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RMS addresses the free software community (fsf.org)
527 points by caution on April 12, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 493 comments



Now, would the journalists who wrote articles with titles that are a variation of "RMS defended Epstein" [1,2] apologize or at least correct their articles? Also, now that RMS has explicitly clarified his position on these issues, can the people who leveraged his "silence" and "bad behavior" to oust him from the FSF at least admit that their motive was less about making the free-software movement welcoming and was more about getting rid of RMS?

[1]: https://www.thedailybeast.com/famed-mit-computer-scientist-r... [2]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/9ke3ke/famed-computer-scient...


Neither of those things will happen.

We would be better off if we could remove those dishonest people from our communities here and elsewhere.

Dishonest reporting, and amplifying of dishonest posts on social media is not something you will ever get an apology for, because those efforts were never meant to survive scrutiny. They were meant to create "pressure" to cause reputational damage.

You cannot convince or engage bad-faith actors. All you can do is identify and eliminate them from your social media circles and sites as best you can.

This is one of the reasons I believe social media sites should enact age-based voting. Such that older accounts that have withstood the reputational scrutiny, have greater influence.


> We would be better off if we could remove those dishonest people from our communities here and elsewhere.

You mean, only in some non-asshole way, so that we don't look exactly like them?


> so that we don't look exactly like them?

How about not be like them at all? People are stupid, but they can learn from their mistakes, and society can help them by accepting an apology rather than shunning them forever.


What if they don't (want to) learn, and don't apologize (like these journalists and their companies likely won't). How often, and how long, do we hope for them to see the error in their ways, repent and become forces for good? And how much harm do we tolerate while we're waiting for them to see the light?


You're right. Better to burn the witches quickly. Deus Vult.


I understand that reply to mean that you don't want any rule-enforcement, ever? That's really the only reading that makes sense with that kind of comment to my question of how much, and how long, should be tolerated.


> We would be better off if we could remove those dishonest people from our communities here and elsewhere.

How do you distinguish between dishonesty and honesty? Who gets to determine that?

It sounds like you are attempting to block the people who blocked other people. It isn't a good cycle to get into.

Listening to arguments we disagree with is going to be incredibly valuable in the coming years. Not everyone is arguing bad-faith. There are some people who genuinely believe different things. Addressing those differences directly, through open discussion, will be much more productive than a procedure to "identify and eliminate".


> How do you distinguish between dishonesty and honesty? Who gets to determine that?

There are two types of communities, in my opinion. ...and most, like HN, fall somewhere in the middle.

There's the community that's open to all, doesn't censor anything, and is flooded with low-quality or manipulated content.

Then there are the communities that are private. They have groups of mature people who DO appreciate different opinions, and are able to engage in constructive discourse. Obviously dishonest content, as judged by older accounts or mods, are removed. Ideally older or high-reputation accounts have greater voting weight.

The danger in the latter is that the community loses the diversity of thought if those top accounts misuse their power to direct a narrative, but as these private communities are numerous - participants can simply leave. You could even make the argument that they could be paid communities, if the quality and analysis of the community is high. For example, I pay to belong to the Arms Control Wonk Discord channel because that community provides detailed analysis on international events on WMDs/conflicts that you cannot find elsewhere. It is low on advocacy, and high on analysis.

HN is in the middle. They ban poor quality accounts, but it's still a free and open forum. For now it works, but as it becomes more popular, I've noticed a decline in content quality and an increase in advocacy.


> Dishonest reporting, and amplifying of dishonest posts on social media is not something you will ever get an apology for, because those efforts were never meant to survive scrutiny. They were meant to create "pressure" to cause reputational damage.

Exactly.

The correct way of handling these instances of bad behavior is to block, shadowban and ignore.


I think mockery is better than blocking. Many of the people involved have convinced each other they have the moral high ground.


>This is one of the reasons I believe social media sites should enact age-based voting.

I am not sure this works, on HN for example is easy enough for a small mob to disappear articles by flagging them, on top of that we get no reason why things were flagged or any way to undo it. Account age or karma is not enough, we need much more, make it harder to share/downvote or flag , like by making someone type at least 60 words and ban the accounts for abuse.


Accounts that act poorly, usually do so in multiple ways. Banning accounts for bad behavior will likely curb other undetectable bad behavior.

HN is a bit unique. I suspect it is less influenced by bad behavior because it is small enough to fly under the radar.


You would think so because is hard to notice, I would not have believed it until I seen it with my own eyes, it was an article about RMS and there was a good discussion in the comments , in 5-10 minutes the entry was gone from the first pages, it was flagged, I think there were around 2-- comments in the end but most readers missed the article and instead they could see more then one day old stuff.

My proposal is to have people do a bit of work not just click a button, write an intelligent argument, it would at least filter the lazy ones out. It is similar when you know someone will review your code you double check your commit first and clean things up, someone might decide that the reason might not be as defendable so maybe a discussion should happen on this topic .


People started flagging anything about Stallman because there were over 100 submissions in 2 weeks.[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26713636


Yeah, but if feels not right , people should use the down vote button , then if the majority pressed down then up then is clearly something it should not be discussed. It is not right that a small number of individuals could hide something, because there is not an equivalent mechanism for a similar number of people to un-flag it.

There were different articles about RMS, so why an article that has Red Hat in it's name should stay and other that has an author less prestigious should be hidden, I mean let the community decide, we always repeat ourselves in comments when we talk about latest Apple,Facebook or Google shit so if the users upvote and discuss something then don't fucking hide it, it means it is on topic, the nes that don't want to engage can skip the article or downvote it and upvote soem other article instead that is more interesting.


You can't downvote articles; you can only flag them [if you want to express disapproval].


Yeah, I was confused, we can't downvote. IMO flag should only be used for offtopic or content that is against side rules.

I nenver flagged any submission, even if I think is offtopic or low quality, I can ignore it, maybe the people that engaged it have other opinion so why I should decide for others what should they see on the home page.

My proposal might not be better , so I admit I can be wrong and I let the HN stuff to do their job how they think is best, just wanted to tell my opinion that even here stuff might be hidden for you because a small number of people decided it.


All submissions compete for attention.

Voting and commenting influence what submissions other people see too.


I know but from my observations all the up-votes and comments can't undo a few flags. Maybe there should be a way so if same number of people contest the flags then it undoes it?

At least I think is not fair to use flag on an item I think it should get less attention, then I should flag all posts about the frameworks or languages that I think are getting too much attention (I do not flag and very rare downvote )


How did you observe the number of flags?

dang seemed to endorse flagging repetition and flame war. I don't know what to tell you if you interpret that as just too much attention.


I have no data so I might be wrong,so let me apologize if my understanding of how HN works is wrong.(I know that some people flag stuff and the Dan will say it is not me , is you guys but this time i will undo the flags and give the article a change(what I do not see is how many garbage or good stuff gets flagged so maybe the good ones that get flagged are few compared to garbage, maybe I will never know)

So let me ask, in general we have a page where we are encouraged to upvote good articles and discouraged to flag things we do not agree or a mediocre how can the system prevent that the flag is not abused by the minority that flags things they just disagree.

I don't want to HN employee, it is a big site and there is probably a lot of issues that need to be checked and addressed, my point initially was that HN is better then FB but there could be better system there.

My favorite so far is a Star Trek related subreddit, the rules are clear and enforced. For example no meme, jokes or lazy comment or submissions are allowed, you are encouraged to either report or educate people that are not respecting the rules. It did not generated a bubble relative to the topic, and the memes,jokes and filth has it's own subbreddits and you have the big subbreddit where most everything is allowed.


You haven't been to DeviantArt, have you.

There, "rageflagging" (flagging because you do not like what is being said, not because it violates some content policy) is fairly common. I don't know why it wouldn't be here on Hackernews, despite the latter's pretense to "quality discussion".

The difference is, at least on DeviantArt the staff intervene when there's a flag, and politely tell the flagger to block the person if they don't like what they have to say. Flagging on HN seems automated and algorithm-driven, which makes it abuse-prone.


You can also hide them. Flagging means something serious.


1. If you just downvote, the article will fall off the front page quickly enough.

2. If you disagree with a flag, then hit the “vouch” button and resurrect it.


HN has a system where submissions get flagged and possibly downranked if the number of comments exceeds its score as it is indicative of a flame war.

It is the opposite of what social media that optimize for "engagement" do.

The HN community also has a habit of downranking controversial topics. For example, subjects like women in tech and racism tend to get buried quickly. It is not that these are not worth talking about, but I think keeping these out help a great deal at preventing bad behavior to emerge. For me, it is a win, and it is not like places where you can talk politics are lacking on the net.


I prefer forums with clear rules, and if something is flagged then it should be only if is against a specific rule. I am not sure if is more preferable to debate the merit of yet another incomplete Tic-Tac-Toe in Rust then having a pasionate debate on app stores, free software or X.

Blame wars should be fixed differently IMO, you could temporary ban accounts that do not respect the rules, users can report comments and indicate the rule that is broken, this require better moderation and clear rules.

Though, I am not sure if HN could implement this, is too big and probably mi preferences work better on smaller niche forums with a few good moderators and a community that cares about the quality and pushes the participants to communicate in the allowed rules.


Vouching appears to undo flagging. More people should vouch, if they see abuse.


>This is one of the reasons I believe social media sites should enact age-based voting. Such that older accounts that have withstood the reputational scrutiny, have greater influence.

Then those accounts just become hot commodities, or you front load a bunch of accurate reporting about banal stuff and bank that credibility for when you want to go fangs out.

Think about it, that's how we've gotten into the "post-trust" situation we're in now. Age does not against bullshittery confer protection. No technical measure will. No edifice is permanent except that in the churn, some people with standards will rise in spite of it all. They'll get torn at at every opportunity, but it's also why critical thinking is everyone's job. You can't delegate it. Nobody can be a habitual follower by default. You have to check.

So many firms exist with the sole purpose of perception/crisis management simply because it is so powerful a tool. No one can protect you from having to think and come to your own conclusions. I thought differently for years. That the media could be trusted for having skin in the game, and dedication to the ideals and tenets of their profession.

Then I learned about how crushlingly pragmatic the world is. Either you acknowledge it, and plot your way around it, or you get run over by it.

I leave with a few quotes and a rather notorious person who rammed home an illustration of this point.

>In this and like communities, public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. Consequently he who moulds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.

-Abraham Lincoln, Ottawa, Illinois, August 21, 1858, Debate with Stephen Douglas

>Whatever is right can be achieved through the irresistible power of awakened and informed public opinion. Our object, therefore, is not to inquire whether a thing can be done, but whether it ought to be done, and if it ought to be done, to so exert the forces of publicity that public opinion will compel it to be done.

-William Randolph Hearst, unpublished editorial memorandum, date unknown

>"You furnish the pictures, and I will furnish the war." - also William Randolph Hearst

https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/173692

Make no mistake. The Fifth Estate is a pseudo-Governmental entity for a reason, and as a citizen, demands due diligence before letting one's sense of the world get run away with.


I'd be surprised if we saw retractions, especially retractions reaching everyone who saw the original claims, but maybe Vice could write a piece attacking the daily beast article while the daily beast writes an article attacking the Vice one.


