(source: former FSF board member)
> She is similarly dismissive of another horrific incident. In the early 70s, when she and Stein were coming home after a gig, a man followed them and forced them at knifepoint to let him into their apartment. He was looking for drugs and equipment. He tied up Stein, then Harry. Once he had piled up the equipment he was going to take – guitars, Stein’s camera – he raped her on the bed.
> In her book, she writes: “I can’t say that I felt a lot of fear. In the end, the stolen guitars hurt me more than the rape.” Can this be true? “Yes,” she says. “I mean, I was angry and I felt victimised. I wasn’t beaten or harmed physically, it was all emotional or mental. Being raped – or fucked – by some stranger against my will at knifepoint, you know …” She pauses and sighs. “It wasn’t a happy moment in my life, but I really, seriously, empathise with women who are beaten. That would be something that [would lead to] emotional ramifications for the rest of my life. But this doesn’t.”
> She knows it may seem hard to believe. “It is ludicrous,” she says, “and it is kind of funny that I would say it, but, truly, I wasn’t physically molested. Afterwards, I was with Chris, and I was, you know …” She makes a sound to signal the horror she must have felt. “I went on with my life. But as I say, I wasn’t beaten or assaulted and I think that, coupled with being sexually violated, is truly awful. Then you are really made to feel powerless.” But she was tied up at knifepoint. Didn’t that make her feel powerless? “Yeah. Not the same. It wasn’t for me anyway.” She didn’t have counselling, and says Stein was supportive “and we moved on”.
So Debbie Harry is certainly making a distinction here between forced sex alone and forced sex with physical violence. And for her that distinction makes what she suffered less serious than if it had included physical violence. Do you want to discount her opinion too?
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/oct/01/debbie-...
I find your interpretation of "an attempt to reduce the perception of the seriousness of the crime" a highly incharitable reading of what he says!
Stallman's entire point is that he feels the use of the word "assault" causes people to believe the crime is more serious than he believes it is. Pointing that out isn't uncharitable.
The only reason "sexual assault" covers what allegedly took place is because the expression was redefined in the first place to cover two separate things, which is exactly the problem. Stallman called not for redefining "sexual assault" as you put it, but for undoing a redefinition that puts it at odds with how those terms are conventionally used and causes unnecessary confusion.
I'm partial to the term "Libre" myself, though in this case it doesn't matter much, since it's a concept that people aren't familiar with anyway and you have to explain it no matter what word you use.
Because he is criticizing that exactly this mingling of terms happened!
> Pointing that out isn't uncharitable.
I'm beginning to feel that you're being willfully incharitable but give you the benefit of doubt that you could be merely misinformed.
I imagine however that most legislatures get around the issue by having explicit paragraphs establishing harsher punishments for violent rape vs mutually-accepted statutory rape.
That Google, the Ad company threatening user's privacy, abusing user's rights, collecting user's data.
The company fined for 5 billion dollars in an anti trust case in EU.
The company behind YouTube, fined for 170 million dollars for collecting kids data [1]
The company behind Chrome, that recently proposed a change to stop ad blocking extensions from working (did I say they sell ads?)
AFAIK Stallman never worked for or at any company the like of Google.
Neither did Eben Moglen, who still offers pro bono legal support for free software at the Freedom law center, which he founded.
For those that do not know him, Moglen was member of Philip Zimmermann's (PGP creator) defense team.
Strangely enough, he was another target of Garret, a couple years ago he declared him "no longer a friend of the FSF".
He was already working for Google.
[1] https://variety.com/2019/digital/news/youtube-ftc-fine-170-m...
Trademarks have to be enforced or you lose them.
> threatened to ruin the life of an FSF board member
Can you please backup this claim? I've found nothing to validate it.
> and who was fired by the FSF for briefing against the FSF's interests
According to every source I've found he resigned himself and voluntarily stepped down and left "on good terms" to take care of SFLC which he had recently founded.
It might be political jargon, but there is no way to prove he was fired.
> FSF's interests while being paid by Oracle.
AFAIK Moglen never worked or took money from Oracle.
Can you please clarify what you mean?
His trademark is on "Software freedom law center", and he's suing the Software Freedom Conservancy. He doesn't hold a trademark on "Software Freedom".
> Can you please backup this claim? I've found nothing to validate it.
I was there when it was reported and had confirmation from a witness.
> According to every source I've found he resigned himself and voluntarily stepped down and left "on good terms" to take care of SFLC which he had recently founded.
> It might be political jargon, but there is no way to prove he was fired.
I was on the board when he was fired.
> AFAIK Moglen never worked or took money from Oracle
Why would you be in a position to know?
Has he ever claimed that?
> I was there when it was reported and had confirmation from a witness.
It is true because I say so it's not really an answer to the question.
> I was on the board when he was fired.
So you can confirm you fired him?
That's interesting.
Back then you wrote
> This, in conjunction with his behaviour over the ZFS issue, led to him stepping down as the FSF's general counsel.
You did not say "fired" anywhere.
Why didn't you just say "fired"?
> Why would you be in a position to know?
I'm in the position to ask why you're accusing someone of taking money, without proof.
It's just human decency, I happen to be a contributor (a tiny one, but sill one) of both FSF and FSLC and I would like to know if Moglen took money from Oracle to sue other FSF foundations.
You seem to know though, but you don't say.
And even if it was true, is taking money from Oracle a crime per se?
What about taking money from Apple, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft? more than a few FSF folks work there.
