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Comment by jplayer01 | Hacker News Reader

Frankly, Bushnell and the response to him clearly show none of this should be decided in the court of public opinion. Even if either of these people are correct, none of what we've read or heard so far is in any way sufficient to condemn Stallmann and ruin his career and none of us is in an appropriate position to make that determination. He underwent utter character assassination in the media who went to great lengths to pretend his argument regarding that other MIT professor was about defending Epstein and pedophilia and I'm still mad that so many people fell for it. Maybe Stallmann might possibly be a terrible piece of shit, but this wasn't the way to go.

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The first I heard was about how he was a guest in Denmark almost 30 years ago and fouled up his room. Nothing bad happened to him, he was lucky.

Stallman had luck with public opinion many, many times. This time his luck changed.

It's unfair to deplore the bad luck and forget about all the times he had benefited from good luck.

Fouled up his room? What do you mean, like, he couldn't figure out how to operate the hotel room door lock?

No, he stayed as a guest at the home of one of the DKUUG regulars and his girlgriend, who afterwards wrote an angry article about it in the DKUUG-nyt. I see the early-nineties issues have been scanned, http://www.dkuug.dk/wp-content/themes/dkuug/arkiv, but I haven't the time to look through them now. The main issues were matters of personal hygiene and the way he treated the girlfriend.

Much the same all been posted later, again and again, https://daringfireball.net/2019/09/richard_stallmans_disgrac... links and quotes a bit.

I still don’t understand what you mean by “fouled up his room?”

Do you mean he messed up the furniture? Spilled tomato sauce on everything? Overflowed the toilet?

There's a reason all these stories stay so vague - as soon as the details come out, it turns out to be lies, exaggerations or really really minor stuff.

By keeping the narrative at the level of "fouled up his room", "made women feel uncomfortable", "drove people out of open source" the people who attack him can make sure that no one can prove them "wrong". Of course, they also ensure that they can't prove anything themselves, but it's not really about that.

I guess a good criteria for criticism should at least be something that passes AirBnB editorial review.

That archive is a gem on its own! I can't find the article about RMS though, and I've scanned through about 16-17 issues so far. Do you happen to know which issue it is?

Aside from that, this is a great magazine and it's so much fun reading through old articles from the 80s and 90s about Unix. I didn't know Denmark had such a large Unix scene back then.

I've clicked a fair few myself, looking for it... I read the story in 1994 or slightly later, but it was old already. I'm running the whole archive through pdfsandwich now to be able to grep.

Grep found it: Issue 121, dated long after 1994.

Thanks. Read it now. This is a great article and I laughed out loud several times. RMS is a true eccentric.

Note the footnote:

>> Det skal iøvrigt nævnes, at RMS til daglig bor på sit kontor på Massaschusets Institute of Technology, hvor han engang har arbejdet, så det er måske ikke så mærkeligt, at hans sociale evner er begrænsede.

Nobody is talking about luck. He was the victim of an unfair and unjust attack by the media, who distorted his words in a disgusting way. There is no way to justify that by referring to his other behavior, no matter how bad it may be.

Do you think it was okay that he escaped censure so many times for no substantive/relevant reason? Do you think it's okay that he now is unfairly harshly censured, again for no substantive/relevant reason?

What I'm trying to say is that the two answers should be the same.

> Do you think it was okay that he escaped censure so many times for no substantive/relevant reason?

If that is true, then no. I don't know the details of the other issues though.

> What I'm trying to say is that the two answers should be the same.

If the situations are truly mirror images, then yes my answers are the same. I'm skeptical that they are, though.

The guy is important for one reason only. He was extremely prophetic, and started an important movement that increased our computing freedoms significantly.

He was always socially maladjusted. I remember him eating his toenails while sitting on-stage a decade ago. That kind of thing shouldn't matter for what he represents and does.

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