Yes, "Famed <rival publication> writes ableist insensitive articles with fabricated lies about an aspie."


What would good update mechanisms be? Is there any today, except "Follow this newspaper forever" and "Hope they do honest retractions"?

One idea.. A system attaches to every article an ID, users read the article and the reader saves the ID for the user and the system later informs him of retractions and critiques, if desired?


No, no that’s not how journalism works. They report the FACTS as they see them. /s

There’s no such thing as a retraction anymore, it’s just clarifications. I would have more faith in the media if they admitted when they were wrong, or at least presented, thoughtfully considered, opposing viewpoints. My faith in the media perhaps really took its first hit with Nick Sandman. I just felt weird that all these people were coming down on a kid. The level of vitriol was disturbing, and many it seems were wrong. I expect CNN to say so, but I don’t think they will, and thus the conflict remains unresolved.


> There’s no such thing as a retraction anymore, it’s just clarifications.

I think journalism always mostly did "corrections."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correction_(newspaper)


Ah thank you, quite interesting. Allow me to clarify: when I was riding those words I had an article on a webpage in my mind. Because articles are so online now, it’s easy to change things and call them clarifications, and people miss the slight of hand that it might have been actually a retraction of statements.

I do recall clarifications and amplifications in physical newspapers, always intriguing.


> Ah thank you, quite interesting. Allow me to clarify: when I was riding those words I had an article on a webpage in my mind. Because articles are so online now, it’s easy to change things and call them clarifications, and people miss the slight of hand that it might have been actually a retraction of statements.

For better or worse, online news articles are living documents now. Especially in breaking stories, I've seen them get updated over the day/week with all kinds of things (e.g. corrections, new developments, rewrites, etc.). Ideally they'd expose a revision history like Wikipedia, but that's probably more of a nice-to-have since their editorial processes aren't crowdsourced.

I suppose they've embraced some of the "move fast and break things" ethos of tech sector (because you can also fix things fast).


> revision history

> nice-to-have

I think that explicit changelogs for a journalistic document are actually necessary in order to verify the trustworthiness of the publisher - how else are you going to notice when they start silently "updating" articles that were pushing an extreme (and factually incorrect) narrative at publishing time?


Just as "television will eventually be a window in a window manager"...

"A newspaper edition will eventually be a repository with good comments on commits"???


You won't see "corrections" along the top bar of "news" on the webpages either. It will always be hidden away somewhere obscure unless their misreporting causes public outrage, and then sometimes they'll actually do a proper retraction.


> It will always be hidden away somewhere obscure

If by "obscure" you mean "on the actual article with the error," sure. But that seems like where the correction note should go.


Yeah. Anytime "the media" reports about things I personally know about, it becomes obvious how much they get wrong. Too many journalists believe they are on a political crusade. They get enraged by their own stories and actively try to enrage everyone else.


Even completely factual reporting can still be biased. Even neutrality is a bias.


RMS does not call for that and it isn't necessary. He acknowledges his own tone-deafness. Plus, people understand editorials like those are interpretations of words. If you want the facts you look at the original source material and decide for yourself.


Fox news viewers don't realize that 3/4 of fox news channel is opinion shows which don't have to be correct or even tell the truth because it's opinion.


Apologize for what? This post doesn't make him less accountable for what he wrote in that email.


It may have come across as being insensitive, but what he wrote in that email wasn't technically wrong.


Being correct is entirely orthogonal to being appropriate.


To forgive someone's social incompetence could be considered appropriate in this context.


Social incompetence always made RMS incompetent as a spokeperson / public speaker.

I'm grateful for his work on GPL and Free Software but this does not make him a suitable spokeperson.


For someone in a leadership role, it could be considered an inability to perform basic job responsibilities.


I agree. Forgiveness does not mean that he should retain his role. However I think his comments have been distorted and I'm not sure this is any worse than him eating the skin off his foot.


Appropriate or not, it was the truth, and whether people feel like hearing it or not, the truth is always justified in standing up for.


I disagree. There are plenty of instances where a truthful statement isn’t worth standing up for. For example: statements that are unimportant, irrelevant, inconsequential, etc, in the context of the broader situation.


[flagged]


He didn't write that; it was reported as that.

It wasn't appropriate but RMS being RMS wrote about a situation in which the girls were being coerced into presenting willingly, which Minksy then could have believed.

RMS is technically correct - this scenario could have happened - but I don't believe it as Minsky couldn't have been that naive.


He didn't just say it could have happened. He said that the girl "present[ing] herself to him as entirely willing" was "the most plausible scenario". While he doesn't explicitly claim that it's 'most plausible' that Minsky believed it, this seems to be implied, given that he spends the rest of the email criticizing the use of the term "sexual assault". In this, he is not technically correct.


The best evidence we have indicates that Minsky was not naive - he turned her down, and then remarked to an associate about it.

And his wife denies it, she was with him.


He said that Epstein may have coerced her to present herself as "entirely willing".


Which is reasonableto assume if she was a trap so that Epstein could get blackmail material. RMS argued she would present herself as older than 17 and seduce her targets.

What is most unclear to me in that whole kermuffle is that this strongly seems to be a hypothetical. She only said that she was instructed to target Minsky, but not that she did have sex with Minsky (or he with her.) I somewhere else read the claim that Minsky was accompanied with his wife, so he couldn't have slept with her even if he wanted to.


Woah, can you provide a citation for that?


From emails posted here: https://selamjie.medium.com/remove-richard-stallman-fec6ec21...

> The announcement of the Friday event does an injustice to Marvin Minsky:

> “deceased AI ‘pioneer’ Marvin Minsky (who is accused of assaulting one of Epstein’s victims [2])”

[ ... ]

> We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing.


Here is the full quote:

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.

He literaly said the girl was being coerced by epstein to _appear_ willing. Not that she was a willing participant. You are grossly misrepresenting what was said.


And I did not say "He said she was a willing participant." I think it is fair to say that Stallman believes it should be considered consensual sex as opposed to rape. Based on what he has said, I'm pretty sure that if you went up to Stallman and asked, "Did Minsky rape that kid?" he'd say no.

On top of that, the idea "It is not a violation if I have sex with this child because I believe I have obtained the child's consent" is extremely controversial (to put it mildly), and it seems like it's just assumed to be a reasonable thought process on Minsky's part in Stallman's construction of the situation. Stallman seems to be starting from the premise "Statutory rape is not rape" and arriving at the conclusion "This statutory rape is not rape," and from there he proceeds to berate people for claiming it is.


I don't read it the way you did. I think the analysis of Stallman's comments contradict your view.I agree with the (dahfizz) parent.


Saying she presented herself as willing isn't the same as saying she was willing.


> wasn't technically wrong

That is your opinion. Others may disagree.

> It may have come across as being insensitive

Sensitivity is a huge part of communication despite RMS acting otherwise. Arguably he'd find more success knowing which battles to fight against whom, when and how.


Modern reporting is about views. Click bait titles that state the worst get clicks. Nuanced truth bored people.

As long as we haven't found a way to entertain the masses without these embellishments I have no hope for an honest media.

Just remember this when they are stirring political division. This president caused this crisis, or this politician said this horrible thing. It's probably not as bad as they say it is.


One problem with click-bait titles is that people don't click; they just stop at the title and discuss and promote that message.


Thanks for posting these.

I was out of the loop on this and tracking down the reporting to which RMS is replying was proving more difficult than expected.


> I was out of the loop on this

Summary: https://sterling-archermedes.github.io/


I wonder if it's feasible to create some kind of database of reporters and their reliability - 'John doe has written n articles that turned out to be fundamentally wrong', Jane doe has written m articles that were fundamentally wrong'.


I haven't followed this in much detail yet, but https://thefactual.com/how-it-works mentions ranking reporters for their expertise in particular subjects.

Saw site mentioned in an HN comment a few weeks ago. So far appears to be an "objective" aggregator.


That's not how mobs operate effectively, unfortunately.


That would require those journalists be worthy of the applause they tell society it both owes and gives to them.

The activists won their war. No reason for them to declare it unjust.


> Now, would the journalists who wrote articles with titles that are a variation of "RMS defended Epstein" [1,2] apologize or at least correct their articles?

If it does not create outrage or get any clicks, they have no incentive to do it. It's not like journalists have a conscience.


They've declared their verdict and moved on :) . It's the 24/7 newscycle they don't have time for corrections unless it is recent and they can put it on the "backpage"


[flagged]


What part of "Renowned MIT Scientist Defends Epstein" (the title of the Daily Beast article) do you have trouble understanding?


I'd also say the Vice headline is almost as dishonest, even if it's not saying he defended Epstein: "Famed Computer Scientist Richard Stallman Described Epstein Victims As 'Entirely Willing'".

Stallman did use those two scare-quoted words, but the headline is trying to paint it in a completely, fundamentally different light from the point he was attempting to make. He may have been insensitive (as he says in this statement), but he wasn't arguing anything close to what that headline is trying to imply.

It's not just a typical case of a misleading headline taking a quote out of context. There isn't any conceivable context where it's justified to call rape and sex trafficking victims entirely willing; of course the victims are by definition unwilling.

So it's an especially wrong and deceptive portrayal of what he was saying. They wrote it that way knowing the audience's immediate gut reaction will be the last sentence of the previous paragraph.


> almost as dishonest, even if it's not saying he defended Epstein: "Famed Computer Scientist Richard Stallman Described Epstein Victims As 'Entirely Willing'".

Why "almost"? It's false, and clearly so for anyone who has the literacy needed to write that piece. It's entirely dishonest.


Did you read "almost as dishonest" as "almost dishonest"?


No, I read it as "somewhat less dishonest". But since anyone who is able to read and understand English at a high school level knows that "presented herself as entirely willing" means something different from "was entirely willing", both statements ("defends Epstein" and "says she was entirely willing") are deliberately stating complete falsehoods. Which is entirely dishonest.


You're right; I probably should have said "almost as destructive". They're equally dishonest. I just think "defends Epstein" is even more of an insult, even if they're both awful.


The first headline is "Renowned MIT Scientist Defends Epstein".


Too late, there is no redemption for Stallman. /s


RMS disaffiliated from MIT in the '80s (see "Commencing the project" in https://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.en.html), so I'm not sure that any headline saying "Famed MIT Computer Scientist..." to refer to him was interested in accuracy in the first place.


He held a position at MIT until 2019.[1]

[1] https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html#16_September...


I was at MIT from 2006-11, including as a student researcher at CSAIL from 2007 onwards, and I was on the CSAIL mailing list until I unsubscribed (coincidentally) a week or so before that post.

In at least the time that I was at MIT/CSAIL, and to my knowledge thereafter, RMS was not employed by MIT nor was he a student at MIT. He had an email/UNIX account at CSAIL, and he had an office, sponsored by some very senior faculty members, and he was of course around the campus frequently - but the campus is fairly open about these things, as you'd expect from an academic institution, and it's pretty straightforward for faculty to sponsor anyone they like as an "affiliate" (though of course office space is much harder).

He continues to have his CSAIL account, though I believe he no longer has his office. I believe that's all that he means by the term "my position." He did not have a staff role or anything that he resigned.


