Richard Stallman’s Exit Heralds a New Era in Tech

RMS seemed to be arguing for clear description instead of jumping to "everything is child rape".

I don't know exactly where RMS is coming from, but, knowing victims of forcible and child sexual assault, I think it's still worth maintaining descriptive, moral, and legal distinctions...

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6405929-091320191420...

Then come back and read what I have to say.

There was nothing offensive or controversial in there. Not a one. The man only pushed to avoid letting the narrative people wanted to believe run away with the reputation of a friend (Minsky) before all the facts were in.

He's endorsing to let the justice system do it's work instead of letting a near tabloid level effort of the media hang a man's reputation out to dry. He's even willing to accept wrongdoing if that is what the facts spell out. He also asks the more extreme poster to the mailing list to provide evidence that it seems he is incapable of uncovering due to his commitment to only using Free Software.

If he's guilty of anything, it's being overconfident of the rationality of others in a world so tormented by those willing to turn even a hint of inconvenient independent thought into a sign of some disfigurement of one's essential humanity.

There are people out there who pose a threat to civil society and deserve civil/social ostracization. Richard Stallman is not the one in this case, as is evidenced by a willingness on his part to have his mind changed.

The media, if anyone, deserves to be ostracized for not actually digging into and presenting the original posts, and picking and choosing only the most controversial aspects of the man that weave the best narrative to draw clicks. If they had done their job, this would have been a non-story, as it would be clear the man was calling for calm in a discussion where passions were running high.

The FSF, and MIT handled the entire thing poorly. Instead of investigating, and not doing anything hastily, they caved to engineered histrionics, and also failed to demonstrate a bare modicum of scrutiny to establish the facts of the matter, or reach out to correct the media. Essentially they prioritized distance and public perception over ensuring the truth was known. Both proved to have betrayed fundamental principles that their respective institutions were set up to protect.

There's no doubt in my mind that harassment and sexual assault, as well as discrimination and sexism, really do happen to some individuals. But when you have narratives being twisted to fit a prescribed perspective, when words and talk about the semantics of those words as signifiers (such as in Stallman's case) are interpreted as defense for the object signified by those words, the line between the aggressor and the aggressee become blurred. That does a lot more harm to movements FOR victim and AGAINST discrimination, by generalizing the phenomenon to the point that it loses all relative value it might've had. If everyone's an aggressor, and every conversation is discriminatory in terms of potential interpretation, all men, women, non-binary, etc. are affected. It is debilitating to the highest degree, and no one should defend, let alone strive to create, such an environment.

If anything, when faced with such situations, we are not discriminatory enough. As Popper described with his famous paradox of tolerance, tolerance of intolerance presages the destruction of tolerance itself. He clarifies, saying: "I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise."[0]

I can only hope that people who are outraged by these aforementioned cases of verbal transgressions have become so because they've misinterpreted what thought was being communicated. Unfortunately, as they more often than not work in consulting or have some "acceptance" program to push towards companies and projects, I can't be certain that they are genuine in their offense.

[0] Karl Popper, Open Society and its Enemies, vol. 1, note 4 to chapter 7.

However the article is characterizing free software as a centralized system whose purpose is to give powerful men the “freedom” to exclude. It also says the free software movement shares this perverse notion of freedom with the tech giants like Facebook. Can free software maintainers become exclusionary tyrants? Of course, but built into free software is the remedy. You have access to the source control and you are not obligated to tolerate a tyrant. You have near complete freedom over the source code to make any changes or to fork the project, completely sidestepping the maintainer. If someone truly wanted to be a petty tyrant with the “freedom” to exclude they would write their software as closed source, start a company and maintain complete control over all versions of the software and hire or fire all of the programmers who can edit it.

This seems to be presenting opinion as fact.

From a software perspective though, I would argue that yes, I should absolutely have the freedom to reject a change in my code from someone else. The rejected party has the freedom to fork my code.

Different issues are driving decisions today than were a few decades ago; that's just the flow of time. I don't think it's a bad thing at all that standards and goals have changed.

I think this "new era" began with the rise of FAANG companies, so really, these trends have been in motion for a while. I'm excited what new developments in AR/VR, AI, compiler theory, etc. will come in the approaching years.

Is the Wired article mis-representing the gist of Christine Corbett Moran's complaint?

Or is the author subtly trying to undermine her?

Is the above comment in the glibc manual something to be upset about? I don't understand why.

Has Freeer Software Foundation been started yet?

https://sterling-archermedes.github.io/index.html

This is only about the publications on medium, Vice, and The Daily Beast, not this new one in Wired, who apparently also discovered there's good money in selling pyres.

I sincerely hope we'll reach that point very soon.

Hahaha! Oh my, what utter crap. Zuckerberg, when did he ever show a true conviction to some higher ethical standards? Where is the positive ingenuity in anything Zuckerberg created? Is there even one thing that man did, that has not turned out to be an abomination? Tell me, what that man did, that _positively_ influenced anything besides human greed and his own wallet. That comparison is the most laughable that I heard in a loong time.

Up to that point, I already had a feeling about the tone of the article, but this then finally shows, that the author does not even know what they are writing about. The article is rubbish.

If there is wreckage around Stallman, then it is caused by him expressing himself in ways, which people tend to misunderstand, although he argues quite mathematically, maybe it is especially, because he does so. He does not care about gender stuff. He cares about what is getting done. Today's socialization is _unfortunately_ in a way, that not _many_ women get into computer science. When he then states something about more men contributing code to some project, he is making a mathematical statement about numbers, not about a gender issue. Why are people unable to understand that? Here is a typical example of people not being able to understand him and his way of making a logical argument: https://youtu.be/eG4HrOpzQXY

I very much doubt, that Stallman is in general against women in tech or anything similar claimed in the article and have never seen him saying anything like that. Seriously, what kind of crap about "female professors keeping plants, because Stallman does not like plants". Go to any office, where women work and check for plants. It is called socialization. We don't have to like it, but saying, that it does not exist, is certainly not going to help solving the issue.

Then we have the usual stupid writing going on about how the OS might be called "Linux", but Stallman wants it to be called "GNU/Linux". As if he was the only one person in the world wanting that. Download Linux and from the repositories and run your computer with that! What is wrong with these people? Can't they acknowledge _years_ of work in his youth and later on, basically life, this man put into creating something, that now they rely on every single day of their comparatively unproductive lives? Can we stop being uninformed and call the OS the name of the kernel? Can we prevent uninformed authors from writing more articles about tech, so that technically correct terms can finally win over wrong usage and being uninformed and work done is finally given appropriate credit?

The ungratefulness some people show towards Stallman is just so unbelievable.

Well, should not have expected a fair account from magazines like Wired in the first place.

Disagree with the author here. Freedom in the tech world and indeed in the 1st Amendment is absolutely about the right to express objectionable views. The problem was that historical cultural norms permitted misogynistic bigots to maintain positions of power - it was a lack of political coordination to root out these leaders. Now there is a political wave driving sexual equality. But just like we learned with racism after Obama’s election, these things don’t move in one direction, they are wars, Trump is still in the Whitehouse and his poll numbers aren’t too bad. So if you care about the long term improvement of sexual equality, best to follow a laser sharp political strategy and discern that a principle like freedom of speech brings allies to the cause, it helps far more than it harms.

Free speech means permitting people to say hurtful things. We should protect everyone’s opportunity to reveal who they are. The main focus should be on what we do with that information.

He'd reached the point of being nearly forgotten until he shot his mouth off inopportunely and caught the full force of the outrage mob.