The Stallman Report

Interesting to note that the A record for stallman-report.org was, up until a few days ago, the same as the A record for drewdevault.com:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.ibb.co&#x2F;RNBGcTJ&#x2F;securitytrails-drewdevault.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.ibb.co&#x2F;RNBGcTJ&#x2F;securitytrails-drewdevault.png</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.ibb.co&#x2F;NYtTQnh&#x2F;securitytrails-stallmanreport.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.ibb.co&#x2F;NYtTQnh&#x2F;securitytrails-stallmanreport.png</a><p>So even though the report is anonymous, we can be almost certain that Drew is behind it, as he was for the previous hit piece.

On the one hand, the case seems too little. Some weird opinions (but are you in the free country with free speech to express even weird opinions?), then an interaction back in the 80&#x27;s(!!!), exactly one weird comment on stage, suggestive behaviour...<p>On the other hand, it&#x27;s not a criminal charge. It&#x27;s about who and how leads an institution.<p>I&#x27;ve seen post-USSR academic institutions led by old directors for decades, with good scientific achievements in the background, but at the time just being there for the old merits, doing ceremonial stuff and signing the necessary minimum of papers. At the time, academia was centrally financed, so they negotiated the money with the upper ranks of the same age and background.<p>Their behaviour was weird to many people around: comments about ages &amp; sex (like &quot;women&#x27;s business is the kitchen&quot;), broad judgements, &quot;don&#x27;t be stupid kid, turn your brain on&quot; kind of comments, making people unease. Quite likely bitter about the USSR collapse. My female friends said they were told after studying or working in academia that they should go have kind rather than try getting PhD. There was no other institution of the same kind in the city. And after all, why should YOU quit as soon as you get unprofessional treatment?<p>Recalling this, I can understand the discontent with Stallman and the board.

If there was criminal conduct, someone should file a criminal complaint and have it adjudicated in a court of law with evidence, a jury and witness testimony and once convicted the accused should be appropriately punished.<p>Otherwise, how is anyone going to determine the truth of the allegations?<p>If the behavior was non-criminal then the decision should be made through normal non-profit governance mechanisms. We have due process of law for a reason which is that people are innocent until proven guilty and there are the proper protections to make sure a fair trial occurs.<p>Another well known non-profit in the biotech space received a 20 million donation and right after that a group of people kicked out the founder citing perceived sexual innuendo in old emails that did not risen to the level of a criminal offense. The donor wanted their money back, because they had given it to support the founder and his mission, but it was too late.

I read it all the way through once, but may have a missed something. Am I to understand that because he has (extremely) objectionable private views that he should be booted out of the organization he started? It seems like there is no evidence of untoward behavior, just a bunch of gross opinions?<p>If that’s the case, I’m completely against ejecting him simply because he publishes nasty thoughts. I say this as a guy who lived through many kinds of abuse as a child. My opinions and almost everything are the exact opposite of his. I don’t like most of his opinions, I don’t like his humor, I disagree with most of his politics, and dealing with him in person is exceptionally unpleasant.<p>But the FSF is an American organization, and in America we have something close to free speech. If he’s being kicked out for expressing sick thoughts on his personal website, but not in his capacity as a member of the foundation, I believe they are making a grave and immoral mistake. They have every right to do it, but I don’t agree with taking such action.

Character assassination by anonymous cowards.<p>The Free Software movement has been completely routed. MS owns GitHub. The farmers fighting for the &quot;right to repair&quot; their tractors are the &quot;front&quot; of the &quot;battle&quot; for user empowerment. But sure let&#x27;s beat the shit out of the dead horse that&#x27;s actually a real live old man with cancer who wrote fucking Emacs, see if that helps?

GNU kind communication guidelines the report purports to be transphobic:<p>&quot;Please think about how to treat other participants with respect, especially when you disagree with them. For instance, call them by the names they use, and refer to them using words whose meanings (as you understand them) cover those participants&#x27; stated gender identities. Please also show tolerance and respect for people who do that using different words from the words you use.&quot;<p>Also strongly disagree with stopping support FSF, in particular from an anonymous group.<p>Recommendations are quite of, despite the generally accurate and reasonable report.

