Thinking about how your actions affect your coworkers and customers isn’t some giant imposition, my dude. It’s a minimum baseline of professional competence. Any barista in the country knows better than to act like that in a professional setting.

Programmers aren't baristas, broseph, and few if any baristas are as deeply on the spectrum as Stallman is. It's fundamentally ableist to hold everyone to a high standard of social functioning in order for them to be permitted to work. Especially if it's their life's work, at a nonprofit foundation they established.

If you were talking about Eich, he should be free as a private citizen to support the political causes he chooses to, even if those causes are disagreeable. He did not interfere with gay members of the Mozilla community, nor make his anti-gay-marriage contributions in a capacity of representing the Mozilla Foundation. He was literally as low-key about it as he could possibly be.

Using “autism” as an excuse is insulting to autistic people and ignores the autistic women who were forced to accommodate his behavior over the years. “Autistic” does not mean “asshole”.

It must be nice to imagine the rules of society don’t apply to you, but eventually society disagrees. If you are bad at your job, you might be fired from it, and “not making the entire industry a more hostile place” was at last part of the job description of an MIT professor.

Also note that there are actual laws about it in the USA, so not only is it part of the job description, it is a legally required part of the job description.

The bits about autism referred specifically to Stallman's cringetastic political expressions, not the other things he might've been up to.

I wasn’t thinking about Eich, but that is another good example: it doesn’t matter how low-key you oppose some of your employees’ marriages, doing it at all still makes you a shitty CEO who makes it harder for your company to recruit and retain talent. Given that that is one of the core job requirements of a CEO, it made him unqualified for the position he held.

We don't know what Eich supports or opposes, all we know is that he contributed money to a campaign to oppose a particular law. Maybe he thought the law was unconstitutional or that, as written, it would cause more harm than good.

And even if he were opposed to gay marriage, if you cannot imagine how someone can philosophically oppose something, even if they are wrong, and yet still practice tolerance for that thing in their own life, then you cannot be reasoned with and should probably delete your account.

I’m gay. Brendan Eich ACTIVELY supported an institution attempting to keep me from being equal. So yeah, if you have the wrong political views, like ones that consider some people unequal, you absolutely deserve to be shitcanned. I’m sorry if I have a hard time feeling bad for people like that. I hope we find and weed out every last bigot, because people like me have fought too long and too hard to still be subjected to this crap. We don’t deserve it. Nobody deserves it.

If it's open season on anyone with undesirable political views, to prevent them from doing good work in areas unconnected with their political activity, what's to become of you when your political views are in the crosshairs? Once you embark on purges of people you don't like or disagree with, you've changed the rules of engagement. Your enemies will then feel justified in turning those same rules on you once they have a taste of a little bit of power.

Roper: So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!

More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

Roper: I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you — where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast — man's laws, not God's — and if you cut them down — and you're just the man to do it — d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.