In Defense of Richard Stallman

Diversity -- but no diversity of opinion...<p>Inclusiveness -- but let&#x27;s ostracize the non-conforming aspie...<p>Fairness -- but let&#x27;s fire people or make them resign from unrelated positions for their personal opinions, because obviously all of a person&#x27;s life should serve as a big PR, and god forbid they don&#x27;t play the role 24&#x2F;7. Someone might call them for it on Twitter, and what could their employee&#x2F;organization do other than fire them? (in the &quot;Land of the free&quot; nonetheless)<p>Not to mention the blatant conformity and blandness -- punishing experimentation, personality, eccentricity, being the devil&#x27;s advocate, controversiality, and, worse of all, being &#x27;unprofessional&#x27; (as if the FSF is something akin to 1970s IBM)...<p>First they came for Patch Adams...<p>The current environment rewards the worst kind of scum: holier-than-thou hypocritical tell-tales and people who enjoy yielding power over others by drawing lynch-mobs.<p>I have wrote against Epstein here in several threads, but I could have lunch with a person who has controversial opinions on the matter like Stallman. People like those who finger-pointed and cheered on the personal consequences on Stallman, I&#x27;d prefer to live in another universe from.<p>Are you happy now? Justice for Epstein&#x27;s victims served? (on someone who never even met Epstein)<p>Speak up now, or don&#x27;t bother to cry crocodile tears and set up the &quot;black ribbon&quot; when we eventually lose Stallman, and tell stories of how he inspired you, etc...

Our culture has made a very bright line decision that sex with minors is unacceptable. Expressing doubt about this cultural norm, or especially advocating against it, is considered unacceptable. Of course one can argue with the merits of those two facts, but they are plainly true and fairly widely accepted.<p>The very concept of statutory rape reinforces how clear this judgment is. The reference to &quot;statutory&quot; means that the mere facts of the act taking place mean that the conduct is off limits. Things like &quot;consent&quot; or even a misrepresentation of the person&#x27;s age are generally considered irrelevant.<p>As a society we&#x27;ve decided that there aren&#x27;t really exceptions to this. If sex with minors occurs it&#x27;s not OK, there isn&#x27;t much need to further investigate why it happened.<p>Stallman, and anyone else commenting here, has really no basis to claim ignorance of this phenomenally clear social norm, which if broken will result in being fired from just about any public facing institution. It&#x27;s on a pretty short list of such norms, alongside things like displaying your genitals in a board meeting, ones highly principled views on nudism notwithstanding.<p>While I appreciate the efforts to make this into some kind of principled argument, I don&#x27;t find &quot;first they came for the people advocating for sex with minors&quot; to be particularly compelling.<p>Nobody has suggested he be fined or jailed. His actions just make him unqualified to be a leader. The other people in those organization do get to have a say too you know.

&gt; They focused on his tone deaf communication style and awkward demeanor. They spoke of behavior from decades ago and pointed out the fact that he had a mattress in his office.<p>It wasn&#x27;t just awkward demeanor. He actively made women feel unwelcome in the workplace and behaved unprofessionally over and over again.<p>&gt; He held his positions at MIT, GNU, and the FSF for over thirty years, and in that time nobody accused him of coercion, unwanted touching, or verbal harassment<p>Yes, because of people like you, Geoff. When people like Stallman behave like they do and say the things they say they don&#x27;t have to face the consequences because people don&#x27;t want to speak up, because they&#x27;re afraid of being called liars or censors. That&#x27;s how authority figures and popular individuals keep getting away with it.<p>The second paragraph of the post is irrelevant and further proves the point. Stallman&#x27;s contributions to free software don&#x27;t excuse his conduct.

I don&#x27;t know RMS personally, but from what I&#x27;ve seen and read about him, he&#x27;s a bit eccentric. There&#x27;s nothing wrong with that, but people tend to dislike or distrust those whom are different from what society considers &#x27;normal&#x27;. I suspect part of the &#x27;witch hunt&#x27; was in part fueled by this eccentricity.

