Such as?

Most of "examples" that were in circulation for past days were usually misunderstood jokes that others made at his expense. Seriously - how can one treat somebody mentioning "if he ever hits on you, just tell him you use vim" as an example of what's wrong with rms seriously? Stories about plants being kept by female professors just to scare him away? Please. You need to be completely missing the context to interpret it even remotely close to how it's being used now.

If you haven't seen the actual quotes from him by now, theres no chance you will pay attention to them going forward.

The point is - I've seen plenty thrown around, most very clearly manipulated. What's more - some small amount of them made me doubt in Stallman a bit, like the "knight for ladies" thing, but after a while it turned out it was manipulated as well, so... it feels like standing on rms side here might be a pretty safe bet after all.

If you're too lazy to do the research yourself, I've even found a page that collects it and does proper justice to objectively present them in full context: https://sterling-archermedes.github.io/ (although this text could do just as well with a few less "paid to write, not to read" repetitions...)

Either you've been not paying attention (in which case, why are you so self-righteously claiming there's nothing else that happened), or you have been paying attention, and you're deliberately ignoring or are mischaracterizing all the actual, real accounts of bad behavior that have been reported over the past week or two.

Either way, I'm not really in a mood to educate you.

"inappropriate and harassing behavior"

What exactly are you claiming he did to harass people?

What exactly did he do that was inappropriate?

Stallman did nothing to harass people. It's all hearsay. Some of the supposed harassment stories contain verifiably false details, for example, that Stallman was in an open marriage. Stallman was in fact never married. There is a very good reason that we do not admit this level of evidence in courts of law.

You know all the people on Twitter claiming that "numerous" women have confided in them that Stallman kept them out of tech? It's all fake. These claims are identical in structure and purpose to Joseph McCarthy's famous "I have here in my hand a list" line. What the mob is doing now to Stallman is exactly the same thing that the mob did to everyone suspected of communism in the 1950s.

Why isn't the harassing behavior being brought up through the right channels? Is internet rage the right way to do this?

Who says it hasn't been? In general, universities and non-profits and companies don't disclose private reports of abuse or harassment. Who says MIT, the FSF, and GNU Project haven't all been getting private reports in addition to the people tweeting and blogging about their misadventures with RMS?

And regardless, this behavior has apparently been going on for decades without anyone taking action. Can you blame people for thinking that "the right channels" aren't working?

Exactly what channels? The police? A lot of what RMS has done isn't illegal and generally there's a very high legal bar for harassment.

So people eventually share their stories through social media and even that doesn't work sometimes (see: Riot). His behavior doesn't have to cross into illegality to be reprehensible.

For a start just leaving a paper trail of formal complaints at MIT would help ascertain this has been happenning for a long time. I just find it shocking that there is no formal complaint. Instead, what we have is just random people claiming that other people got harassed. None of this is verifiable and honestly if internet has thought us anything it is that everybody lies in social media just to get a few likes.

You realize that that very well could be the case and reason why Stallman stepped down, correct?

MIT could likely get into deep trouble if they chose to publish all of the formal complaints against Stallman for obvious privacy reasons and this incident could've just been the proverbial final straw.

And regardless: Apply Occam's Razor here. What is more likely: A group of random people consisting of professors and students bringing grievances against Stallman, or some sort of conspiracy where all of those people are lying, embellishing etc for some form of revenge? If multiple disconnected people are calling someone an asshole, maybe there's an issue here. It's amazing to what lengths people will attempt to create a narrative defending RMS.

> A group of random people consisting of professors and students

A group of random people with a certain radical ideology, most of which work at google[0][1][2], the military[3], or have personal issues with him due to their history[4][5], etc. I certainly do not believe that it is a conspiracy - ie they are being honest on the fact that they do not like him (not necessarily on why they do not like him though) and that they are not being paid by someone to do it, but they are far from random people.

Also, I personally saw no professors being involved, although I might be mistaken.

[0] https://medium.com/@thomas.bushnell/a-reflection-on-the-depa...

[1] https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/1172422966904160257

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20995556

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21090851

[4] see 0 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Bushnell#GNU_Hurd

[5] https://twitter.com/migueldeicaza/status/1173981287037751297 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_de_Icaza#Advocacy_of_Mi...

Seriously, for a public figure you accept evidence this weak? No, Occam's Razor wouldn't let you make this conclusion at all.