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Comment by ng12 | Hacker News Reader

> He thinks people should be punished for selling proprietary software correct?

No? I'm not really sure what you mean by "punish" here. He advocates for Free Software -- to my knowledge he's never advocated for punishing anybody.

> He appears to support actions that harm others by some of his statement.

How? Where's the harm? What's harmful about questioning the age of consent being 18 (which, may I remind you, varies from 12-19 worldwide). Why are some aspects of US law declared beyond the scope of acceptable discourse? You can disagree with him (I certainly do) but I don't see why we should shame him for even broaching the subject.

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"I'm all in favour of the principle that it's good to reward people who do things that contribute to society and it's good to punish people, one way or another, if they do things that harm society. This means that people who develop Free Software that's useful deserve a reward, and people who develop proprietary software that's attractive deserve a punishment."

That is from this interview https://fsfe.org/freesoftware/transcripts/rms-fs-2006-03-09....

We aren't talking about the age of consent. RMS explicitly said children before they hit puberty / sexual maturity which is a bit different than a 17 year old to most people.

> Why are some aspects of US law declared beyond the scope of acceptable discourse?

They're not, it's fine to talk about these things, and there are plenty of places where people discuss all aspects of law around sexual offending.

The wrong time and place to talk about them is when your organisation is discussing potential problems because a high profile person linked to your organisation has been accused of raping a coerced child. People in that thread needed a useful way to deal with "MIT has links to Epstein, and Minsky is accused of raping a child". RMS's diversions into "is it rape?" and "is it assault?" were not helpful to that thread.

Either RMS was oblivious to the distress and distraction his comments would cause, or he knew and didn't care. Neither is good.

> Either RMS was oblivious to the distress and distraction his comments would cause

First, the conversation was internal, it was leaked to the public. Second, it's nothing new. He's been documenting his opinions for decades. Third, it was a relevant discussion because he was talking about the characterization of the events by the media.

If you just have a bone to pick with RMS I'm not sure what there is left to discuss.

Wouldn't it better for MIT's reputation if people weren't jumping to the conclusion that one of their professors would willingly rape people? Did anyone actually believe Marvin Minsky of all people would do that? I wonder what he will have to say about this when he gets unfrozen.

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