Humanity is converging on ideological monoculture. There is one correct way to think, and if you&#x27;re dumb enough to step outside of those bounds, people _will_ come after you, and destroy whatever you have. One comment here even suggested that RMS is a rapist in so many words, really?<p>I submit that you cannot have innovation without inconvenient characters. You must allow a plurality of ideas and ideals to exist, even those that you find dumb or repulsive.<p>I don&#x27;t personally like RMS very much, he seems like an annoying person, but he should not have had his life ruined for what amounted to an pedantic argument on a mailing list.

There&#x27;s quite a lot in this. I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s helpful to throw in stuff like &quot;He is now likely homeless&quot; - gossip&#x2F;rumour I&#x27;m sure this author would be decrying if the other side of the argument had brought it up. We don&#x27;t know anything about RMS&#x27;s personal life and shouldn&#x27;t speculate.<p>Now let&#x27;s address the underlying point: You don&#x27;t get X good thing without Y bad behaviour. I don&#x27;t agree with this. It&#x27;s a weird sort of blackmail &quot;Put up with my bad behaviour because you need me&quot;. Firstly, For all we know, if we had been less tolerant of bad treatment of people in the free software movement, it&#x27;d be a much more powerful movement today than if we had allowed a small number of toxic individuals to take leadership roles and drive out many potential contributors. I see that as no less likely than the scenario put out in this defense.<p>Secondly, this attitude shifts the responsibility away from the individual for their actions. If someone has a lot to contribute but it never happens because their attitude sucks, that&#x27;s on them. It&#x27;s not on us to enable them.

Sigh. No.<p>It&#x27;s not just about one incidence of some mistakenly pedantic comments, as has been made clear by many, many people. It&#x27;s a pattern of behaviour over years combined with no interest in listening to other people or accepting that he might be in the wrong. His behaviour towards women in particular has resulted in a lot of people sharing stories of his behaviour which, on their own, should be enough for someone to be considered a problem. This latest incident is just what it took to finally tip things over the edge.<p>This article then goes on to talk about people like Stallman being needed, or essential for something like free software. It doesn&#x27;t matter, even if it was true, which there is no way of proving, it&#x27;s pure assertion. Phrases like &quot;required someone who couldn’t take a hint&quot; might sound all perseverance and dedication to this writer, but perhaps going and asking women what comes to mind when they hear about people like this might be an eye opener.<p>Without him students wouldn&#x27;t have as many free tools? Maybe, but maybe they would have other tools, better tools, built by the people his behaviour, and the behaviour of people like him, have driven from the industry before they got a chance to have the impact that people like him seem to assume is a right.

This pretty much sums up my opinions on the matter. I&#x27;m glad someone else took the time to write it up and share it with others.

AFACT, the strongest argument in favour of the removal of RMS is by Thomas Bushnell[0]. The best counter-argument to that, which I could find, is by Thomas Lord[1][2]. I haven&#x27;t found any replies to the latter.<p>(There&#x27;s also the meta-issue that rule-by-lying-journalists-and-misinformed-mob is terrifying and despicable, but it doesn&#x27;t affect the object-level question of whether RMS significantly contributed and&#x2F;or contributes towards making MIT and the free-software world unwelcoming to women.)<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@thomas.bushnell&#x2F;a-reflection-on-the-departure-of-rms-18e6a835fd84" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@thomas.bushnell&#x2F;a-reflection-on-the-depa...</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;thomas_lord&#x2F;status&#x2F;1174433645110513664" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;thomas_lord&#x2F;status&#x2F;1174433645110513664</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;threadreaderapp.com&#x2F;thread&#x2F;1174433645110513664.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;threadreaderapp.com&#x2F;thread&#x2F;1174433645110513664.html</a>

Sadly, a large number of people seem to have decided that their feelings are more important than the truth. That if something makes you feel bad, this means it <i>is</i> bad and must be destroyed.<p>This is like how a dark basement might be scary to a child. A normal adult would explain that the basement is actually harmless, and teach the child to see it for what it really is and learn not be afraid of it. The feelings-first crowd would have us simply destroy all basements.<p>Feelings are important and can help point you in a direction, but they need to be tempered with reason and logic before resulting in action.<p>People who act solely on feelings are also easy to manipulate because talented writers, actors, etc can evoke strong feelings about anything regardless of facts.