You said that it's necessary to sue to protect trademarks. In this case, where is the necessity?
> It is true because I say so it's not really an answer to the question
You can choose to believe me or you can choose to believe I'm lying - entirely up to you.
> So you can confirm you fired him?
Eh. Asked him to resign with the understanding that he'd be fired otherwise.
> And even if it was true, is taking money from Oracle a crime per se?
It's not a crime, it's just inappropriate to take money from a company and provide legal opinions that serve their interests while serving as general counsel for an organisation that strongly and publicly holds a different opinion.
I understand you don't like questions.
Moglen founded SFLC and helped SFC come to the light.
He even registered SFC trademark, he asked for the cancellation of SFC, not the trademark of "Free Software".
Now it's sure that no one will try to register a trademark similar to FSLC or FSC dealing with free software.
With that move he protected both.
There's no need to double down on the false accusation line.
Facts are well know by now.
> You can choose to believe me or you can choose to believe I'm lying - entirely up to you.
I'm not a believer.
I prefer the sane way of doing things: reviewing evidence.
You are not providing any, just "believe me or not", which is not what I'd like to do when it's about my money.
You said something about Moglen that upset me, I've just asked for a clarification, that you refuse to provide.
> Eh. Asked him to resign with the understanding that he'd be fired otherwise
So you did fire him, but issued a different statement.
Good to know.
> It's not a crime, it's just inappropriate to take money from a company and provide legal opinions that serve their interests
When did this happen exactly?
Wasn't Moglen providing legal opinions to Debian, the FSF, Canonical, but not Oracle?
And What interests are you talking about?
Is Google any different from Oracle?
One of my favourite programmer ever, Alan Cox (who also kinda look like Stallman), worked for a long time on the Linux kernel but was also being paid by Intel for a few years. What's wrong about that?
> as general counsel for an organisation that strongly and publicly holds a different opinion
The different opinion was a minor difference though.
I remember the OpenZFS problem: the only difference was that Moglen believed that users can legally distribute copies of OpenZFS binary blobs as the result of the compilation of an openly licensed source code, while FSF said no.
They had the same opinion on everything else.
Even Linus said in the past “But one gray area in particular is something like a driver that was originally written for another operating system (ie clearly not a derived work of Linux in origin). At exactly what point does it become a derived work of the kernel (and thus fall under the GPL)?”
Is this enough to fire people?
BTW Canonical have been distributing OpenZFS for years now and the sky has not fallen, nor Oracle have become richer thanks to that. They still distribute the real ZFS (the proprietary one) which is a much better implementation of ZFS.
He protected the Software Freedom Conservancy by accusing it of violating the Software Freedom Law Center trademark? You're going to need to explain that more clearly.
> I've just asked for a clarification, that you refuse to provide.
I've clarified as much as I can. When there's no other public evidence available, what do you want me to do?
> The different opinion was a minor difference though.
It really wasn't.
> Is this enough to fire people?
Evidently.
I think you are intelligent enough to understand it on your own.
BTW, I know asking question is good, but sometimes try to answer other people's questions, it's good too!
> When there's no other public evidence available, what do you want me to do?
So we can safely assume he did not do anything you say, he's innocent until proven guilty, like any of us, right?
> It really wasn't.
It really was.
I'm with Joshua Gay (former employee of the FSF Licensing & Compliance Team) on this:
It is not clear to me that there is any contradiction between the SFLC statement and the FSF’s statement on the matter of Linux and ZFS. That is, I can’t really find how the SFLC and FSF differ in their interpretation GPLv2 and CDDL.
>> Is this enough to fire people? > Evidently
That's why it is bad, if it wasn't evident.
FSF should not act as evil corporations do.
I wouldn't be asking if I could. How does "Software Freedom Conservancy" damage the "Software Freedom Law Center" trademark?
> So we can safely assume he did not do anything you say, he's innocent until proven guilty, like any of us, right?
Given the lack of independent corroboration, it's certainly reasonable for you to assume that I'm mistaken or lying.
But he doesn't deal with what the big problem here is - the way this was done is concerning. Stallman wasn't forced to resign by people like him - who are quite happy to say "Look, Stallman, you've dedicated your life to this, you've done good work, but we want to take the movement into a more mainstream place".
Stallman resigned in the middle of a press firestorm, based on lies, with people publicly accusing him of supporting someone he called a 'serial rapist'. He is now facing large numbers of people retroactively justifying his treatment by spreading various rumours that may or may not be true but certainly can't be enumerated and assessed for accuracy. They are unfalsifiable and undebunkable because so far there is very little substance and a lot of hearsay. I've seen the odd comments justifying all sorts of weird assumptions, in one case literally because 'he was an eccentric bloke'. This is gross pigeonholing and stereotyping.
This is not a reasonable process and the outcomes are horrible. Stallman has literally dedicated his life to trying to make the world better for other people. He was bought down by leaks by someone who now says "Did I even really know who Richard Stallman was before those emails? To be honest, not really" [0]. This is not how these things should be done and it bodes very poorly for the future of the FSF. Not only is there no particular reward for leading the FSF, there is also the risk of being publicly shamed and driven out.
There is a difference between leadership change by mob rule, and leadership change by voting and process. This isn't a sustainable way of doing things. It is really bad.
[0] https://medium.com/@selamjie/remove-richard-stallman-fec6ec2...
* EDIT - Thanks yakshaving_jgt for pointing out I said Paul. Moment of confusion, although fortunately not one that obscured the point.