He held a visiting scientist title and an office. The affiliation was less substantial than a professorship but not nothing.


> RMS disaffiliated from MIT in the '80s ...

> sponsored by some very senior faculty members, .... It's pretty straightforward for faculty to sponsor anyone they like as an "affiliate" (though of course office space is much harder).

I think that if someone is sponsored by senior MIT faculty to the point of having an office on campus that's a pretty good claim to being MIT-affiliated.


He resigned his paid job, but was later brought back as unpaid (and maybe just honorary) staff. I'm not sure if he ever actually did anything for MIT in that unpaid role. I kind of suspect it was a gift to grant him an office and other MIT resources for his work on GNU. [GNU itself used to have some small lab space at MIT, for use by other volunteers.] But even so, he was listed in the MIT directory as a Visiting Scientist.


The Minsky defense was not the primary, most important reason RMS can't serve as an effective, inclusive leader for free software, it was just the one that got the most attention. This does nothing to address the numerous complaints of harassment towards MIT students, the _other_ times he spoke out in implicit support of pedophilia, the public gaffes that are unacceptable as a public representative (e.g. the foot skin eating thing), and the fact that the FSF under Stallman kinda lost to open source anyway and hasn't really done anything besides virtue signal to others about how pure and ethical they are.


He has been treated unfairly many times and that is, completely independent of whether he's the best choice as leader for the FSF, wrong. You do it here: "the _other_times he spoke out in implicit support of pedophilia...". He wants to have a discussion about what makes sex between people of varying ages wrong. He applies normative principles to it and can't see why it's wrong (e.g., age of consent varies...why would what is okay in one place be abominable 100 meters away?). I'm sure professional philosophers have written on this at length, and without being punished for going down the exact same road he has. But more importantly he doesn't understand very well that the mere mention of this line of inquiry is borderline reputation suicide because of [blue-team elite coastal] public mores idiosyncratic to 2020 rich western countries.

I'm also not sure why "inclusive" is a good criterion for FSF leader, it seems like just a hollow shibboleth buzzword at this point. People who harp on "inclusion" are usually the most interested in exclusion.


> completely independent of whether he's the best choice as leader for the FSF

It's not independent, you can't just drop the context. RMS the 9-5 software dev at some nameless corporation having this discussion is, while still unacceptable (because the relevant society has decided that it is obvious why sex with minors is harmful), not nearly as impactful as RMS the respected-by-many leader of the free software movement. The clout he has from that position and work makes him influential even outside of the sphere, as well as affecting people who might join the movement but are pushed away because they find his other opinions unacceptable.

That's why we're talking about it in this comment thread instead of ignoring it like we do most of the weird takes on the internet.

> I'm also not sure why "inclusive" is a good criterion for FSF leader, it seems like just a hollow shibboleth buzzword at this point. People who harp on "inclusion" are usually the most interested in exclusion.

The paradox of tolerance explains why it might feel like being inclusive of many groups of people involves exclusion.


I appreciate your thoughtful reply.

I think the problem in it with respect to mine lies here: "because the relevant society has decided that it is obvious why sex with minors is harmful"

But it's not obvious who is a minor or when a minor having sex is wrong. I commented elsewhere, but what about two 15 year olds? A 15 and a 20? In some country X where age of consent is 14, vs. in some country Y where age of consent is 18--is there a moral difference? Where is the real moral line that society has decided upon, according to you? 17.375 years?

The Minsky / RMS thing involved this sort of question. The girl was 17.


That was the question RMS asked, but it is oblivious of a way more relevant point: the girl was a victim of human trafficking. Regardless of age a sex slave cannot consent.

Not to mention how clueless you have to be to discuss age of consent laws on a many-thousand person workplace mailing list with teenagers on it.


...right, but you can't look at someone and based on looks end up thinking, "That person is a victim of human trafficking!" in the same way you might look at someone and think, "That person might be younger than 18 [or whatever the local law says]!". It might be possible to blame Minsky for the second thing, but the first seems completely crazy to me.


Um, what? I must be misunderstanding you because rape isn't OK just because the perpetrator has plausible deniability about whether it was intentional. Doubly so when there is a strong case he knew or should have known something something was wrong.


Yeah, I think there's a misunderstanding. Basically, there is no possible way to know by looking at 17-y-o girl at some island party that she has been "sex trafficked". But there is a reason to suspect that a 17-y-o girl is less than 18 by looking...she looks about 17. So it makes sense to consider blaming Minsky for failing on the second thing, but to consider blaming him for the sex trafficking aspect doesn't make any sense at all. Edit: and I should be fair to Minsky's memory, there is no evidence he had sex with the 17-y-o, and significant evidence that he did not.


> because the relevant society has decided that it is obvious why sex with minors is harmful

Society declares a lot of things obviously wrong and most of us never really examine why they are wrong, particularly from first principles. I think being willing to examine and question these kinds of assumptions fosters a very open culture where people aren't afraid to speak up (unlike the other 99% of the world where you live in fear).

E.g. I'm in the same boat Stalman was in that I've never recieved a satisfactory exaplanation from first principles about why mutually agreed (using that term because "consensual" has legal meanings) non-penetrative sexual interaction between a child and an adult is harmful. I've just been told to take it on faith that it causes horrible damage (and ignore the obvious confounders in the "studies"/anecdotes and the surrounding society working hard at placing the victim label on the child, which could easily cause damage itself).


that's completely fair!

but on the other hand some might think that the FSF is becoming one of those organizations were "social indignation" has more importance than "due process" and it might alienate old and new contributors that value that aspect.

Politics is always a trade off, you can't make everybody happy.


> He wants to have a discussion about what makes sex between people of varying ages wrong.

Great, it's an interesting philosophical question. If the issue is so important to him, he should transition to a career in philosophy, or sociology, or anthropology.

However, as a board member of the FSF, a public-facing leadership role, his job is to promote free software and nothing but free software. He shouldn't muddle that message by talking about ideas that are generally taboo in normal conversation. And I don't think it's just the [blue-team elite coastal] public for whom sex-with-minors talk is not regular dinner conversation, or at least I hope it's not.


> Great, it's an interesting philosophical question. If the issue is so important to him, he should transition to a career in philosophy, or sociology, or anthropology.

By that logic, a person without primary job in social study can criticise him for his social behaviour. People are more than just what they work on and everyone has ideas to themselves how society should be including me, you and him and sometimes like to tell the world about this. I generally tend to ignore that, e.g. when a programmer tells how bad trump is or what should be the age for consent in this case. But this doesn't mean there should be anything bad in expressing social opinion publicly.


Agree with you that the discussion shouldn't be part of his job. But there should also be room for him to have a public discussion that isn't part of his job. I don't recall the details, were parts of this discussion on the fsf home page or something?


Not FSF's site that I know of, but there's mentions of these "consensual pedo" stuff on his blog. As he's a visible spokesperson, that means his blog content is part of his overall role, and not something that can be treated in isolation.

I'd also push back on the post further up: It's not a particularly interesting philosophical question, and I don't think pure inquiry is RMS's goal here given his tendency to aggressively hit on women that are completely uninterested in him in contexts where such behavior is inappropriate.


His blog clearly states: "This is the personal web site of Richard Stallman. The views expressed here are my personal views, not those of the Free Software Foundation or the GNU Project. For the sake of separation, this site has always been hosted elsewhere and managed separately. "


That's far from enough.


"As he's a visible spokesperson, that means his blog content is part of his overall role, and not something that can be treated in isolation."

I agree this is de facto the case. It's kind of sad, though, and I don't think the world needs to be this way. There should be a way for an e.g. CEO or similar to have a life and persona outside of a job.


There are various ways to do that. Plenty of famous people manage to figure it out. That's not what RMS was after. He's putting this stuff up on his blog, which he uses for activism, not abstract philosophical inquiry.


"How dare people have opinions on politics or society on their personal web blogs". How is this any different than telling celebrities to pipe down, as if people aren't human anymore once they become famous?


When you have the megaphone of fame in your hand, you can't pretend it doesn't exist. That kind of influence is an enormous privilege, one that nearly everyone that has it has had to chase aggressively their entire careers if not lives. You cannot pretend a celebrity pontificating into a camera that is broadcasting to 100's of millions of people is the same thing as someone's personal weblog that no one ever reads. You can't abstract or generalize to "principles" in that sense over this. Once you're famous you have to own that, or take yourself out of the spotlight. As I said in another comment, there are many famous people who've figured out how to self actualize their lives without attracting attention.


People also make the choice to cling onto famous peoples' words. They could just as well not do that.

> That kind of influence is an enormous privilege, one that nearly everyone that has it has had to chase aggressively their entire careers if not lives.

I don't think RMS did that, and I don't think "nearly everyone that has it has had to chase [it]". Some people do, and others just... become (in)famous in their respective fields. Imagine just wanting to be good at basketball, getting some of level of fame, and then just hearing "shut up and dribble", etc.

> there are many famous people who've figured out how to self actualize their lives without attracting attention

And how does one go about this without e.g. not saying anything at all? Discussing politics or societal ills is -always- going to irk some people. It's really not fair to say that, because someone now has some level of reach, that they have to basically say nothing at all. Why is there no personal responsibility or accountability? I'm going to assume the controversial stance here that people just don't raise children right, to not dwell on peoples' words just because they're "famous". And that is a larger societal issue than celebrities simply having opinions as a human being.


> People also make the choice to cling onto famous peoples' words. They could just as well not do that.

We cannot change the behavior of every person in the world.

But we can change the people who represent the FOSS community to the world.


> You cannot pretend a celebrity pontificating into a camera that is broadcasting to 100's of millions of people is the same thing as someone's personal weblog that no one ever reads.

I'd say it's getting harder and harder to tell the difference.


Who arises to that status is becoming more organic, which is probably a good thing in my book, but access to the top tiers of success/influence remains closely guarded by the people with the power to do so.


People can say whatever they want. If you don’t like someone’s specific critique, tell us why instead just saying it is bad to critique famous people.

Being a public figure has a lot of downsides. Maybe society could, as a whole, be a bit nicer to public figures (and everyone else for that matter). But that is a bigger ask. And it’s not exactly clear how to achieve that.


...yeah, and activism should be an acceptable (albeit insufferable) part of one's non-work persona.


> There should be a way for an e.g. CEO or similar to have a life and persona outside of a job.

It's called private life for a reason: it's not in public.

But when acting as a public speaker and spokeperson you should be acting accordingly.

Weird remarks about age of consent on public mailing lists, or hitting on every young woman at a conference or eating skin from a foot in front of a whole audience are all behaviors that put the whole FOSS movement in a bad light.


Downvoting without commenting... interesting.

I'd love to see what contributions to FLOSS the downvoters have achieved.


No, they were on his personal site where he writes voluminous “political notes”.

The only reason that didn’t create more controversy before is that he is very left-wing politically and so are most power brokers in the industry. So being outspoken about the Iraq war, etc didn’t get him canceled in the same way as happened to the Dixie chicks. If he were a strident Republican I suspect his political notes would have put him in trouble far sooner.