It does rather smack of the old police tactic: When someone&#x27;s known to have done something Bad, but the police cannot prove it, they send them to prison for a minor crime such as tax evasion.<p>I&#x27;m not saying that RMS has committed any crimes of course, but there are other reasons that people do not see him as a political figure that they can rally behind in the modern day. A lot of this is entirely about image. People feel uncomfortable having an aging, socially irrepressible person in charge of an organisation which they support. A (seemingly false) allegation is all that it took to bring those qualms to the fore.<p>Also I note that the author tacitly avoids the other comments which RMS has historically made, in particular with regards to abuse of minors, instead focusing on the one which was incorrectly taken out of context.

Funny enough on how the industry has taken free-software and its &#x27;open-source&#x27; derived ideas for granted and they have all originated from the FSF and its founder RMS.<p>But when social media archaeologists revive past &#x27;thought crimes&#x27; from 20+ years ago to use against anyone, it is ridiculous to completely silence and exclude them from society, especially someone like Stallman who is very principled in his cause.

We live in a world that you cant diverge a little bit. You can&#x27;t have a different personality. You can&#x27;t just say the truth or be technically corrent because it may also happen to be politically incorrent.<p>You have to go with the flow. But still people expect from you to be a superstar of what you are doing.

@dang<p>Can we please stop removing Stallman discussions from the front page?<p>I understand we want to keep things civil on HN, but the reality is that this dramatically impacts this community and all developers - probably more than we realize on the surface. I Discussing it and essentially letting everyone voice their thoughts is a way to both (a) come to consensus and (b) potentially see view points.<p>As it stands the “media” has a voice, most developers come to Hacker News.

&gt; There are two possibilities here. Either the author of the Medium post was not capable of correctly parsing the sentence, or she didn’t care about truth and was leveling as many accusations as possible in the hope that one would stick.<p>Either I am vastly overestimating the quality of american top university education, or the first option is highly unlikely. So, who benefits from Stallman getting removed from the picture? Or, given that the original author was also from MIT, maybe it was just some sort of personal grievance?

I hope RMS is safe, and that someone finds a way to let us all help him, in any meaningful way.<p>The most disgusting thing is that whose who witch-hunted him, from their higher moral ground, will face no consequences at all.

Funny, the &quot;professionals&quot; took over. I knew it was inevitable when software engineers started arguing for certification, talked about how they were so much better people because they hated writing code outside their jobs, talking about how people learning to code was a conspiracy to ruin software engineer salaries, and began constraining strictly the spaces that people could act in. All that was always a harbinger of IBM-as-life.<p>Of course this is inevitable. When I was young, you just did what you did and tried to find other people who also did what you did. Maybe they liked you, maybe they didn&#x27;t. If they didn&#x27;t you found someone else or you made that group of people. It was all about freely associating.<p>The nerds got beaten but that was always going to happen when this thing became big.<p>When Terry Davis (of Losethos fame) said deeply offensive things that were personally offensive to me, we all tried to understand that it came from a troubled mind, that we could admire the work without tolerating the outbursts. With the socially awkward folks, it was even easier. We could gently direct while moderating their extremes.<p>Cancel culture is a mistake. I&#x27;m not bold enough to face it under my real name so I&#x27;m just going to weather it under the tarps where my people stand with their tenets like lit beacons barely visible in a storm. If you invoke Crocker&#x27;s Rules, if you can forgive and redirect, and if you can disagree with words without invoking nuclear retribution, you can find the rest of us in our scattered micro-communities.<p>Good luck.

this just makes me sad. I believe, everything Stallman said but I could never say it out loud. He did. He was right.<p>&quot;Whatever conduct you want to criticize, you should describe it with a specific term that avoids moral vagueness about the nature of the criticism.&quot;

It seems the damage is done and cannot be reversed.<p>About the only lesson you can learn from this is that if you really cherish Freedom of Speech, then you actually require Fuck-you money to practice that right effectively.

&gt; You don’t get the free software movement without a person like Richard Stallman. Its success depended on a stubborn pedantic ideologue. It required someone who couldn’t take a hint.<p>This is really the crux of the matter. Richard Stallman should absolutely be held accountable for the stupid things that he has said. The problem is that humanity _really_ needs people like Richard Stallman- very few others have made such a practical (Emacs) and political impact on software, and by extension, the world as we know it. There aren&#x27;t many Richard Stallmans, and if you get rid of all them then _really_ bad things will happen.<p>It is equally important that he is punished, that he repents, and that he continues his work.

