How is this good news?
He was the founder of the entire free software movement who was “canceled” for dumb reasons (read the article!)
I mean if near endorsement of child abuse is not enough , yeah, please, let’s wait until he fully endorses child abuse, then we’ll get rid of him.
Link?
That’s the very essence of the accusations against him. In an email to a student body mailing list, he defended a former colleague against allegations of child abuse. It is not such a clear cut case, as the “child” in questions seems to have been a 17 year old girl, and Stallman basically said it can’t be considered child abuse if the child was credibly lying about her age and willingly engaged in it.
I personally think it still leaves an incredibly bad impression on the person (who at the time was an middle aged man) to exploit a young woman like that, irregardless if the interaction appeared to be legal and entirely voluntarily. Especially if the context is transactional sex as in this case and not some sort of lolita type of romantic inflatulation.
he defended a former colleague against allegations of child abuse.
You can’t just believe everything you read on Twitter.
The source is quite public, so it’s better to go to that source.
Yes? I read the original source, and that is what he did. You can say he argued on a technicality, but for all intends and purposes he did try to defend his former colleague against such accusations.
For the intent of figuring out what he said, he did not say that such-and-such actions are defensible.
Rather than talking in big circles round the issue, it’s better to just look at the truth of the matter. Do you, or do you not believe that saying someone who slept with a twenty year old has committed “sexual assault” could be misleading?
That’s the very essence of the accusations against him.
I’m getting tired of this, exactly this is the problem. It’s always accusations, not a clear-cut case. We can talk when accusations turn into facts.
And I mean, yes if the girl lied about her age I don’t know how you expect the other person to know? Obviously transactional sex is still unethical, but calling it willing child abuse is pretty strong if the abused lied about her age, and was nearly an adult.
Edit: being nearly and adult matters, because it may make it much harder to visually tell the person’s age
It’s always accusations, not a clear-cut case.
No, there’s a tons of evidence on many episodes when he embarrassed the Free Software movement by acting poorly in public speaking events. You can find pictures, videos and descriptions of him doing weird things ranging from older comments around age of consent, annoying women with unwanted attention, walking around barefoot or poorly dressed, throwing temper tantrums and the list goes on.
This is not about judging him as a person. A spokeperson is responsible for representing a community in public. Bad publicity harms other people.
I mean, speaking as a member of said community, Free Software is punk. I don’t want a fashionable representative who only says things that everyone agrees with.
Sure, I don’t need my Free Software representative to philosophize about the age of consent, but as long as he’s not telling people to rape others, I do not have a problem with that, and again, would rather have him speak his mind than not say anything that’s pushing the boundaries.
The age of consent and the annoying of women is bad, but the rest I don’t really care, IMO I kind of like it, it is fun and I prefer that to a souless kind of CEO.
No, I know that he did some interesting stuff (including, among the ones you listed, eating his toe skin in public).
I was talking more about the motives behind “canceling” certain people; that is, not many people have been canceled because of facts, it’s always accusations
It’s always accusations, not a clear-cut case.
With Stallman, pretending it’s not clear cut is ridiculous.
Probably the most damning one:
- In a 2007 interview, he said:
I don’t have any experience working with women in programming projects; I don’t think that any volunteered to work on Emacs or GCC.
A number of women have contributed to GCC, including:
- Janis Johnson maintains the test suite and has been a contributor since 2001
- Sandra Loosemore is the lead author of the GNU Library Reference Manual;[3] RMS is listed as her co-author.
- Dorit Nuzman made major contributions to loop scheduling and vectorization.
- Carolyn Tice is also mentioned as a contributor.
If anything that just shows how fucking disconnected he is from everyone… it’s kinda been like that for a long time, nothing new there
With Stallman, pretending it’s not clear cut is ridiculous.
The “not a clear-cut case” referred to Minsky and not Stallman. What are you claiming that Stallman is obviously guilty of? Because the discussion was on his alleged endorsement of child abuse and sexual assault and you linked to articles which make accusations based on assumptions and further dilute it with describing how disgusting and asocial he is. Your highlighted point in no way supports the claim of him endorsing such behaviors and comes from an interview, in which Stallman also states that:
I know most of the maintainers only through email, which means that I don’t know whether they are male or female unless their names show me. I just looked at the list: one maintainer is probably female, and a few others have names that might be male or female.
Yes, saying that no women contributed to GCC is false and wrong but it’s not a reason to exclude him from the movement or a justification for the CancelStallman campaign.
Lets be factual here, no one is accusing Richard Stallman of child abuse.
What he did, and no one is even remotely denying that, is publicly defending someone who likely did something of incredibly bad taste (regardless of the specific details and the exact age) for exactly that thing the person allegedly did (so Stallman must assume it to be true as well).
This in itself is not illegal or anything like that, but associated organizations like the MIT or the FSF have every right to decided that because of that Richard Stallman is no longer suited as a public high level representative or a honorary professor.
As much as I also think this witch-hunt on the internet went too far (with Stallman being an out of touch ex-hippy who probably thought we was beyond touch due to his cult following), this is not by any means a hill I am willing to die on. In fact it was probably a good reality check for him and I don’t see much problems him him being back on a lower profile position in the FSF now.
Stallman poses a danger to the system not only because of his ideas about Free Software but because he still keeps alive the approach with which we have obtained all our rights: radicalism. The system to try to discredit Stallman even with fake news and to incorporate only what suits its interests under the name of “Open Source” leaving out the rest of the rights-based political movement (Free Software).
lets see how it goes this time
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Found this article there, and it’s well worth a read.
I think the most important bit of that article is the response of Civil Rights Activist Nadine Strossen. I don’t know her but her credentials are listed sound believable.
Some people using the Internet might be surprised but it’s not their job to judge in a liberal society. They of course can raise their opinion in the same way as someone can raise their opinion in a pub after a few beer, and their opinion weights the same, nothing more but a chat.
For a more serious discussion certain rules and assumptions should apply in a society and these are well explained and argued in Nadines response.
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