One could certainly argue that as an ambassador for FLOSS he should have avoided all politics on his website, on the other hand i guess it was only the two (very bad) notes on statutory rape that were dredged up later, along with a variety of other material, to justify the campaign against him since the initial Epstein/Minsky related allegation fell apart so quickly.


The former head of the aclu (a woman) defends Stallman and his various positions. The post was shared a lot last month and is a good read about the entire stallman situation. https://www.wetheweb.org/post/cancel-we-the-web-rms


> He wants to have a discussion about what makes sex between people of varying ages wrong

Wtf does that have to do with free software?

And why does he keep doing this over and over again? There's no smoke without fire


Why are you so obsessed with RMS? There's no smoke without fire.

/s


I'm commenting on an article that made it to the front page and is related to an organisation I deeply care about. Otherwise I wouldn't give RMS the time of day ;)


He was writing those things on his personal web site, before anyone called them blogs.

It has nothing to do with free software, you're right, they are his opinions on stuff.


> He wants to have a discussion about what makes sex between people of varying ages wrong.

That alone makes him unfit to lead anything (among the many other things he's done). I do not want to hear his opinion on this subject.


So do not read his private webpage (which is full of his personal political opinions). RMS clearly separates his free software-related activities and other personal opinions.


The OP is on fsf.org.


But OP does not contain discussion about sex with minors. That discussion was (in the past) on his personal web stallman.org .


Yes it does. It claims the allegations against Minsky are false. That has not been proven and the allegations are highly credible. It's an offensive and stupid thing to say, especially publicly, especially when you're "apologizing".


Innocent until proven guilty? The accusation were neither proven to be true, so what is up with your really flawed reasoning?


The ability to be an effective leader is not a court of law. I'm totally ok calling for someone to step down after they defend statutory rape, in theory and practice (which RMS did both).


> It claims the allegations against Minsky are false.

I don't think he did.


From the post:

"False accusations -- real or imaginary, against me or against others -- especially anger me. I knew Minsky only distantly, but seeing him unjustly accused made me spring to his defense. I would have done it for anyone. Police brutality makes me angry, but when the cops lie about their victims afterwards, that false accusation is the ultimate outrage for me."


yes, exactly.

He was arguing that he was wrongfully accused of rape, because according to the testimony the sex never happened and nobody has been able to prove otherwise (an eyewitness swears that Minsky refused her).

He then added that even if the sex happened, and he had no doubt that it could be possible, the victim was sent to him to act as willing, so that would make it statutory rape, due to the age of the girl (unknown to Minsky at the time).

He was contesting the legal semantics, not the fact per se.

More importantly, he was talking about it on the mailing list of MIT in response to this

“deceased AI ‘pioneer’ Marvin Minsky (who is accused of assaulting one of Epstein’s victims)”

In his own words Stallam said

The injustice is in the word “assaulting”. The term “sexual assault” is so vague and slippery that it facilitates accusation inflation: taking claims that someone did X and leading people to think of it as Y, which is much worse than X.

[...]

Whatever conduct you want to criticize, you should describe it with a specific term that avoids moral vagueness about the nature of the criticism.

Hardly a defense, he was calling for better and more precise terms to describe what happened.

Something I would expect from someone of his age talking with young students, fueled by passion and rage

I’m writing this because I’m too angry to work. says Selam G. on her blog post.

Angry people that let their anger win never made the World a better place IMO.

Whatever is the truth, I think it takes courage to defend someone you know "only distantly" when you think he's been wrongfully accused (in your opinion) and to do it publicly even though that could cost you your career and you have nothing to gain.

Anyway Minsky's long been dead.


No, it doesn't make him unfit. It makes him curious and open-minded. How are we as a society supposed to come to conclusions about ethical issues without examining them? If we adopted your stance, nothing would ever change. Conservatives like you would have had the exact same stance on homosexuality 100 years ago: "Zomg no, it's so terrible we won't even consider talking about it except to condemn, and we'll punish people who do try to have an honest conversation". I say this as a person who also is a conservative with respect to statutory rape laws.


Are you comparing the rape of a minor to homosexuality?

I would not work with someone who conversed like this in a professional setting. I'm not alone. It's wildly inappropriate at the very least. It's not his field and he's personally involved with the accused.


"Are you comparing the rape of a minor to homosexuality?"

Yes, that's exactly it. Respectable people would have felt the same way about homosexuality 100 years ago as you do about sex involving minors.

Further, your characterization as "rape of a minor" is problematic. What's a minor? If one minor is involved, it automatically becomes rape? In much of Europe ages of consent are surprisingly low (14) to Americans, who tend to expect 18. What about a 17 year old and a 19 year old? Two 14 year olds? A 15 year old and a 20 year old? Is what's 100% wrong and prison-bound in the U.S. morally permissible in Spain because the laws are different?

Or maybe you have access to the Objective Moral Truths, such that this game is easy for you? If so, do share. It'd make all of this so much easier.


> If one minor is involved, it automatically becomes rape?

YES. This is how it works legally, because one person does not have the emotional and intellectual maturity to provide fully informed consent.


I really think that lumping forcible rape in the same category as a 17 year old successfuly seducing a 21 year old in California (as opposed to, say, Spain) is bad for discourse.

Even if we grant the latter is harmful and wrong, the mechanism via which the harm happens is different, as is the amount of harm.


>a 17 year old successfuly seducing a 21 year old

Most countries have laws allowing relationships within an age difference of 3 or 4 or 5 years.

But some people want to blur the lines around consent claiming that a 15yo can consent to sex with some 45yo without the latter being held responsible.

> the mechanism via which the harm happens is different, as is the amount of harm

I never argued otherwise.

Just like for any other illegal behavior, legal systems are designed take into account the circumstance and impact of an event.

But this does not change the initial point about informed consent and rape being rape.


> But this does not change the initial point about informed consent and rape being rape.

I think it does. "Rape being rape" relies on the word having a precise meaning where all things in the category share essential characteristics that allow you to make moral judgements based on category membership.

But "rape", like all heavily contested political words with high moral weight, is definitely not such a word. It has a canonical example value (unfortunately I feel I have to be specific here: a stranger dragging a fighting women into the bushes and sticking his penis in her until he cums), but has a range of meanings that varies fairly drastically across conversational contexts (e.g. we talking ethics/morality? Law? Descriptiveness?), geography (e.g. is drunk sex rape? Depends on jurisdiction. What counts as a "minor"?), time and even subcultures.


No, it doesn't.

What about Japan where age of consent is 13?

Or Switzerland were the age of consent is 16, although if the age gap between parties is three years or less – for example between a 13-year-old and a 15-year-old – no charges can be brought


[flagged]


I'm trying to understand your perspective.

Would you be ok with Stallman defending Minsky if the victim had been one year older?

Do you think it should be illegal to publicly defend alleged perpetrators/what Stallman did?

Would you react more/less strongly if Minsky had been accused of murder, and Stallman pointed out that the crime was potentially assisted suicide?

Do you not want to work with Stallman because his moral system is not solid enough to you, or do I misunderstand your position?

Would you be willing to work with an ex-convict in general?


> Would you be ok with Stallman defending Minsky if the victim had been one year older?

No.

> Do you think it should be illegal to publicly defend alleged perpetrators/what Stallman did?

No, but you should lose your job if you're in a leadership position.

> Would you react more/less strongly if Minsky had been accused of murder, and Stallman pointed out that the crime was potentially assisted suicide?

No.

> Do you not want to work with Stallman because his moral system is not solid enough to you, or do I misunderstand your position?

I would not work with him because I find him disgusting. I would not work with anyone who sexualizes the workplace. Infinitely worse when they're arguing in favor of pedophilia.

> Would you be willing to work with an ex-convict in general?

Depends on the crime, but rape and murder, absolutely not.


Why do you even think working with you would be sought after?


He's mistreated many FSF staff members, many LibrePlanet attendees, many GNU project contributors, etc. The fact that the public discourse is focused on the Epstein-related comments does RMS and the FSF a huge favor by pointing the spotlight away from the real issue which has been happening for decades.


It's a bit rich that you accuse those who didn't take the initial smear campaign at face value of moving the goal posts.

First it was the Epstein connection, which proved false.

Then it was predatory behaviour at MIT with three quotes from over 3 decades, a sign on his door, and a mattress doused in implications.

Then it was simply "making some people uncomfortable", which is sort of a given if you talk about free software to groups of people who are in the proprietary software industry, and says nothing at all.

If you want the "real issues" addressed, stop drowning them in fabrications.


Until you've been as close to rms as the people that have worked with/for him that have tried and failed for years and years to resolve issues privately, whatever silly argument you are trying to make doesn't have a leg to stand on.


> people that have worked with/for him that have tried and failed for years and years to resolve issues privately

Is this about Thomas Bushnell? Because I feel this is about Thomas Bushnell[1].

Bushnell is currently a friar in a religious order and works for google, and there is nothing wrong with that[2].

I can easily work with devout religious people and respect and accept them for their superior knowledge of the matter at hand (say, Don Knuth), but there's nothing wrong with politely declining their opinions when it comes to "issues" or how to become a "better" person.

Again, no disrespect to Bushnell, who I'm sure did a fine job, but I'm not willing to take his assessment of the personality of an avouched atheist at face value.

[1]https://medium.com/@thomas.bushnell/a-reflection-on-the-depa...

[2] well, working for Google can be debatable depending on what you do there.


> Is this about Thomas Bushnell? Because I feel this is about Thomas Bushnell

It doesn't have to be. I've known over a dozen people working at the FSF over the years, and they _all_ had the same stories about trying to avoid RMS as much as physically possible because of his behavior and how he treated people. At some point we have to stop looking for excuses and start listening to the people who are actually there.

> First it was the Epstein connection

Correction: _Last_ it was the Epstein connection, a straw on a pile of many straws.


> start listening to the people who are actually there.

I'd love to, if only these people who are so aggrieved would properly write down their experiences instead of "I didn't like him anyway" after-the-fact tweets.

> Correction: _Last_ it was the Epstein connection, a straw on a pile of many straws.

Yes, quite enough to build a strawperson as an effigy, and now you're doing it, because there was no Epstein connection. In all of MIT, the only person you can trust not to have any sort of connection to Epstein would be rms, but yeah, let's blame him and the dead guy, and take it from there.


> and now you're doing it, because there was no Epstein connection.

If you prefer the phrases "defense of Minsky in his 70s having sex with a minor on a private island where Minksy then later hosted another conference _after_ Epstein's public conviction for sex trafficking and being designated a level three sex offender" or perhaps "refusal to recognize sex with minors as rape" we can use one of those instead. I don't mind. Because Stallman _did_ say he believed that Minsky had sex with a 17 year old on a billionaire's small private island and saw nothing wrong with it, and Minsky _did_ host a conference on Epstein's island after Epstein's crimes became public.

> I'd love to, if only these people who are so aggrieved would...

I think it's weird for you to expect everyone to blog about their daily negative experiences instead of venting to their friends and then trying to forget.

The two sides here are people who work at or with the FSF (or who have close friends who work at or with the FSF) and people whose only exposure is shit blogs that come up on google. And the people who work at or with the FSF are like "RMS is a nightmare for me or for a close friend of mine", and the people who google shit blogs are like "I don't find these shit blogs to be compelling enough to notice the fact that the people saying that RMS has been a nightmare are all the people who have to work with him". Everyone gets to pick their side though.