As an observer from the outside i have to say, that i am as an &quot;privileged white male&quot; will pay much attention to what i will say in the future. This is my conclusion about what happened here and happened to Linus.<p>The feeling that you have to be super sensitive will close more doors then before - prove me wrong.

Stallman is missing, many fear of social isolation or even suicide. You can&#x27;t ruin someone&#x27;s career &amp; life based on an opinion that was &quot;leaked&quot; and consider the fact that Italy&#x27;s former prime minister was involved in an actual orgy with underage models but no one cared about and this guy is still one of the most respectable persons in Italy.

Thanks a lot for writing this post, and for sharing it.<p>&gt; By satisfying the mob today, we are sacrificing our future. That’s the real risk.<p>Precisely.

I will leave these two links here. The parallels are striking.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Struggle_session" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Struggle_session</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Cultural_Revolution#Red_Guards_and_the_destruction_of_the_%22Four_Olds%22" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Cultural_Revolution#Red_Guards...</a>

While I am also saddened by the dishonest nature of the reporting on the Minsky accident and the cowardly lack of push back against it, one should not go to the other extreme and simply dismiss all the complaints about Stallman&#x27;s behavior as him merely being &quot;a clueless aspie&quot;. A good example is his emacs virgin joke, which he as as I read specifically made about individual female members of the audience. Due to our hysterical politicized environment we are not able to deal with incidents like this : acknowledge that behavior like this is unprofessional but does not make Stallman a horrible monster, especially since he indeed stopped making that joke after some criticism.

Why do we even need to invoke Stallman&#x27;s achievements as an excuse here? What did the man say - he expressed his opinion that accusations of sexual assault are probably inflated and inaccurate. For fuck&#x27;s sake!

If I know anything about human behavior than these incidents were a final excuse to get rid of Stallman. I personally don’t care for him, but he has done so much for FOSS. Also I am surprised more people trying to condemn him are not seeing that Stallman is basically autistic. People are essentially being mad over someone with autism acting in some ways autistic.. C’mon people need to start cutting some people a damn break this worlds lost all sanity..

Do we need another rehash? The only thing new I learned here is that his log showed a resignation from the GNU project leadership (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;wHrTo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;wHrTo</a>), which has since been removed, and that came only two days after saying he wouldn&#x27;t, joking about being a nuisance at the same time (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lists.gnu.org&#x2F;archive&#x2F;html&#x2F;info-gnu&#x2F;2019-09&#x2F;msg00008.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lists.gnu.org&#x2F;archive&#x2F;html&#x2F;info-gnu&#x2F;2019-09&#x2F;msg00008...</a>)<p>Edit: as for the &quot;maybe homeless&quot; claim, as far as I know, it&#x27;s his life style. Relatedly, I&#x27;ve heard many horror stories of people who hosted him. Here&#x27;s one I saw recently (with more in the replies): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mobile.twitter.com&#x2F;migueldeicaza&#x2F;status&#x2F;1173981287037751297" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mobile.twitter.com&#x2F;migueldeicaza&#x2F;status&#x2F;117398128703...</a>

I’m glad this is on the front page. My previous posts on the whole RMS “thing” had been removed or disappeared to quickly from the front page to discuss.<p>Honestly, I’d Remove the “flame war” system for the day. I feel Hacker News needs some discourse. The vocal minority is drowning out the masses.

The 4 steps of cancel culture, or socially sanctioned sadism:<p>1. He said&#x2F;did thing x. He must lose his livelihood and be annihilated.<p>2. He did not say thing x, but he said y which is basically thing x.<p>3. He said neither x or y, but he essentially deserves this anyway because of other things he may have done or said. They may have not offended anyone at the time to cause this level of outrage, but clearly combined with what he may have said recently, his time was up anyway.<p>4. He may not have deserved what happened to him, but maybe he should have just kept his mouth shut about issue x. If me and my friends accused him, then he probably wasn&#x27;t innocent.<p>(5.) Write medium&#x2F;Quillette&#x2F;twitter post: I was part of the mob until it came for me.

