He is welcome to his thoughts and opinions, and everyone else is entitled to their freedom not to associate with him as a result.

More to the point, everyone else is entitled to their freedom to associate with him, despite his thoughts and opinions. He is entitled to be the head of the GNU project because it's his fucking project. And if other people are willing to contribute money or code to that project, fucking FINE.

That's what this is about. Sarah Mei is coming from a place of, "Because RMS said this Very Bad Thing, no one should associate with him at all." Carrying with it an implied threat: if you continue to associate with a Bad Person, then you are a Bad Person and maybe whoever signs your checks should know just what a Bad Person you are.

FWIW I have never heard of Sarah Mei until today. I had a quick look at her Twitter account. There must be over 100 tweets and retweets about Stallman and the FSF over 10 days, that's when I stopped scrolling.

I have no horse in this race, this is too much of a hot topic to take a stance about personally, but I can't say I'm enjoying the modern viral Twitter shit-storm phenomenon very much.

The loudest campaign, wrong or right, wins by deafening everybody and amplifying their moral stance through that platform.

I have nothing against Mei personally, but I _loathe_ the modern Twitter driven moralism. Does everything have to be a crusade?

People have literally written the same thing about me and DNSSEC, both here and on Twitter. If you don't want to pay attention to Sarah Mei, you don't have to. People are allowed to decide what they care about, and to advocate for those things.

That being the case, Stallman is free to ignore his critics (and probably has; I think this is probably just vandalism).

Indeed. When he resigned from the FSF, I wondered myself -- was that a concession of defeat or a mic drop?

It was a concession of defeat; the Free Software Foundation does not belong to Richard Stallman.

> He is entitled to be the head of the GNU project because it's his fucking project.

Sure, but others are entitled to tell him he should step down, and he's entitled to do so if he feels like it.

Exactly. We could actually be more inclusive if we simply focused on people's actions within their domain, and ignored any flippant, tactless, or awkward _statement_ they may make when talking of other things.

That's a literal definition of the word "inclusive" that is at odds with its idiomatic meaning.

Yes! That is the paradox. The narrower the focus of your group, the more people you can include because they don't have to agree on all these other issues, too.

And that is precisely the problem - not that the Government or other explicit power structure is stepping on him, but that it's becoming fashionable for individuals to refuse to associate with anyone who has said or done anything they don't like, regardless of how much good they have done or how nice and helpful they have been otherwise.

Political changes tend to follow behind cultural changes here. If this cultural change has legs, then I have to wonder how long it will be before the Government does start acting more directly against anyone who has views outside of the mainstream. Social Credit score, anyone?

I really don't see anything "precise" in the way you've connected the dots from "people exercising their right not to associate with others whose behavior offends them" to "the Government is going to enact a social credit score".

Government Social Credit Scores are bad. It does not follow that people don't have reputations.

Heh, when your org’s image is a hostage of few short-minded haters, it is not particularly strong definition of freedom. Those haters could unassociate with him by simply not associating. “Remove <humanname>” is completely different.

That's true, I agree. But then everyone loses what he has to offer as well ...

Dude. RMS has a history going way back. No doubt people have been telling him (both in informal and formal settings) to curb his behavior in private for years. This was, as has been said before, the last straw.

You don’t have privy to his HR record at MIT and neither do I. But I’ll bet it looks closer in size and volume to Bart Simpson’s file than it does Lisa Simpson.

It is hard to fire people in academia. They found a legit, lawsuit-proof excuse to can him and took it.

If there were a credible case of criminal misconduct against him, you can be sure you'd hear the witch hunters cry it from the fucking rooftops.

In the hours I've spent reading this story, all I've seen is hearsay about women feeling uncomfortable about him having a mattress in his office; criminally stupid misreadings of his writings regarding Minsky; and of course various accounts him being a terribly unpleasant person, which we already knew.

It's obvious what ways the winds are blowing. There's no place for misfits like RMS in today's world. (But I guess there never really was.) That doesn't mean I have to like it.

There is no amount of evidence that would please alt-right types like you. That’s why it’s not worth discussing things with you. Construct whatever narrative helps you sleep at night.... if this was any other website, I’d have a significantly less measured response.... needless to say, get used to being on the losing side of the culture war.

Would you please stop posting in the flamewar style like this to HN? It just degrades this place even further. I'm sure you can find substantive ways to make your points, or simply the discipline not to feed egregious comments.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Not only did he not commit a crime, he didn't even do anything other than awkwardly posit that maybe his deceased friend didn't realize he was doing something wrong. Certainly this was a tactless comment.

Now I don't personally like Richard Stallman, but the "one tactless comment and you're dead _and_ people who want to associate with you are dead, too" approach to modern Internet justice seems wrong.

In mob justice scenarios, it helps to have associates who are willing to defend you and stand by you. But it seems that Stallman has a history of wearing out his welcomes, so that rather than supporting him, his associates instead were saying "we'll quit if you don't push him out."

When you run a public organization, personal skills do matter.

> If you don't link what he says, you can just ignore him.

If the contributors to the GNU project stop contributing since they do not like what he says, Stallman becomes a liability. Resignation is likely the only viable option.

It is also worth noting that there are reasons to stop contributing to an organizations for reasons other than policing the thoughts and opinions of its leadership. Sometimes people don't want to be associated with those thoughts and opinions, even if they are a strong proponent of the freedom of speech. Other people will want to limit their exposure to thoughts and ideas that they find revolting, which is difficult to do when the leadership sanctions them. While it is possible to argue that ending contributions results in the policing of a threshold for decency regardless of the motivation, the motivations are meaningfully different.

Yes, we should be grateful to Stallman for his contributions to Free Software. We should also be grateful for his resignations. Some of his viewpoints are truly harmful to both individuals and society, while his leadership role lent those ideas more credence than they deserve. If he recognizes the undue influence that leadership roles provide, we should offer him an opportunity to rebuild his reputation. Otherwise, he brought his own downfall.