No, actually I would prefer facts instead of this incessant and tiring framing with laden and erroneous terms.

> I think it's weird for you to expect everyone to blog about their daily negative experiences

And I think it's weird that most with personal grievances against rms can't be bothered to write anything but the shortest of anecdotal tweets and most with pleasant or neutral experiences take the time write long form articles including names, dates, locations, etc.

If one sets out to ruin someone's life one could at least put in some effort to convince those that are not automatically on your side.


No it's not about that person. This isn't about RMS saying something that some of us disagree with and looking past it. It's much bigger than that. For example, RMS made the working environment at the FSF so bad that the staff unionized. The working environment is still bad (staff either burn out trying to make things better or get fired for some reason) but at least RMS can't fire people on a whim and the staff get bereavement leave (RMS was opposed to it) and cost of living pay adjustments (also opposed).


So in other words at the FSF workers are free to unionize like in the rest of the civilized World, while if you work at Amazon you have to pee in a bottle and be happy about it.



I think we should start a discussion about a simple fact: the World is huge, US is only a small part of it.

For example: RMS did not believe in providing raises — prior cost of living adjustments were a battle and not annual. RMS believed that if a precedent was created for increasing wages, the logical conclusion would be that employees would be paid infinity dollars and the FSF would go bankrupt.

That's unlawful in Italy to avoid salary discrimination where people in poorer areas (the South) are paid less for the same job.

It's considered a great victory by Italian huge worker unions.

Or this other one

RMS created non-safe spaces at both MIT & the FSF. When I was at the FSF, RMS had little to no empathy for the staff. The FSF was not a healthy, functional workplace. We formed a union to help protect ourselves from RMS — he controlled our pay, benefits, and workplace conditions.

Again, this is totally subjective.

It's a work place not a kindergarten, you don't like the place you leave, we are talking about software engineers not cleaning staff, they'd have a chance anywhere else.

this is simply this guy personally holding a grudge against RMS, but there's nothing objectively bad here.

You know what's really bad? that it happens at Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple l, but you don't know because workers simply can't talk about it.

Low paid workers fear of losing their salary, high paid workers don't care about them and also don't want to lose their huge benefits and say screw them

What is terrifying is people thinking that knowing something is worse than not knowing because if you talk, it's bad for you.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/may/05/amazon-pr...

What is bad IMO is thinking that unions are inherently a bad thing, but I am glad they exist and I am member myself of one of them in Italy that has 5.5 million other members and I gladly pay monthly to be part of it,even though I rarely need them they offer free services and protection to all the workers.

If nobody has been fired, harrased or threatened for proposing to unionize, that's a great plus in my book that puts the FSF ahead of many other job places in the US.


Bushnell is by no means the only person who has expressed such things.

ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2019/10/15/fsf-rms.html


[flagged]


Maxwell was accused of directing Guiffre to have sex with Minsky by Guiffre in her deposition.

As far as I know there is no allegation from Guiffre or others that it actually happened, only that she was 'directed' to do so.

If I have missed sources that makes a clear allegation, I would appreciate hearing more.

Do you have actual sources saying otherwise, or are you inferring an allegation it actually happened from Guiffre's statement about the instructions she were given?


The questioning was about the high powered men Giuffre was trafficked to. To say it was only about Maxwell asking her to do so, is taking that quote out of context.


So in other words you admit you inferred from her deposition something she didn't actually say.

It is possible Minsky did have sex with her.

But to describe it as a 'credible allegation' is dishonest when it is not clear there is an allegation at all.


That's not true, like I said you're erasing the entire context of the quote.


As you point out the questioning was about trafficking, not about whether or not she went through with sex in that specific case.

You're inventing an interpretation that is possible but that there is no supporting evidence for.

You're free to believe he had sex with her, of course. It is possible he did.

But when you're claiming there is 'credibly accused' when no clear allegation has even been made, you're being dishonest.


Again, that's not true. In that same deposition a third party testifies that Guiffre did fly with Minsky. Choose to argue semantics all you want, but it's a credible accusation.


Nobody is alleging Minsky was never approached by Guiffre as directed.

But there are also no claim in evidence that Guiffre actually had sex with him.

You keep claiming an accusation that you have no evidence of.


The deposition is the claim. They were discussing men Guiffre had been trafficked to. You're deliberately ignoring that.


No, I'm not ignoring that. I'm pointing it out does not say what you claim it says.

It could imply it, but it does not say it.

It makes the claim she was trafficked. That is supported by the deposition. That is supported by the witness you mention. There is no reason to doubt that.

But trafficking does not contain an automatic implication sex happened in every instance. What matters to establish trafficking is Maxwell's purpose in sending her, not whether or not the purpose was fulfilled.

What you choose to believe is one thing, but your claim there is an accusation sex occurred in this specific case is not supported by that statement no matter how much you choose to read into it.

You're deliberately ignoring the plain wording of the questions and Guiffres own answers, and instead read into them what you want them to say.

Maybe Guiffre meant to make a direct accusation [against nst Minsky, anyway], but she did not in that deposition.

EDIT: You'll note I'm not at all claiming Minsky didn't have sex with her. I don't know if he did. It's possible he did. Still associating with Epstein at that point in time already stinks and it is reasonable to wonder why. It's possible Guiffres intent was to accuse him. A whole lot of things are possible. But what is possible and what accusations there are evidence for are different things.


I disagree, I think you have to really contort your thinking and selectively quote the deposition to say this isn't an accusation.


You've been unable to point to an accusation against Minsky in it.

You're the contortionist here.


We used to have a word for defending the accused, "Justice".

Accusation by a single terrified and led witness does not give license to treat someone like a convict.


He's not providing "justice", he's tainting open source software. You can read the victim's own thoughts on Stallman:

https://twitter.com/VRSVirginia/status/1174108999039406080


what exactly this has to do with what happened to Giuffre and why should we care if it's Giuffre quoting something we have known for years?

Is Giuffre some kind of higher being whose words are to be taken as divine thruths, just because she's a victim of something completely unrelated?

Has Stallman ever did anything remotely similar to a crime?

BTW in my country sex at the age of consent would be considered statutory rape in USA (it's 14 years old here).

Does that make all of us rapers of children?

That was what Stallman was arguing about.


I was responding to the parent comment that claimed Giuffre was a "terrified and led" witness.


she could be, we don't know (at least I don't know) and since I don't know, I prefer to stay on the cautious side.

For example Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz has now sued the woman in federal court in New York, claiming that her allegations are “lies, disparagement, defamation, harassment” that are “beyond the bounds of decency and not tolerated in civilized society.” [...] Dershowitz repeated his previous claims that Virginia Roberts Giuffre was “pressured to falsely accuse Dershowitz” by her lawyers, namely the law firm headed by renowned attorney David Boies.

I can't honestly say who's right and who's lying.


As someone who has followed the case closely, I have no problem saying I believe Giuffre. She's hardly the only Epstein victim and there's plenty of photo evidence backing up many of her other claims.


who said anything about Epstein?

I believe Epstein did it, Stallam believes Epstein did it too (he wrote it in the thread), there's no doubt about it.

Another thing entirely is the other accusations, we can't assume that every accusation is true until proven otherwise by a court of the law (except for Minsky who's dead).

That's why I support Stallman reasoning, a chain of criminal events can't be assumed on someone's saying, it must be proven or we go back to inquisition, especially if one of the accused is dead, can't defend himslef and it's the smallest fish in the pond.

I get these are all powerful men and have the means to protect themselves, but they have the right to be presumed innocent nonetheless.

Having followed the case myself, I wonder why nobody is talking about Wexner, former CEO of the Victoria's secret empire that was built thanks to the close friendhsip with Epstein and who's still on an honorary president's chair.

> L Brands executives were reportedly made aware, in the mid-1990s, that Epstein was posing as a modeling recruiter for the company. Although they alerted Wexner, he seems to have taken no action

An why Boies talked to Wexner (they now say it was his lawyer) and forced the judge to remove him and after the court removed Boies and his team Giuffre hired his opponent in the gay marriage trial that made Boies popular?

> Boies and his entire team from Boies Schiller Flexner were removed from the New York case in October after judge Loretta Preska determined that he had become a witness in the suit and, as such, could no longer advocate on Giuffre’s behalf.

> Charles J. Cooper replaced David Boies, his opponent in a California gay marriage case argued before the Supreme Court, as a lawyer for Virginia Roberts Giuffre in her federal defamation lawsuit against Dershowitz.

The case is now an O.J. Simpson scale event, I think we will know more only after the next hearings.

I am simply being cautious, I am not dismissing Giuffre, in my opinion things are too complicated to throw judgements around, one way or the other (except, as we have established, for Epstein).

I also don't believe Wexner can be the only Epstein's client.

If we look at the case in its entirety, what Stallman did or didn't do it's meaningless.

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/article245017...

(sorry for the late answer, I was rate limited)


It seems to me that the discourse was very deliberately focused on the Epstein-related comments by people who felt that'd be a good way to achieve the outcome they wanted. It's undoubtedly true that RMS is often rude and offensive, but this has long been widely known and publicly discussed, so a pressure campaign on those grounds would almost certainly have flopped.


It seems to me the discussion of his Epstein related comments encouraged other people to come forward with their own grievances. I don't think most people knew he defended adults having sex with children. Or he hit on much younger women at conferences. Or the FSF unionized because of him.


I really think they did. The first two were some of the only things I knew about RMS before the current controversy prompted me to learn more.


Only a handful of HN comments mentioned Stallman and pedophilia before the Epstein controversy.[1]

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...


It makes painfully obvious the point they don't get it. They really, willingly or not, refuse to understand what the issues here are.


Not to mention how badly he mismanaged the paid staff of the FSF which prompted them to unionize: https://twitter.com/paulnivin/status/1377079987950395393 I think, if anything, this is the strongest argument for why he should not be in a leadership position at the FSF.


This appears to be about events that are at least 15 years old, if not older?

Does sound like a pretty terrible manager. An unpaid volunteer position on the board doesn’t really seem like the position where these problems would happen again. And they weren’t the reason he got in hot water - that was all related to a media firestorm over Minsky/Epstein.


> This appears to be about events that are at least 15 years old, if not older?

What would you consider an appropriate statute of limitations here?


Statute of limitations is a concept of criminal law, since none of the described actions are criminal it wouldn’t apply directly.

I do find it questionable to dig up decades old actions that were apparently dealt with at the time by appropriately unionizing and fixing the situation, and say that means a person should never have even a volunteer job again.


"Did not treat employees well" is a great reason for someone to not be a boss, but unfortunately that's not why he's demonized.


RE: that twitter thread. Wow. That's absurdly bad. Especially given that I suspect any software person there could easily go get a much higher paying corporate job without much trouble.

I feel like a problem that plagues software worse than other industries is that BigTechCo can pay multiple times more than what I'll call "greater good" kinds of places like:

* government

* education, especially in high school

* software freedom / open source / communal / etc types of places

The one that I mourn the most is high school computer teachers. How many startups were started by people with only a year or so of college? How important is high school in choosing your career? How often is curiosity suppressed in high school when students try to go off the standard curriculum into material the teacher isn't familiar with, and think of how easy it is to do that in programming?