Why is there so much hero worship in technology? Compared to other business areas we have myriads of heroes and fallen angels. If you think about it, it just doesn’t make a lot of sense, yes there are a lot of people that move technology forward by several years... and without those people some developments would have taken longer. But there is nearly no example where I would be willing to say without hero x - y would never have happened. Is this something psychological? Is this about us having a feeling of agency and not just being simple players on the field of Moore’s Law?

In the words of the Artificial Intelligence from War Games &quot;this is all a strange game in which the only winning move is not to play.&quot;<p>Let&#x27;s hope that we can still play chess together.

&gt; Stallman made some technically-correct-but-utterly-tactless comments<p>No. No, he didn&#x27;t. He made some technically incorrect comments. Regardless of whether or not what Minsky did <i>should</i> be considered assault, it <i>is</i> considered assault, and (more importantly) it <i>was</i> considered at the time Minsky is alleged to have done it.<p>Stallman did not say that what Minsky did shouldn&#x27;t be assault. He said that Minsky shouldn&#x27;t be regarded as having committed assault.

<i>sigh</i> I just wrote a screed ripping this apart but seriously, no-one who liked it will have their minds changed by me.<p>Instead, I’ll make a point that should concern anyone who actually cares about Free Software and not dragging it into the culture war: the article claims Free Software has a bus factor of one (or possibly zero now). That had better not be the case. And if it is the case, now is the time to do something about it.

&gt; blatantly lie about what was said,<p>I&#x27;ve seen this said a few times, and it needs to be cleared up.<p>Stallman defended Minsky by saying it wasn&#x27;t rape and it was assault. To mount this defence Stallman had to ignore common English definitions for both words, and he had to ignore the legal definitions of both words.<p>People are angry at Stallman for what he actually said, not what you think they think he said.<p>If you want to say that you want necrophiles to fuck your corpse when you die; that you think the harms of incestual abuse can be avoided with condom use; that you think child abuse isn&#x27;t that harmful; that you think sexual assault isn&#x27;t assault unless force or violence is used; that having sex with a trafficked coerced child isn&#x27;t rape; then you shouldn&#x27;t be surprised when projects want to distance themselves from your views.<p>&gt; You don’t get the free software movement without a person like Richard Stallman<p>We don&#x27;t get the free software movement we have without Stallman, but what&#x27;s that actually saying? How popular would gnu be if it had someone who was better at communication involved?

I think the most interesting part of this gotterdamerung is the claim in “Remove Stallman appendix A” that if the work of a Great Genius hinders The work of some number of talented skilled folk, then society is ultimately at a loss.<p>I’m not certain that this is necessarily true. Or false for that matter. I have an intuition, possibly colored by an overall culture of hero worship, that it is false.<p>This is the rationale: the dynamics large groups of people inevitably approaches that of a committee. Committees are averaging devices that smooth potentially groundbreaking ideas out of serious consideration. Genius on the other hand is not only extraordinarily capable of such groundbreaking ideas but is able to insist on them doggedly.<p>OTOH it means that one true genius (and maybe Stallman isn’t one, but true geniuses have very very often been assholes) is worth almost an infinite number of merely talented folk.<p>The ultimate question: what lifted us from mere animal status 10-15K years ago? A handful of geniuses or a general society awakening?<p>But also; how may “young talented physicists” it takes to change a lightbulb?

&gt; He held his positions at MIT, GNU, and the FSF for over thirty years, and in that time nobody accused him of coercion, unwanted touching, or verbal harassment.<p>The author missed the point of the Me Too movement. Lot of other powerful people were not publicly accused for decades because they were powerful and could easily silence their accusers.

Amid the controversy, I thought this post (indirectly linked from another one below) makes a pretty strong case, with witnesses albeit anonymous ones, that RMS has a history of bad behaviour including sexual harassment:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@selamjie&#x2F;remove-richard-stallman-appendix-a-a7e41e784f88" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@selamjie&#x2F;remove-richard-stallman-appendi...</a><p>It also links to this, from <i>1983</i> which does not name RMS but is pretty interesting and damning about the culture of computer science at the time:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;homes.cs.washington.edu&#x2F;~lazowska&#x2F;mit&#x2F;?source=post_page-----a7e41e784f88----------------------" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;homes.cs.washington.edu&#x2F;~lazowska&#x2F;mit&#x2F;?source=post_p...</a><p>Disclaimer: I&#x27;m a man, I&#x27;m not a feminist, I dislike cancel culture.

