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This story has obvious falsehoods and as far as I can tell, is totally false or about the wrong person.

1. As far as I can tell, he was never on the board of VA Linux.

2. RMS was never married. https://www.quora.com/Is-Richard-Stallman-married

3. It is a widely known that if anyone ever associates RMS with "open source", he will interject to say that he vehemently disagrees with open source and had nothing to do with its creation. The fireball guy who posted this story, clearly knows very little of RMS to post this without mentioning the fact that this part absolutely is false.

4. He dislikes the word "open" in general, and would never ever use it to describe anything he was involved in. Again, key fact that is clearly false.

5. RMS does not usually have bad hygiene.

6. One of the people who coined "open source" was involved with VA Linux, his name was Eric S Raymond. Perhaps this this is about him.

> 5. RMS does not usually have bad hygiene.

He does, actually. But yes, the story is most likely about ESR, and he's been quite open about his polyamorous relationships.

Also, Gruber dislikes Stallman for quite a while, and has repeteadly picked on him for various reasons like "lack of hygiene" or weird behaviour. Never, once, until now, for the sexual advances theme.... He just discovered that this was in fact the primary reason why he should've disliked Stallman, not the others.

Given this, I'd expect (A) this is close to the worst concrete evidence that one can find on Stallman's misbehaviours, everywhere; and (B ) it's not exactly unbiased. Sure it sounds bad, but I would like details. Because at the same time, there's also this tale that sounds a lot more objective, verifiable & facts-based https://archive.is/7qepC. E.g :

> One remarkable thing about the FSF at that time, when we worked out of dinky spare offices on the campus of MIT, was the degree of participation by women. In the tiny society that was then the FSF, women were more prominent than I had seen in Silicon Valley, or acadamia prior. The general culture of inclusiveness and tolerance that RMS fostered meant that, at least when I was there alongside Bushnell, that social circle in and around the organization was feminized and all the stronger for it.

> Also, Gruber dislikes Stallman for quite a while, and has repeteadly picked on him for various reasons like "lack of hygiene"

It somewhat makes me think that, coming from the greatest Apple fanboy ever, Gruber forgot that on many accounts Steve Jobs too had a personal hygiene problem.

> I don’t know the details, but she was given advanced warning anytime Stallman was headed over so that she could leave. He was a creep and women at the company knew to stay away.

If we don’t have a specific account and details are unknown, then I don’t think this is a fair characterization.

Ive had others think Stallman is creepy too. They actively avoided him, but he never did anything to them.

Sexual advances in and of themselves are not illegal - but again we don’t have a true source for this information. Assuming this is all 100% factually accurate and the sentiment is properly related: it sounds Inappropriate, but if he wasn’t fired, it sounds like it wasn’t far enough outside the acceptable conduct to warrant anything.

> it sounds like it wasn’t far enough outside the acceptable conduct to warrant anything.

That's not how things work. Workplace "justice" is quite dependent on things like internal politics and personal affiliations. You can't rely tell how bad something was by the disciplinary response.

Stallman is such an annoyance that if there were a credible harassment allegation against him, the MIT administration would have almost certainly made use of it before this.

There was a pretty big change in 2016. How sure are you that had no effect on his internal political situation?

Consequently it might be correct to reserve judgement, like the author implies.

Why is John Gruber reprinting anonymous emails that are clearly lying? Richard Stallman was never married so he never had an "open marriage" either. Given that the person writing the email didn't even bother to verify this easily verified detail I suspect the rest is also a work of fiction.

The VA Linux claim is to the best of my knowledge false. It's also second-hand information relayed by Gruber.

Eric S. Raymond ("ESR") was an author of the Open Source Definition and a member of the VA Linux board:

https://www.linux.com/news/eric-raymond-responds-changes-va-...

I find no current links indicating Stallman was ever on the VA Linux, or any other corporate board. Neither his personal bio nor Wikipedia bio mention any.

That article says

> followed up with a post relaying numerous first-hand reports from women subjected to Stallman’s harassment. One example:

The example it then lists (about Stallman at a buffet lunch) is the only "first-hand" report of harassment contained in the follow-up post. This is actually pivotal to the whole daringfireball post as he is purporting to have an ironclad case of harassment but there's only a single first-person account and an email he received about something happening to somebody else at VA Linux (I can't find any reference for Stallman ever being on the board of directors at VA Linux, although they changed their name a number of times which doesn't make things any easier).

I'm sorry for the specific request, but it must be a first hand account of an event. This second hand account can easily be the result of RMS being a difficult person to be around, for any number of reasons, constructed via word of mouth into a sexual issue.

I haven't read the description of anything that resembles sexual abuse by RMS.

(edited to remove an unintended reference to sexual assault)

Why are you shifting the goalposts to sexual assault? No-one here is saying that RMS has sexually assaulted anyone, and he wasn't fired due to allegations of that nature.

Sorry, it was unintended. Thanks for pointing it out. I edited the text.

> I'm sorry for the specific request, but it must be a first hand account of an event.

The excerpt is from an e-mail that John Gruber received in 2011. It is the written testimony of someone who witnessed the events in question first hand.

It's a blog post written around an excerpt from an email of someone who did not witness the abuse event, but knew and interacted with the abused at the time. In my book, that's a second hand account of the event.