil rights activist who was the first female President of the ACLU---and Suzanne Nossel---CEO of PEN America and former executive director of Amnesty International USA---among others: https://gitlab.com/jorgemorais/justice-for-rms

If you have strong opinions about my text, it may be wise to reach me directly (see `Help wanted`section of my text for contact details) instead of posting yet more comments on this thread. I hope not to cause a flame war, especially here in LWN. I value LWN for technical excellence in contrast of the shallow, hothead click-baiting of e.g. Slashdot.

The free software movement isn't the FSF (or Richard Stallman), and disaffiliating with the FSF as an organization doesn't at all mean turning your back on the free software movement.

And you will not be alone if you do so. Bradley Kuhn left the FSF over this - http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2019/10/15/fsf-rms.html - and it's pretty clear he's not alone. As you point out, the strength of the free software movement is evident in his contributions and in so many others.

There are a wide variety of other organizations leading the free software community - Debian, Conservancy, etc. They don't rely on the FSF, and you don't have to, either.

The LWN comment system is inadequate for discussions of controversial subjects, or any subject that draws many comments, because it is a simple tree organized by the order the comments are received, which is pretty much what Usenet had with the rn newsreader in the 1980s. It badly needs improvement. Its inadequacy makes it too easy for discussions to be hijacked, and even appears to affect the editors' willingness to tackle hot topics (in fairness they "go there" anyway when it's really necessary).

In general, people should be judged by their actions. If we judge by speech or by thought, 90% of all human males who have had about 3 beers at any bar in the world should likely be ostracized from society. Likely too, every young man in puberty should be jailed for his libidinous thoughts that objectify women (or men) and are inherently sexist and degrading. Some people are just crass. If you go down this route of trying to ideologically purify the populace, you will end up in a civil war. How many people can be kicked off of every platform and lose their jobs before you’ve ruined enough lives for them pose a serious threat should they join together against you and your ideological kinfolk? By shutting off their speech, getting them purged from their work place, and generally telling them that they’re the scum of the Earth, you are (in their minds) reinforcing their belief that you’re a new totalitarian ideology, and that they need to defend thesmselves (potentially violently). A persons job is his/her well-being. All must learn to be tolerant of all. If a person’s rights (not feelings) are violated, then we have grounds for legal proceedings and action can be taken. If a company finds someone too damaging to their brand and too costly to their revenues, a person can certainly be fired.

This is more of a general observation, but I've noticed that in general it takes somewhat of an abrasive personality to kickstart important, big things. As in the more 'regular-behaving' people who may join later because they believe in the idea and probably even conceived of it themselves, simply lack the 'no fs given' mental attitude one needs to adopt in the face of extreme animosity from the forces opposed to the idea, who are usually much better resourced.

The same applies to how 'outlandish' the ideas seem; RMS may be a bit of a free software/copyleft maximalist, but it is important to remember that the opposition to his ideas will constantly try to moderate and move more and more to a 'compromise' position they feel comfortable with.

If there's noone at the extreme end of an idea like free software and everyone is just a 'moderate', the opposition will moderate the moderate voices to a point where free software == source available or something similarly awful.

This is why, I believe, people like RMS are important.

My personal practice is to mentally killfile anyone who uses the term "SJW" as a pejorative. It's a surprisingly effective litmus test.

There's no need to go to the Internet Archive when one can read all "odious stuff" on rms's homepage, with the added benefit of context and references.

But then someone might notice the (mostly The Guardian) articles that rms's conclusions are about, and then someone's conscientiousness might tell them they'd need to read the article and then they might realise they'd have to formulate their criticism of, in order:

-the article
-the journalist
-the editor
-the various cited references
-the psychologists or other domain experts behind the references
and finally
-rms, who based his conclusions on all of the above.

but it's easy to see that's a lot of work to form an actual opinion about someone one didn't like in the first place, so why bother?

Could you elaborate it a bit? Let's focus on my black-n-white picture, as it easier to see extremities and finales.

Serial rapist got parole (otherwise it's a prisons job to stop him walking outside of the jail). He got shiny new theory which gives constructive (yummy!) proof for P=NP. He speaks on conferences on this topic, not on 'wife beating preferences'.

Why you would stop him? I'm truly do not understand this. If someone doing the thing you consider good and important, it's deserves attention and respect. Even this person is bad in some other area, if his actions and words on the important topic are meaningful and it does not brings controversial topics upfront, what's the problem?

Half of scientists of the past had slaves or benefited of slavery. Should we throw away them from science books?

I do not understand cancel culture. For me it's mirror of soviet culture (which I got a bit in my childhood), which said that 'people with bad background are bad and should be canceled, oppresses and excluded'. Bad people included nobles, bourgeoisie and just rich farmers (kulaks). And you are doomed if you ever show sign of doubt for party line.

Now someone invented new party lines and everyone with different opinions must be expelled, banned and cancelled.

I just do not understand that.

Using that same argument, we should automatically discount the theories of any scientist that lived over about 50 years ago. And completely scrap our system of government, because not only did all of its founders commit VeryBadThings(tm) -- eg treatment of women, not to mention actual hereditary slavery -- it was heavily based on a two-miliennia-old system that was founded and practiced by folks that celebrated pedophilia.

Indeed, his position on free software is ethical. But you should consider it by itself. Why would you need to also consider other ideas (say "it is ok to offer sex with a card") into accout? It makes no logical sense.

And your analogy is broken: ethical positions vary, maths don't. Ethics are slightly diferent from age to age, from country to country, from person to person. Mine have changed as I have grown, and even with context. Thus, I firmly believe that anybody requesting that we all align to some "correct" cannon is either missguided or malicious.

Less about opinions or people being busy being offended on others people behalf, which is common these days and more about behavior pattern.

RMS contributed to a negative environment for women at MIT [1] for decades to the extent that female freshmen were informed they should say that they were VI users when RMS would start hitting on them so he would leave them alone.

The likelihood of him not showing the same behavior pattern and the general lack of ethical standards in any other communities he resides in, is zero to none thus the FSF leadership sent willingly ( and knowing of the repercussions of that decision ) a loud and clear signal to the FSF community, contributors, sponsors etc. when it allowed him to returned to the board, in which people either have to accept and embrace that message or walk away from it altogether (which arguably is the wiser choice in this case).

1. https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~lazowska/mit/

In the interest of balance, since we have shut off the comments on this,
I will note that the FSFE has a statement about the court case here:

https://fsfe.org/about/statement-20201220.html

jake