I wouldn&#x27;t call the MIT CSAIL list &quot;private communications&quot;. Sure, it&#x27;s not open to the general public but it is public enough to warrant a public discussion. (Additionally it has members around the same age as the abuse victim.)

I&#x27;d like to understand HN&#x27;s ranking algorithm.<p>At the top of the frontpage:<p>- Mesh Spreadsheet - 66 points, 2 hours ago<p>At the bottom of the frontpage:<p>- In Defense of Richard Stallman - 463 points, 1 hour ago<p>Archive: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.fo&#x2F;Mc5qV" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.fo&#x2F;Mc5qV</a>

Perhaps for topics like these we should adopt the rules of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;NeutralPolitics&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;NeutralPolitics&#x2F;</a> ?<p>Specifically, rules 1, 2, 4, 8.

Amen. Social justice warriors and baseless witch hunt participators are the armpit of humanity, wanting attention by covering up their own incompetence and insecurities. Go do something with your life, and mind your own business.

&gt;He is now likely homeless and his friends (such as Eric Raymond) have had trouble contacting him.<p>and as esr wrote:<p>&gt;I guess he was sleeping in his office and can’t anymore.<p>But this hasn&#x27;t been true for years.<p>&gt;Until around 1998, my office at MIT was also my residence. I was even registered to vote from there. Nowadays I have a separate residence in Cambridge not far from MIT. However, I am rarely there, since I am nearly always travelling out of town.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stallman.org&#x2F;rms-lifestyle.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stallman.org&#x2F;rms-lifestyle.html</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stallman.org&#x2F;archives&#x2F;2006-may-aug.html#05%20June%202006%20(Dutch%20paedophiles%20form%20political%20party)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stallman.org&#x2F;archives&#x2F;2006-may-aug.html#05%20June%20...</a><p>Done. You go on record that it’s sometimes ok to fuck children you’re gonna have a bad time. Full stop. Who gives a shit that the Minsky comment got misquoted or whatever, he has worse shit on his website. Why is this a conversation?

The idea that sharing an email sent to you is a &quot;leak&quot; that somehow violates privacy is incoherent. This is doubly so when we are talking about a mailing list.

RMS is a true Hero, he gives his life to fight for the basic human right for free computing. RMS is a modern historical figure on par with Jesus. His weird opinions on other topics and clumsy social behaviour do not matter a bit in comparision and if at all they need to be adressed with love and care, not cruxification.

500+ points in under an hour, yet at the bottom of the front page. Is &quot;flag&quot; just a super downvote?

Why is hackernews kicking all Stallman threads off the frontpage?<p>ycombinator seems to have an agenda in this too apparently.

&gt; There would be no copyleft, no GNU General Public License, no Free Software Foundation, no GNU userspace (binutils, coreutils, etc), no GNU Compiler Collection, and (of course) no Emacs<p>Like no other decent person would&#x27;ve been able to invent these?

We’re a nation of rats now.

&gt; The word “assaulting” presumes that he applied force or violence, in some unspecified way, but the article itself says no such thing. Only that they had sex.<p>If someone appears to be having sex with someone that appears to be underage, the older person appears to be sexually assaulting the younger person. This is because a minor cannot legally consent which makes non-consensual sex forceful by definition, hence it is called assault.<p>In other words: rms was wrong, and now rms is gone.

<i>Update: According to his website, Stallman has found housing. He also says he will continue to head GNU</i><p>Glad to see these updates.

RMS should sue the publications for defamation and loss of income. Hopefully someone can help him with this if needed.

Of course the real monsters among the rich and powerful, the clintons, the trumps, continue to be untouchable.

my friend and i use the N word multiple times in our conversation or in chat. None of us are black. Context matters... Now if one day somebody hacks my phone and says i am a racist by leaking parts of my messages- is that ethical? how far are we from censoring others thoughts?

Thank you for that article!!<p>It&#x27;s a shame what a piss-poor narrow-minded society &#x27;the west&#x27; has become...