This is really great work getting all of the evidence into one place. Really helpful, thanks. I really like the focus on the victims.<p>I am a previous PhD student who worked under Marvin Minsky, and I do believe that there is no evidence that Minsky was present for any sexual misconduct, and some of the quotes about Minksy do not mention that there is no evidence of Minsky&#x27;s sexual misconduct. I believe the quotes about Minsky unfairly harm Minsky&#x27;s reputation.<p>Again, this is great work, and I&#x27;m mostly nitpicking from my very particular perspective as someone who has worked directly under Minsky.

I think it is good that people put in a lot of effort to collect this in one place. The report opens with a very strong perspective:<p>&gt;The case against Stallman is clear, and yet the free software community has failed to act, in particular at the level of institutions and leadership but also in the form of grassroots support for Stallman. Many defenses of Stallman rely on a comfortable ignorance: ignorance of the scope and depth of Stallman’s political campaign against women and victims of sexual violence, or a comfortable belief that Stallman ceased his problematic behavior following his 2021 re-instatement in the Free Software Foundation. Some believe that Stallman’s speech has not caused material harm, or that his fringe views are not taken seriously; we provide evidence to dismiss all of these arguments in this report.<p>One thing I have consistently encountered when discussing contentious topics with people is that intentional ignorance is a <i>tactic</i>. One cannot be held responsible for acting one way or another on an issue if they do not know anything about it. Women I know in industry report this as by far the most common reaction of male coworkers to one of their colleagues facing allegations of sexual harassment. They don&#x27;t know anything about it, it seems complicated, they haven&#x27;t followed it closely, they don&#x27;t want to get involved, etc. It is very frustrating and I am glad the report has identified this phenomenon and is pointing out this has been going on for long enough that it cannot be reasonably deployed by anybody.

Here is a web site that defends Stallman:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stallmansupport.org&#x2F;richard-stallman-honors-and-awards.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stallmansupport.org&#x2F;richard-stallman-honors-and-awar...</a><p>I take no position.

The man has weird views on non tech issues. Some are thought provoking, some are plain bad hills to die on. But I don&#x27;t see how this is something I should be getting up in arms over.<p>The FSF has largely failed to garner political&#x2F;public influence to prevent the enshittification of the digital world. What is there to be gained from a putsch like this? If these people truly cared about the mission RMS set out to achieve they would realize that further dividing the minuscule libre software community (which is already co-opted by corporate interests to a large degree) will only get us further away from making a difference in the areas that actually matter.<p>Like damn, we only narrowly avoided a future where I can&#x27;t even browse the internet without a TPM attested bootchain deemed &quot;trustworthy&quot; by corporations, and somehow a 71 year old cancer patient is the hottest issue in the tech world right now? Get a fucking grip.<p>This all just seems like a toxic power grab by people who are blinded by their narcissistic self righteousness.

Puberty was considered the adulthood age for mellinia, that is suitable for marriage (and is still considered so in several places).<p>Why is this a very controversial topic?

For once doesn&#x27;t seem like a hit piece, the arguments are pretty solid and well documented.<p>Very thorough job and if RMS was smart he would gracefully step down.<p>The only argument I find here against it is the question of whether someone&#x27;s personal opinions should be a reason to be removed from a leadership position.<p>Edit: Oh wow just read the recommendations. Can&#x27;t agree to most of it, sorry.

I am concerned about the fact that we don&#x27;t know the identities of any of the authors of this web page.<p>There are people who find it very enjoyable to destroy someone&#x27;s reputation (for basically the same reason that there are people for whom murder is such a turn-on that they cannot stop themselves from doing it till they get caught).<p>Also, there might be ways to profit or personally benefit from a campaign like this. E.g., one of the authors of this web page might covet one of the titles or jobs Stallman currently holds -- for themselves or for a friend. E.g., Stallman or one of his supporters might be approached in the coming days with an offer: I can make this web page disappear from public view, but it will cost you. Basically any <i>rival</i> has an incentive to try to get you fired and to destroy your reputation.<p>I suspect that we as a society should adopt the general rule that anonymous attacks on the reputation of a person should be ignored. In the absence of such a rule, anyone can keep on waging campaigns of reputation destruction (in pursuit of getting ahead somehow or of a twisted kind of enjoyment) with little to no cost or risk to themselves. The attack can include lies, and even if the lies are discovered, again there is no cost or consequence to the attacker.

Anything more to these allegations than there was last time?<p>Or is this yet another chapter of someone&#x27;s envy resorting to character assassination instead of finding contentment in their own work?<p>If these people succeeded in their apparent goal of making RMS less popular, do they think the world will love them for it? Why aint they signing their name?