But I digress. I want to call out an example of this kind of "clearly, obviously for the common good" done right: Let's Encrypt. I think their software people make ~200k the last time I looked? Which is pretty dang good. I think the main thing it might lack is the kind of comp you get to via equity in a startup or public company. But given LE isn't that kind of company, I don't think you can fault them too much for that. So while I wish LE devs were paid like senior google devs, 200k gets you pretty damn far anywhere but NYC and San Francisco.


one thing that bothers me in the context of cancel culture is that it seems people put the equal sign between the work/art someone produces and their ideas outside of that area.

Having wrong or plain stupid ideas does not mean you should die and all the [brilliant] work you are doing should go to waste.

the bigger the target you attack, the better. right? what is your contribution to this world?

they are not even close to the same thing. look, RMS is a weirdo - everyone understands this. But most people are not even close to his level. This exceptionality has it’s drawbacks and its cost. Do you really think the FSF wants to deal with all this? What is the thought process behind reinstating RMS?


> one thing that bothers me in the context of cancel culture is that it seems people put the equal sign between the work/art someone produces and their ideas outside of that area.

It often depends on what that outside work is; if RMS was a bad soundcloud rapper, I couldn't care less, it's inconsequential. If he was a known puppy puncher (which he isn't), I'd care a lot more, because that matters so much to me that I don't want to even remotely support anyone like that.

But in this case the complaints aren't "outside of that area", they're directly related to his role as a leader of the free software movement. His harassment of people directly hurts other people in the movement and people who potentially could join and help out. His musings on pedophilia are not simply unacceptable, they directly lead to people dismissing the movement because they fear joining a movement that abides such opinions. That they are both is part of what makes him unfit.

> all the [brilliant] work you are doing should go to waste

I believe that the opportunity cost of keeping someone like RMS in a leadership position is higher than the accomplishments he achieves by that position. It's not simply a "cancellation" for some abstract moral reason, it's that he is _not worth it_ compared to what could have been achieved with the people he pushed away.


The argument isn't that he contributed nothing or that his contributions are worthless. Few people are advocating for burning everything he built to the ground simply to exorcise his lingering influence once he is gone or whatever and even fewer are doing so in good faith.

The argument is that by retaining his position he is actively alienating people. Do you think he is such a phenomenal genius that keeping him is worth ten good people quitting or not joining in the first place? A hundred? A thousand? Where is the break-even point where it becomes more beneficial to keep a "genius" than being welcoming to new people who feel deeply uncomfortable around his behavior. And are you measuring him by what he has created in the past, or are you really considering his present value and likelihood of future contributions?

What if he's not so brilliant after all and you're allowing one "genius" to cost you equivalent or even superior "geniuses" with less abrasive personalities?

We like to tell stories about individual heroes, but if there is one recurring pattern in history it's that we're always standing on the shoulders of giants -- and even that imagery is misleading as it is not really just a handful of giants but armies of them, mutually supporting each other as they carry your weight.


> Do you think he is such a phenomenal genius that keeping him is worth ten good people quitting or not joining in the first place?

There are no numbers here, so this is literally impossible to debate. You can say X, I can say Y, and it's all completely subjective.

I personally don't think that he's driving away people like people claim. RMS is involved with the gnu project, fsf, and free software (now renamed open source), but those projects are each far bigger than he is.

> What if he's not so brilliant after all and you're allowing one "genius" to cost you equivalent or even superior "geniuses" with less abrasive personalities?

Again, this is impossible to debate in good faith. There are infinite hypothetical alternate realities, what good does it do for any of us to muse over them? Maybe a "super genius" exists and is being held back by RMS' continued existence. Maybe not.


>Do you think he is such a phenomenal genius that keeping him is worth ten good people quitting or not joining in the first place? A hundred? A thousand?

Unless the people at the FSF calling for his ousting are privately acknowledging that this is only because of the 'bottom line' (I don't think that's the case), then it becomes necessary to judge the actual reasoning of those hundred/thousands of people's decision to avoid RMS. Put simply, when is it okay to just implement a blind appeal to popularity?


When I say "worth it", I'm not simply talking about finances.

He's a drain on the organization's reputation. People don't join the FSF because of the great working hours and phenomenal pay, they mostly join it for ideological reasons. We're not talking about retiring a beloved mascot because people don't like it anymore, we're talking about removing an individual holding a position of power who's actively keeping people away by being a sex pest.


But agnostic to this specific situation, you would acknowledge that there could be a situation in which the people kept away are morally confused to the point in which it's actually better to do without them from a moral (and long-term business) perspective.

"Having a CEO in favor of Data Privacy/Product Safety/Responsible Bank Lending will lead to thousands of potential employees avoiding our company!"

I'm sure you'll disagree with the particulars on the FSF case, but I'm just saying popularity is not the slam-dunk you're implying.


[flagged]


Then why invoke the "hundreds or thousands" point at all?

Seems irrelevant and sort of crass given the gravity of the other qualms you have.


RMS made these comments on work communication channels. You don't need to separate his ideas from his work because he himself put his ideas into his work environment and is now, correctly, paying the price for that.


I don't think CSAIL mailing list qualifies as "work" for rms, if "work" is FSF. Maybe "professional", but it's a university, so that sort of inquiry is 100% appropriate and should be protected.


For a lot of people on that list it was work. And as for whether it was an appropriate for that discussion, the university in question has since unambiguously communicated that it wasn't.


Yeah, we're unfortunately entering a time of repression. I wonder how bad it will get.

The duty to resist it rests on our collective shoulders.


[flagged]


Defffffinitely fair game at a university, then. I thought we were talking about the more abstract investigation of why it's wrong to have sex with minors. This sort of direct political stuff is regrettable but totally within the realm of acceptable.


It may be acceptable to you but for me and a lot of people, it is not. The solution for me is to never associate or work with the FSF and advocate against this type of behavior from "leaders" in our industry and field.


The age of consent in some European countries is generally lower than the US, some as low as 14, most about 15 with some having 16¹. If we assume that the majority of citizens of such a country agree that their country has a reasonable age, would your response then be to “never associate or work with” anyone from that country?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_consent#/media/File:Age...


I would not work with anyone who held those views, regardless of which country they were from. I find it abhorrent and especially so in the context of work.


But how do we all decide for ourselves what is abhorrent? Hopefully by some sort of reasoning right? (And hopefully not as tortured and ill-advised as what RMS wrote all those years ago.)


The same reasoning that says it's bad to murder someone. I would say empathy and a modicum of human decency.


In Japan age of consent is 13.

Do you find Japanese people abhorrent?


[flagged]


Let's talk about numbers:

- In 2019, the rate of forcible rapes in the United States stood at 29.9 per 100,000 inhabitants. it has decreased from 1990, when there were 41.2 forcible rapes per 100,000 inhabitants.

- In 2014, rape rate for Japan was 1 cases per 100,000 population. Rape rate of Japan fell gradually from 1.6 cases per 100,000 population in 2005 to 1 cases per 100,000 population in 2014

What lesson can we learn from this in your opinion?


I'll offer an answer which will not satifty you nor solosoyokaze. But first, you should understand that long before these events, RMS already had a proven track record on inclusiveness, gender equality and anything his opponents have him accused of.

So what lesson can we learn? that some sexual encounters in Japan that should be considered rape, aren't.


> So what lesson can we learn? that some sexual encounters in Japan that should be considered rape, aren't.

That could be true.

But 30 times less is hard to explain with that.

Remember that he majority of rapes are perpetrated against adult women and Japan is the country with the oldest population in the World, right before Italy.

I guess that living in a society where crime rates are generally low (Japan has one of the lowest rate in the World) helps a lot.

In Japan half of the people are not having sex, that makes it one of the countries with the lowest rate, hardly a country of rapers.

So what lesson can we learn?

That violence is key to injustice

The whole discussion about diversity and inclusivity in the States revolves around self segregation and punishment for those who do not abide, it is based on fear of the consequences not on a general understanding that conflict is an integral part of the society and inclusivity means to accept it, not to remove it.

Stallman is a non violent man, he doesn't adhere to the American standards, he's a weirdo, but never harmed anybody nor committed violent acts, let alone crimes.

I write an email to his address from time to time, have been doing it for the past 10 years, and I always receive the most polite replies (days later of course, he reads them offline).

Sometimes it's like talking to Sherlock Holmes, he's very logical, has strong opinions, lingers on the most miniscule detail and that can be unpleasant to some.

He can be confrontational, but not dangerous.

I would rather share the proverbial desert island with him than with those who attack him for not being "standard compliant"

I know I shouldn't have to feel frightened by him.

Maybe we could learn a thing or two from him, once we go past the preposterous social indignation à la carte because he likes to walk barefoot.

p.s. In Sweden age of consent is 15 years and sexual assault (so not rape specifically) reports are very high, but under the Swedish laws half of the planet would be in prison (in Sweden not using a condom is considered rape).

Eurostat figures show that Sweden had 64 reported rapes per 100,000 residents in 2016, compared to 10 in Germany. When Sweden's figures were recalculated using the German definitions, the new figure was 15 reported rapes per 100,000 residents.

p.p.s. if in Japan they are "hiding" the real rape numbers, what makes you think the same thing is not happening elsewhere?

USA laws about rape are not stronger than those in Germany, that has a third of the rapes of US and where age of consent is 14.

What's the difference then?

In Germany violent crimes in general are a lot less than in USA.


Sure, but does any of that keep you from empathizing with the content of this letter?


Yeah, it does. In context, this letter, especially given it's posted to the FSF site and not, say, his personal website, is meant to justify electing him to the board and address the backlash against it, and I don't really have much patience for a letter addressing only one of the many complaints people have against allowing him a leadership role. It's dismissive of them.


He even continues to defend Minsky in this letter. It's not even an apology, it's just more of the same.


> He even continues to defend Minsky in this letter.

Honest question - is there a way in which someone could not immediately condemn Minsky without defending him?


Say nothing. That's what a competent leader would do. No one wanted RMS's take on Minsky (or pedophilia in general, which he also offered up).


I'm very unclear on what general priciple you think RMS is violating with the Minsky comments. Is it that you should never defend someone accused of Bad Thing if you are a public figure ij channels that may be related to your work?


> Is it that you should never defend someone accused of Bad Thing if you are a public figure ij channels that may be related to your work?

That's a part of it (aside from general moral disgust). How does RMS defending an Epstein client help FOSS? It does not, and it detracts enormously.


Empathizing, no - through 4+ years of Donald Trump I am able to empathize quite well with abusers justifying their actions. I can imagine the sort of mental universe, of checks and balances, of personal expectations, which RMS's mind clearly does. The letter informs me more clearly of his aloofness and care-free attitude towards solving this dear problem.

I'll tell you what it does keep me from, accepting him as a leader.

The letter is evidence that the abuse will continue, amplified by the visibility and power of a leadership position.

> "I've learned something from this about how to be kind to people who have been hurt."