To add insult to injury, the author of the first libelous article against Stallman works for a US government contractor in company developing drones and other killing machines... <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21090851" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21090851</a>

Many of history&#x27;s most brilliant people have low emotional intelligence to the point where their statements seem&#x2F;are quite anti social.<p>How far would Linus Torvald have made it in today&#x27;s political climate?<p>Jonathan Haidt&#x27;s The Coddling of the American gives some great insights into the issue of feelings vs. truth.

I&#x27;m not sure someone with such bizarre views on consent should be in a leadership position or be a teacher. I usually agree with articles like this but then I read stallmans views and they are probably disqualifying.

With all the asshole CEOs, managers, office bullies, in this world - of course we should ruin the life of Richard Stallman. Well done everybody.

Thank you so much for this post.

This thread should be required reading anytime someone asks why there aren’t more women in computing science.

100% this post. I&#x27;m extremely saddened by the willingness to destroy a man based on nothing.

How was he ``forced&#x27;&#x27; to resign?

Thanks

Every aggressor in all of history always acted out of self-righteous victimhood.

He might’ve been an influential figure, but he’s still a creep. Just because someone made something once doesn’t mean we should turn a blind eye towards them.

This is a bad post

The article says you don&#x27;t get the free software movement without RMS.<p>What about BSD?

Am i reading it correctly that the author implies that the end justifies the means (in this case stallmans behaviour) because without it we would not have what we have today. Unless you have a time machine that is just speculation.

Totally right as regards the private mail.<p>However, the fact that he is homeless has nothing to do with the discussion. It just adds some &quot;feeling&quot; to the problem which should not be there. A MacArthur fellow (1990) is supposed to be able to manage his life (or get someone to do so).

Can we stop these threads? They are not productive, we have all chosen our sides on this particular &quot;metoo&quot; vs. &quot;cancel culture&quot; debate and nobody is having their minds changed.

This article is so wrong in so many ways...<p>&quot; You don’t get the free software movement without a person like Richard Stallman.&quot;<p>Well once Stallman pass away, it will be the apocalypsis for the free software movement

Is it possible for us to have leaders who are driven and excellent, who also manage to be excellent to other people?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;bcrypt&#x2F;status&#x2F;1173731697159835648" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;bcrypt&#x2F;status&#x2F;1173731697159835648</a><p>I don’t think it’s subscribing to or endorsing cancel culture to ask for that. RMS being a rude, insensitive jerk is not because he’s an aspie (claiming such is rude to aspies who manage to not be assholes), but because he is a selfish and self-absorbed person.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;rakyll&#x2F;status&#x2F;1174141125902229504" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;rakyll&#x2F;status&#x2F;1174141125902229504</a><p>We deserve better leadership.

&gt; In short: Stallman made some technically-correct-but-utterly-tactless comments<p>No, they were not &quot;technically correct.&quot; Neither Stallman nor the author of this post are experts on sexual assault, and neither has the requisite knowledge to even judge whether the statements were technically correct or not. If people are too lazy to learn about an issue in some depth, they should just shut up and listen to the experts. And if they don&#x27;t want to listen to the experts, they should at least study the issue in some depth. I&#x27;m sure neither Stallman nor the author of this post would be as forgiving towards equally clueless, equally stupid comments made about programming by people who have no clear idea of what it is.<p>Also, the problem with making those comments, correct or otherwise, wasn&#x27;t one of tact. That the author and Stallman don&#x27;t understand the actual, direct, real harm in an authority figure making such comments in a public workplace forum could be either due to innocent ignorance or willful ignorance, but it is ignorance. And if, in the case of Stallman, he continues to cause this harm after being warned, <i>and</i> doesn&#x27;t wish to apologize, <i>and</i> this comes after decades of inappropriate workplace behavior, then a sane world would show him the door.<p>In any event, like a lawyer who doesn&#x27;t know the law, the author doesn&#x27;t address, nor seem to understand, the issue at the heart of the matter, and puts himself in the same position of ignorance as Stallman. And so the post isn&#x27;t so much a defense as it is yet another diatribe on how weird, confusing and even unfair certain subjects can seem to people who don&#x27;t understand them nor really wish to. Thank you, but we know that. Stallman, or anyone for that matter, deserves better than this Rudy Giuliani &quot;defense.&quot;