I don&#x27;t think rms should have returned to the FSF board and I do believe his continued presence there does more harm than good, not because of hit pieces against him damaging his reputation, but because of his own behavior. I&#x27;m also aware that some of the vocal voices defending Stallman are nothing but channeled bigotry of their owners (oftentimes much worse than anything Stallman has ever been alleged of) and all I can say about those is how disgusted I am by them.<p>That said, I read this page in its entirety and I can&#x27;t help but notice how manipulative this report is. I can&#x27;t tell whether this was intentional malice, a sign of subconscious bias or maybe just careless use of words, but constructs like &quot;we can conclude that [statement that doesn&#x27;t follow from what was said before]&quot;, placing whole paragraphs that are hard to disagree with but aren&#x27;t related to quoted positions and are clearly meant to inflict negative emotional response to induce implicit misrepresentation (such as the one that starts with &quot;The actors involved in pornographic films...&quot;) and stating things like &quot;absolves the perpetrator of wrongdoing&quot; or &quot;consistently defends [something]&quot; despite of that not being present in the quoted source material nor able to be inferred from it without making possibly wrong assumptions on intentions behind the words written make me doubt whether this was authored in good faith, even when the report makes some points about Stallman that I ultimately agree with.

The anonymous authors of this website have instructed people on other websites to come here and downvote any and all comments that speak in favor of RMS:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mastodon.social&#x2F;@report_press&#x2F;113305688857205037" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mastodon.social&#x2F;@report_press&#x2F;113305688857205037</a><p>This is telling. They don&#x27;t want discourse, they want to silence and bully everyone who disagrees with them so only they are allowed to speak.<p>All they have is anonymous accusations with zero proof, an off-context quote regarding an MIT professor, off-color jokes made 50 years ago and a couple of (retracted) opinions that are no worse than the things being said by prominent philosophers like Michel Foucault and Simone de Beauvoir.

Back when RMS was writing the GNU utilities, if you weren&#x27;t willing to have an occasional chance encounter with him in the same building, you were limiting your options for a productive computer science career.<p>I&#x27;m half serious when I say he&#x27;s the reason so many women at MIT went to biotech instead, and so we can thank him for mRNA vaccines.<p>But that is no longer the case. Refusing to be in the same room as him will in no way retard your progress in computer science nowadays. If anything, it enhances your prospects.<p>So I don&#x27;t see a problem with having a space marked &quot;Beware the RMS,&quot; where he can keep on with his work and the people who can put up with him, do. I don&#x27;t see a problem with that space being marked &quot;FSF&quot; either. Namespace is a large space.

Nice try Drew Deflop, we know its you.

seems like a rehash of the same hit piece they tried to pull off back in 2021

Whether you find the people who want RMS to resign obnoxious or not, this is a very well documented and clear-headed collection of what they think (and convinced me) is wrong with the man

The alternative opinion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stallmansupport.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stallmansupport.org</a>

As sourced on kiwifarms, drew himself has posted lolicon on reddit.

How curious to see that the authors of this character assassination are anonymous. I wonder if it&#x27;s a cabal of closed-source proprietary software authors behind this.<p>If this was being released 10-20 years ago, I&#x27;d suspect the involvement of Microsoft and their allies. These days, who knows. The Free Software movement has been attacked from many angles over the years, from those who want to destroy it completely to those who want to control and usurp it. There certainly are a long list of suspects for who may have authored this screed.<p>It would be interesting to see if a stylometric analysis could unmask those responsible. Perhaps we&#x27;d find dark skeletons in their closets, as is so often the case for those who point accusatory fingers at others using spurious evidence.

Honestly, it looks like a personal RMS hate page written by an autistic (or someone in a manic state) man. I can&#x27;t say that someone who goes through years of mailing lists looking for evidence of RMS saying controversial things is sane. Besides that, the fact of expressing a controversial opinion is not a crime, and shouldn&#x27;t (and can&#x27;t) be punished. What is really important, is that the modern cancel culture (and this page as part of it) is destroying the freedom of speech, and it may really be the end of our society as we know it. Societal norms tend to change, and usually you change them by discussing them. It reminds me of lynching - someone can be cancelled just for saying something wrong (like &quot;God does not exist&quot;), or because of a false accusation (that someone is a witch). Do you want to live in a world, where your life can be destroyed because you said something that isn&#x27;t now socially acceptable 10 years ago? Anyone can become the next one, and you are no exception, no matter how much do you support modern social movements.