Implying that he will continue to hurt people. Of course all of us will ... however his kind of Hurt is the issue. He takes no responsibility for doing the hurting.

He provides no reason to this behavior stopping here and now, in this letter. He admits to having difficulty with social interaction, and yet he provides no remedy, no, "Here is how I will fix this going forward."

E.g. to solve this, he could use words which have first been edited by an assistant: he could only continue to talk publicly / talk with those whom he "leads" (which is a lot of people given his high-level role) through a filter.

This is just an example, however it is unrealistic. It's his job as an adult to lay out a plan to remedy this.

Linus had a turnaround moment, and wrote a convincing letter. Compare the two.

His remedy seems to suggest that he might manage to grow his empathetic skills, while retaining his boss-level. That is irresponsible, IMO.

This whole issue carries an insulting undertone, as the FSF Board deemed RMS worthy of being leader, when the (former!) supporters disagreed with that value-statement, given his insufficient skills.


Yes


A bunch of companies joined together and announced they didn't like Stallman. Tellingly, the left out the list of grievances, so we can just endlessly debate which 'issue' is the 'real' issue.

> FSF under Stallman kinda lost to open source anyway and hasn't really done anything besides virtue signal to others about how pure and ethical they are

Then why do you care at all about the FSF in the first place? It sounds like you're here just to spread rumors and opinions in this case.


> Then why do you care at all about the FSF in the first place? It sounds like you're here just to spread rumors and opinions in this case.

I can't answer for the OP but it's clear that the FSF was a in a leadership position within the software world in the 1980s and 1990s. That position has slipped precipitously despite the increasing importance of the GNU software they developed in every aspect of modern computing. RMS, both in his behavior while representing the FSF at conferences and his (lack of) understanding of the modern computing environment[1], was/is very clearly part of the reason for that decline. I think the principles the FSF stands for are good and important, however without an organization to promote them they will continue to wither in the modern age and bringing back RMS will not help to reverse that trend.

[1] How can a man who spent years refusing to use normal web browsers and insisting on having web pages e-mailed to him possibly be positioned to develop policies to promote the principles of Free Software within the framework of the modern web?


That position has slipped precipitously... because corporations like IBM, Google and Microsoft have taken control of open source. They employ a significant number of contributors and enjoy control over a lot of the major projects.


> and his (lack of) understanding of the modern computing environment

How can you look at the "modern web" and claim that? It looks like he understands it perfectly well, even back in the day, but what can he do other than say it's not good for user freedom when faced with user-hostile corporations with literal billions at their disposal?

> refusing to use normal web browsers and insisting on having web pages e-mailed to him

That's silly. His workflow is obviously email based, which, given that he travels a lot and stays in places with possibly less than stellar connection, is perfectly practical. Get all your work on your device when you have a connection and work through them in batches until the next good connection.


> I can't answer for the OP but it's clear that the FSF was a in a leadership position

Who cares about 'leadership position' aren't people capable of deciding things for themselves?

> FSF stands for are good and important, however without an organization to promote them they will continue to wither in the modern age and bringing back RMS will not help to reverse that trend.

So, people can form something similar to the FSF then. Put out a better product, whatever it is the FSF does, and then people will care. Otherwise, your opinions don't matter.


GNU project contributions generally require copyright attribution to the FSF. This gives them standing to enforce any GPL violations, but it also makes them rather hard to replace when it comes to GPL enforcement.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html


Make your own GPL alternative if you don't approve of the FSF and how they conduct themselves. It's like saying Ford is in a leadership position, if you don't like their product, drive something else.


Have you never heard of the network effect? It would be extremely difficult to get users of GNU/GPL software to switch to alternatives after they're already made their choice.


So, because other people are unwilling to do the work themselves and want to consume the work of the FSF for free, that gives them power of the FSF to demand how they behave because of some nebulous idea of 'leadership?'

The FSF doesn't owe you anything, and they're only your leader if you choose to follow them.

The companies that have spoken out against Stallman represent 100's of billions of dollars in capital. It's pretty pathetic when you think about it.


Leadership within a realm begets influence. The entire goal of the FSF as a political organization is to influence the software industry to follow the core principles of Free Software that it espouses. By failing to be in a leadership position, and failing to do things to (re)gain the position, the organization as a whole is failing. The fact that companies representing "100s of billions of dollars in capital" had to put out statements regarding RMS returning to the FSF should tell you just how much of a leadership position the FSF used to have and how much they are damaging it by continuing to associate themselves with RMS.


>and the fact that the FSF under Stallman kinda lost to open source anyway and hasn't really done anything

What can the FSF do better, with or without RMS ? I honestly don't think there are too many good solutions. The parts that matter to FSF (i.e., free software at the hardware layer), are also the most challenging and for which there are no business incentives, political awareness, or will. Otherwise, garden variety free/open source software is already fine and flourishing depending on business interests.


Some examples: https://twitter.com/luis_in_brief/status/1379813168638091271

> Otherwise, garden variety free/open source software is already fine and flourishing depending on business interests.

Open source thriving is actually a loss for free software, in the view of the free software movement, because open source software can and does still restrict user freedoms.


Foucault, along with most french leftist intellectuals go and write a public letter in support of pedophilia and not only are they not getting in trouble for it - many of them are the ideological forerunners to modern leftism.

It's not just cus of RMS saying the age of consent is wrong...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_petition_against_age_...


This happened in 1977, and none of the people who signed it are public figures today, certainly not in the tech sphere. Academics who study philosophy and literature are well aware of the checkered past of the influential figures throughout history.

The implication that leftist thought is rooted in pedophilia is, I'm sure, intentional flamebait. I will just point out that, whether or not people are right to vilify Stallman, no one here is suggesting that we abandon the free software movement because one of its most prominent figures said unsavory things. So there is no logical inconsistency.


> This happened in 1977, and none of the people who signed it are public figures today, certainly not in the tech sphere.

Aren't Foucault, Derrida and Lyotard still big names and influences in postmodern thought (and the whole "woke" movement)?


"Woke" is just an insult these days. And few activists sit around discussing Derrida.


They are still huge figures, and some of those who signed this are still alive too.


Modern Americans seem to be very conflicted and in a need of a shrink.

On one hand, they seem to have this quasi genetic memory of things being an abomination unto the Lord[1], while on the other hand, it's not hip to be openly religious, so they won't openly mention the Lord[1], all the while maintaining their puritanic shackles and even have outrage at the people who don't have those shackles.

Just you wait until they realize what you wrote about Foucault and denounce any and all of his achievements ;-) It seems to be very trendy these days.

[1] The ironic bit, of course, is that the Scripture doesn't state what the age of consent should even be.


None of those people should be on the FSF board either.


I did not even know about this stuff (but can now see what are perhaps the reasons why my comment elsewhere in the thread are being downvoted).

Is there a place I can quickly catch up on these events?

I also don't think that the foot skin eating thing is a non-starter. People are weird; I can live with that.

But the other stuff is obviously troubling.


> Is there a place I can quickly catch up on these events?

Summary: https://sterling-archermedes.github.io/


To the OP: that article is extremely biased in favor of RMS and focuses extremely narrowly on the Epstein/Minsky e-mails. Unfortunately I do not know of a good collection of his other failings (outside of the Minsky e-mails) to provide as a counter.


> that article […] focuses extremely narrowly on the Epstein/Minsky e-mails

No, only about the top third of the article is that. The rest covers the various subsequent attacks and goes through their claims at length.


> the _other_ times he spoke out in implicit support of pedophilia,

His support for pedophilia was explicit (though in context it was actually support for “consensual” sex between adults and children, not support for mere pedophilia, which is an orientation, not an action.)


And yet all we have documenting those are a few (anonymous) blog posts.


That's great, but the problem seems to be RMS's disruption of development activities. This doesn't change that. For example:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-01/msg00...

Imagine taking the time to publicly explain to an out-of-practice dev why some technical feature is needed, then being accused of a "pressure campaign" that requires the out-of-practice dev to consult privately, "with people I have confidence in."

Gnu devs have an impressive amount of patience and grace to put up with that. But I see a lot of other FOSS devs try to replicate RMS's unnecessarily aggressive rhetoric. They often shoot themselves in the foot with it, disrespecting and consequently losing valuable contributors who are otherwise aligned philosophically with the project in every way.

That kind of disruption is at odds with every value FOSS devs claim to hold-- meritocratic, decentralized, etc. Even Debian put the hammer down when an out-of-practice dev tried to use permissions to disrupt the work of a new dev. Nobody sane and self-respecting should put up with this kind of behavior.

Edit: clarification


Someone I know who works on pretty much singlehandedly on something that is on the frontpage of GCC said that he entered Stallman's bad books the moment he found out he had children.

GCC plugins were a stallman thing, LLVM was even offered to the FSF at one point IIRC. Is there anything competent he has done post-2000 or so?


> Is there anything competent he has done post-2000 or so?

While you may not care about it, GPLv3.


That was sort of the opposite of competent:

- Because it was a new license, it necessarily resulted in license fragmentation, which is an ongoing headache for the free software community. It's worth doing if there's a serious need that outweighs the costs and you can guide the community towards dropping the old license, but....

- The Linux kernel had always been GPLv2 only and remained GPLv2-only, which meant that the most interesting GPL-licensed code on TiVos and similar devices was not subject to GPLv3.

- Embedded devices like TiVos generally want a small userspace. The most popular choice was Busybox, which announced that it was GPLv2-only.

- Also, Busybox turned out to be a reasonably straightforward product to replace, which hurt the ongoing aims of GPL enforcement - including regular old GPLv2 enforcement about simply getting source code at all: https://lwn.net/Articles/478249/

- The FSF moved its own projects to GPLv3 only, but that scared the largest surviving commercial UNIX vendor (Apple) enough that they remained on GPLv2-only versions, and eventually started sponsoring the development of permissively-licensed competitors to even reasonably difficult products to replace, such as LLVM and its ecosystem (lldb etc.) instead of GCC and its ecosystem, which are now technically on par with GCC, if not much more advanced. (Historically, one of the FSF's biggest successes at making inroads in the proprietary software world was getting Steve Jobs to use GCC and release the Objective-C frontend for it!)

- Because the FSF couldn't guide enough other major projects towards GPLv3-only, many brand-new GPL'd software projects continue to use "GPLv2 or later" to this day to work around license fragmentation (i.e. so they can share code with other GPLv2+ projects), meaning any additional strictness of GPLv3 is irrelevant in enforcement.

- Of the major issues around software freedom and digital autonomy today, approximately zero of them are TiVoization - and, as described above, that's not because GPLv3 was wildly successful in combating the threat, it's because it turned out not to be that pressing of a problem.

There is basically no leverage in GPLv3. Just about everything you'd want to do with free software today, you can do with GPLv2 or permissively-licensed works.


> Of the major issues around software freedom and digital autonomy today, approximately zero of them are TiVoization

According to what? It seems to me tivoization is exactly one of the biggest issues facing users these days, especially in an IoT world, so how you can draw that conclusion (and the others) baffles the mind.

I think if you really want to understand GPLv3, you should listen to Eben Moglen more than RMS, because Eben has the ability to articulate in a way that RMS doesn't, and has given some very good speeches about not just GPLv3, but on the FOSS ecosystem as a whole.

