Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

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Justice begins with truth.

1. He only has honorary doctorates. If you wouldn't say "Dr. Zuckerberg," don't say "Dr. Stallman." (Meanwhile, Dr. Bill Cosby has an earned doctorate!)

2. Related to the previous point, his "position" at MIT was an office with a mattress, thanks to having influential friends in the faculty there. He was not paid by MIT, he had no teaching role at MIT, and he was part of no MIT research projects.

3. Even if every error printed by the media was corrected, there is - and has been for years - significant dissatisfaction with him at MIT, within the FSF, within the GNU Project, and within the free software community at large.

4. Stallman continues to be welcome to debate the truth. It's a valuable part of a free society. What MIT and the free software community has made clear is that he is not welcome to debate the truth and serve as a representative of MIT and of the free software community. MIT gained nothing direct from his affiliation as unpaid research staff assigned to no research projects; all they gained was an association with his reputation. As soon as that becomes a negative association, there's no rational reason to keep it. Similarly, the free software community has argued for the removal of Stallman from his leadership position because they've seen that he prioritizes his interest in debating about sexual norms over his interest in leading and growing the free software community. (See, for instance, http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2019/10/15/fsf-rms.html .)

It is true that the media flare-up about Stallman's Minsky/Epstein commentary was the immediate political motivation for him leaving his MIT affiliation (since the most active benefit of his affiliation was his presence on the CSAIL general mailing list where he made this comments, and there has been general displeasure at his presence there for well over a decade) and his FSF role. But I'm not sure what the benefit to the world is to re-appoint him to his FSF role only to "re-try" him for his actual failure to do his work - especially when so many GNU projects seem on the verge of forking.

It doesn't make sense to remove someone from a position because of a few things they said. Rather, we should evaluate the individual as a whole. Is he a good person or a bad person? Is he effective or inneffective? Based on everything I read about Stallman so far over the years, I'd say he is truly decent human being and an extremely effective leader. He is almost certainly a better person than all of the self-righteous, hypocritical bureaucrats who are now trying to take him down who never did anything altruistic their entire self-centered lives.

IMO, if Stallman didn't do any crime himself, he can say whatever the heck he wants about anything. People need to toughen up and stop being such hypocrites. We all have a brain between our ears; how about we start using it to decide for ourselves if some celebrity or politician is right or wrong instead of trying to censor them. Just because they're famous doesn't mean they're right and it doesn't mean you have to agree with them.

Sure, that seems like a much more reasonable basis for this discussion.

There has been very strong consensus at MIT for decades that he's not a decent human being and he himself tries to take down people who are doing altruistic things but dare to host their volunteer signup form on Google Forms. I genuinely don't know what the argument for reinstating his MIT position is.

The internal politics of GNU have been awful for decades too, largely due to RMS, and I know plenty of free software folks (including a few folks formerly associated with FSF - i.e., true believers in the cause that RMS managed to deconvert) who think his leadership is ineffective, harmful, or both. So, if there's a claim that he's a good leader for the FSF and for GNU, that seems like something we can have a direct, factual debate on.

"RMS didn't make the statements about Epstein that the media claimed he said, therefore he's a qualified and effective leader of the free software movement" is fallacious. "The media attacked him unfairly, so he needs his old job back to get back at them regardless of his fitness for the job" isn't justice, just revenge.

> 3. Even if every error printed by the media was corrected

That would be a huge step, and not some minor detail as you're trying to frame it.

And they were not 'errors' - his statements were quite deliberately misrepresented. If I, a non-native speaker, can understand what he wrote, then native-speaker journalists should not be presumed to be so incompetent, especially since they did not correct their stories and headlines once informed of the 'errors'.

It would be a huge step, and it would be worth doing, because the truth is important - but it would not be a reason to reinstate him at MIT or at the FSF, and it would not change the ongoing conversations within the GNU project about GNU leadership.

As a member of the "free software community" I take issue with your speaking on my behalf.

And I have communicated with various others in our community who feel differently from how you've painted us with such broad strokes.

They said there has been significant dissatisfaction, not every person who uses free software is dissatisfied.

No, he said,

>What MIT and the free software community has made clear is that he is not welcome to debate the truth and serve as a representative of MIT and of the free software community.

I don't remember a great groundswell of anti-RMS statements from the FSF community. In fact, when Ludovic the guix maintainer brought it up on the gnu guix mailing list, Ludovic had to start banning people and removing list messages because so many people in the community loudly disagreed with him.

The irony is the FSF has a censorship problem, and people who support RMS are among those being censored.

https://danielpocock.com/where-do-censored-developers-go/

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