Why is it that almost always I find the attacks against GPLv3 to be so lacking in substance? (for example, using an openly user hostile company like Apple as a reason for why it was bad just seems... like blatant pandering to me, as opposed to a real argument)


My entire point relies on Apple being an openly user-hostile company, yes! It was a great victory for the FSF that they were able to get Apple to release code and build on a free-software compiler, wasn't it?

And it's actually a little strange that they still release code and build on a different free-software compiler when not legally required to, despite being so user-hostile of a company, arguably quite a bit more user-hostile than they were in the past. There's a lot of discussion we ought to have about why they're contributing, whether that leverage was real, whether we could have predicted the rest of what they did, etc.

For IoT in particular, given that the processing power on-device is limited, I think it's pretty common for the serious risk to one's freedom/autonomy to be the fact that the data is being held and processed remotely and you have basically no idea over what happens with it, let alone any control. The GPLv3 does not include a requirement to release the source for the server component, so the best you can do is reimplement the entire effective functioning of the product from scratch. Also, because the GPLv3 has no such requirement and probably couldn't, that effectively is a motivation for the manufacturer to move as much processing server-side as possible.

(And at that point, you may have a better time building the device yourself or more practically buying it from a more friendly hardware manufacturer. Even for the TiVo, if you're going to have to implement a DVR yourself, the video capture card and the hard disk are the easiest part of it.)

I can see a limited use case for things like smart TVs to just sort of prevent them from communicating with the network at all, but a firewall can do that just fine - and it's a lot more practical for most people than hacking the device firmware.

My claim isn't that there's no use for freedom on consumer devices with on-board software - quite the opposite. My claim is that the specific thing the GPLv3 tried to save us from hasn't been the priority it was made out to be, and in the process it just made free software worse. I am totally open to a counterargument - is there a device you have where a) it does run some GPL (any version) code and b) there is some meaningful change you could make to the code it runs?


Thank you for clarifying. I can see your reasoning now, taking a more practical approach, let me try to restate: by taking such an idealogical stance, the FSF lost what was a large base that existed for them previously? I understand that, but think there are lots of idealogical reasons why that kind of argument doesn't hold much sway with entities like the FSF and FOSS proponents. v2 had some very obvious issues, and v3 was intended to plug those holes. I would be interested in hearing not about v2, but in what kind of modifications to v3 you think could have still accomplished the idealogical mission while preventing the pragmatic loss?

"My claim is that the specific thing the GPLv3 tried to save us from hasn't been the priority it was made out to be, and in the process it just made free software worse. I am totally open to a counterargument - is there a device you have where a) it does run some GPL (any version) code and b) there is some meaningful change you could make to the code it runs?"

I would like to say that v3 addressed much more than just tivoization. Lets not overfocus on just that one point.

While I gather you are looking to get a response about IoT devices, I am a heavy proponent of gpl, and v3 specifically, and have worked for years to make almost my entire daily stack gpl. I don't have a apple-tv or a chromecast, nor even a smart tv. I have a linux box dedicated to my dumb tv. Tons of gplv3 on it I can modify at any time.

Now practically, on much bigger projects, I tend not to modify anything, but I have found that on smaller projects/repos I find I am much more willing and able to make a few modifications here and there, and have, mostly because by sticking to the do one thing well principle, I can then chain together tools in ways I want.

"I can see a limited use case for things like smart TVs to just sort of prevent them from communicating with the network at all, but a firewall can do that just fine"

This is a great example, because TV's being user hostile means that a firewall doesn't actually mean that much. For example, there are smart tv's found to connect to any random open wifi to transmit their user data... completely outside the owners knowledge (or firewall). Being able to actually control the devices you own is a key factor, and no amount of "well the user could or should do this" neverending arms-race fixes that, but fixing the fact that I cant root a smart tv would.


If you take the assumption that the user device is actively user-hostile, there's a simpler approach: just add another microchip whose purpose is to run non-free code (or at least non-GPLv3 code) to report on what you're doing. You might not get the world's best networking stack by constraining yourself to non-GPL, but you can certainly get something that's enough to spy on the user. (Or, frankly, given the state of OpenSSL vs. GnuTLS, you probably actually want the non-GPL option :) ) Maybe the GPLv3 gets you the ability to ensure that you can modify the fancy UI on your TV because the best stack for that is GPLv3-based for some reason, but they'll just wire that to a non-GPL component to actually interface with the TV tuner, and then they'll know everything.

That's why I think the Apple case is relevant. Apple is a user-freedom-hostile company. (I actually think they're great at certain things like privacy that are necessary components of user freedom / digital autonomy, but certainly I wouldn't say I've particularly got autonomy over what happens on my iPhone.) And Apple (or well, their precursor, NeXT) decided to contribute to GCC because licensing compelled them to. And now Apple is deciding to contribute to LLVM with no compulsion, which is really kind of strange given that we thought we needed a licensing lever to make that happen, and also there seems to be no licensing lever we can possibly pull to get them to open up the actually interesting parts of any of their devices. The GPLv3 cannot possibly prevail against Apple, because they can and empirically did just reimplement things to avoid it.

This is the difficulty with licensing as a weapon, and it's something that the free software movement needs to seriously struggle with. Did the strategy make sense in the past and it no longer does? Did it never make sense, and we were just lucky? Are we not trying hard enough?

And to be clear, I'm not saying that he FSF needs to be pragmatic instead of ideological. The FSF always was pragmatic as a means towards being ideological. That's why it built GNU, an entire coherent OS that people could actually use, and didn't just write licenses. And that's why a lot of the early FSF focus was on redeveloping parts of UNIX that had no immediate free replacement, instead of writing free software in general.

Quoting RMS:

> As the GNU Project proceeded, and increasing numbers of system components were found or developed, eventually it became useful to make a list of the remaining gaps. We used it to recruit developers to write the missing pieces. This list became known as the GNU Task List. In addition to missing Unix components, we listed various other useful software and documentation projects that, we thought, a truly complete system ought to have.

I argue that the reason that RMS / the FSF had leverage over NeXT/Apple in the past was that it was ruthlessly pragmatic: they built an amazingly high-quality compiler compared to all the alternatives that existed at the time, such that the obvious thing for a for-profit, user-hostile company to do was to comply with the terms of the license. That pragmatism gained them an ideological victory.

The GPLv3 is very ideological, but it was only ideological. There wasn't a plan for how to actually get anyone (except the FSF themselves) to use it; there wasn't even a plan for how to get the actual GPL'd code running on actual TiVo devices to use it.

So - I don't know what modifications to v3 would have accomplished the ideological mission, and my tentative answer would be it couldn't be done. But that just brings up the question of why it couldn't be done - what could they have done to have enough power/influence to cause a mass switch to GPLv3?

Or was there some other way that they could have addressed the threat of user-hostile devices other than through writing a new software license?


I don't have the time right now to respond, but I appreciate the depth of your response and you have given me a lot to think about. Cheers.


> - Of the major issues around software freedom and digital autonomy today, approximately zero of them are TiVoization - and, as described above, that's not because GPLv3 was wildly successful in combating the threat, it's because it turned out not to be that pressing of a problem.

I'm not really sure how you define "software freedom" or "digital autonomy". What I do know is that the majority of phones sold today run Android. Despite being technically "open source" and therefore free software, it is impossible in practice to replace the software due to "secure boot". This is what GPLv3 was intended to combat. I agree that it was a failure (it turns out corporations _really_ don't want us choosing our own software).


> Someone I know who works on pretty much singlehandedly on something that is on the frontpage of GCC said that he entered Stallman's bad books the moment he found out he had children.

I know pretty much nothing about this Stallman person, does he actually dislike people with children?


No.

"He was kind, attentive, and has a loving core. In simple language, he patiently explained to my son, then around 12, about the virtues of the GNU/Linux operating system"

https://whoisylvia.medium.com/richard-stallman-has-been-vili...

He doesn't deem "having children" as some sort of special accomplishment though, which might rub some parents the wrong way.


I don't know whether he dislikes people with children, but the sin here is reproducing and thus hurting the planet or something like that.

Apparently this argument only subsided because it was noted that rms is not vegetarian


It's important to keep in mind that RMS is a controversial figure, and a lot of people disagree with the FSF mission/philosophy. So, naturally, you're going to see a lot of baseless rumors from anonymous assholes on the internet.


> Stallman's bad books the moment he found out he had children.

This is how disparaging internet rumors are spread. You know someone that allegedly experienced this. Do you know them well enough to know the account is factual, or maybe they were just piling on because they had a bad experience with him and decided to frame him in this negative way because it was the 'cool' thing to do at the time?

Quit proliferating unsourced 3rd party accounts.


I speak to them maybe every day and I have absolutely no reason to doubt him.

I would just say what the project was but he's basically the sole maintainer of the GNU side of it.


> That kind of disruption is at odds with every value FOSS devs claim to hold-- meritocratic, decentralized, etc.

You're mixing things here. :) meritocracy and decentralization are completely orthogonal to free software. They [edit: s/are/could be construed as a/] part of the open-source ethos as explored in CATB & explained by esr, not a sine-qua-non of free software.


The problem in this case is an unspoken governance model where a participant from decades ago showed up, made public accusations about the trustworthiness of the other participants, then declared a time schedule of his own choosing during which he would consult his own private council to judge the veracity of all the public arguments given.

Whatever we want to call that, and whatever the origins of the problem, it is a bad thing.

Edit: clarification


Hey, I've been thinking and talking in another thread; I just made a comment that is completely relevant for this convo, too; the people in the discussion, as well as you, are looking at things from a different value framework as rms, the gnu project, and the fsf. Here's the relevant comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26809646

We can agree the discussion could be handled better, and the accusations were unwarranted in context; I happily chalk that up to a misunderstanding (rms not seeing other people's lack of awareness of value framework incompatibility as a massive obstacle to conversation, instead assuming interlocutors had better information than they seemed to, in which case their behavior could have been construed as being in bad faith) - which implies 2015 rms should probably dial it down in the strength of his accusations among other adjustments. Communication is _not_ easy.

If a farmer and a forest ranger go into a patch of land, they will see the same scenery, but may have heated discussions about what to do with it. Unless they understand that one of them wants to produce food, and the other to protect the forest. And if one of them has decision-making power over the terrain, even if they have not been in there personally for a while - the argument about how what they want to do fits with the decision-maker's values needs to be made.

Of course, nobody is stopping the developers from going and doing the stuff they want to do in the first place, distributing it and, if the change is as technically important as it seems and the cards are played just right, even becoming the de-facto standard distribution of a piece of software; their changes just won't be merged into the main product for the foreseeable future.


Good lord, it's like talking to a brick wall. That thread is agonizing. Why do people still put up with that?

e: Also, it's hilarious to jump to Apr 2021 and see a thread titled "How to make Emacs popular again: Use monospaced fonts less".


Well, at least they've wised up on one part: In the 2015 thread, most of them seemed to think Emacs was still popular.

(Personally, I thought it's used mostly for coding, so idunno if proportional fonts will be a popularity panacea.)


What's the Debian occurrence you speak of?


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