I only seen some accusation that appeared now after 20 years , where RMS said something and some people were made uncomfortable.

I agree RMS is not a sociable person but I would have preferred to see some significant "crime" , now I have the feeling that you can be kicked out from your own project if you made a stupid comment or thing in the past and the social media gets enraged by mostly FUD and exagerations of your said comment.

If that's your concern, I recommend reading up further on people's issues with rms. It's not "some accusations that appeared after 20 years," it's 30 years of pattern.

https://medium.com/@selamjie/remove-richard-stallman-appendi...

> I recall being told early in my freshman year “If RMS hits on you, just say ‘I’m a vi user’ even if it’s not true.”

I do not believe this. Stallman has no kind of irrational hate against vi beyond "church of emacs" memery. Stallman doesn't even take the editor war thing seriously.

>He literally used to have a mattress on the floor of his office. He kept the door to his office open, to proudly showcase that mattress and all the implications that went with it.

Stallman lived in his office. This is well-known and well-documented.

It's not mentioned in this article, but there's also the claim that women kept plants around to scare Stallman off. This is also patently false; besides being obviously ridiculous, one can also find plenty of pictures of Stallman surrounded by plants.

All of these claims are so utterly ridiculous, so absurd, that I not only feel confident to dismiss them without evidence; I'm also inclined to believe that most of them were made in jest.

It becomes hard to believe any of the accusations when so many of those that are repeated in earnest are so laughable.

Utterly destroying a person's reputation should come with a damn high burden of proof. That article would be laughed out of any courtroom.

Reading that has been a complete waste of time. To save everyone else some effort:

1. The man has problematic opinions. Welcome to democracy, where people with uncomfortable opinions are free to hold and discuss them. This is healthy.

2. He used a bad pick-up line, saying he'll kill himself if X doesn't go out with him.

3. The MIT report doesn't mention Stallman by name.

3. Had a mattress in his office.

The discourse level in the US has hit rock bottom lately, all I see are online mobs running amok.

  1. The man has problematic opinions. Welcome to
  democracy, where people with uncomfortable opinions are
  free to hold and discuss them. This is healthy.

People are free to hold and discuss them but others are just as free to exercise their democratic right of free association by choosing not to associate with you because of them.

This last is a major contributing factor to the volume of those asking for his ouster... they are free to walk away and not use GNU or other free software, but they don't want to. They want to have their cake and eat it too, they want to keep free software and get rid of the guy that makes them feel bad about it because he's awkward and poorly socialized... like very many computer savvy people are.

These people are arguing for their own desires more than anything. They want an FSF they can feel good about, not this one with a flawed person producing the software they can't give up.

If he doesn't sit well on a pedestal, push him over and set someone else there.

That's arguably what figureheads are for; to be set up and knocked down at the whims of the public. When a person becomes symbolic of an organization, they run the risk the organization will change (or they will) and dissociation will become necessary.

He's never really been a figurehead, at least not entirely. At the start, he was one of the most prolific programmers around, and I think he still writes code sometimes.

Can you honestly say that the others have merely chosen not to associate with Stallman?

No, they are coordinating a character assassination campaign and are pressuring everyone to disavow him. It's disappointing to see people cheering mobs on, just because they seem to attack "bad" people, while forgetting that anyone can be made to look bad.

"anyone can be made to look bad" is an opinion that basically throws the human capacity for discernment under the bus, and if humans can't discern things then why bother with anything?

No; rms is gross and creepy because rms is gross and creepy. Not because some conspiracy has worked to make him look like he is.

"If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged". This is why we have due process and innocent until proven guilty.

Even if he were gross and "creepy", that's no reason to oust someone from the organizations they helped create and destroy their reputation with absurd unverifiable anecdotes, like the ones about plants or vi. Or the note hanging on the door, which was likely a prank.

Creepy is also a meaningless word, best associated with ghosts and monsters, not people. Nowadays it seems to be used to criticize awkward male courtship attempts, as if trying to romance someone isn't tough enough and those that don't know how to do it have to be ridiculed too.

We have innocent until proven guilty as a guardrail against depriving people of their freedom. That doesn't even fully describe the entire US court system, which includes civil court (standard of proof is "preponderance of evidence"), and neither of these are the same as the softer standard of when we deprive a person of the privilege of their trusted station (which is what is happening to rms). In that court, "burden of association with tarnished reputation" is plenty. That's why concepts like "the appearance of impropriety is impropriety" exist.

Your article is fake news, RMS did not defended Epsein and the pedophilia thing is an opinion that he changed his mind about. From what I read about this topic the legal age for sex is not topic where 95% people agree one and RMS had a different view then the majority and he was convinced to change his mind (proving he is open minded)

I did not read the rest since it probably is as fake or exaggerated as the beginning.

If you didn't read it, you failed to read the part about "Richard Stallman has been contributing to a negative environment for women at MIT for over thirty years," with citations.

Then the anti RMS group could create a blog post that is 100% factual and fake. You can put facts and testimonials with names and time period when it happen, bonus points if you can mention any conflict of interest or personal biases this people may have.

I read in other places about RMS pathetic way of asking for a date so I know he was and is not perfect.

You seem to disagree that that imperfection, along with his other documented imperfections, isn't sufficient to induce people to want to walk away from his leadership.

You're entitled to your opinion, but other people would disagree with your opinion on the topic. And because free software is free as in freedom, they're certainly welcome to attempt to route around him (whether that fractures the community will be up to the community as a whole).

That article is basically a hit piece, meant to character assassinate Stallman based on lies and misinterpretations[0].

[0] https://sterling-archermedes.github.io/

I've seen enough written about it, even by Stallman's supporters who say they've had conversations with him about these things before, to indicate his behavior has been more than just a poorly worded conversation.

The existence of some folks who skew those things IMO isn't relevant when it comes to the things that I've seen that seem like believable accounts.

Some of those people that wrote against RMS are not in good relations with him so you need to consider those memories as biased.

I'm not sure that means something is necessarily biased.

Our memories are always biased, now if you add some grudge in the mix I am sure you will remember the bad parts as extreme and ignore the good parts.

> I agree RMS is not a sociable person

Project leadership is a social task. Sometimes, being well-suited to be a chief-of-doctrinal-purity or chief-of-technology is not being well-suited to being a chief-of-chiefs.

His job is to present his idea, mostly write and present it. He does not need to go in schools,bars and churches to trick people into his believes. He has a mathematical style of presenting things: primary notions, definitions, axioms . Though I liked his sense of humor (probably some religions zelot would dislike the saint joke)

But the lynch mob is still there and defends its cancel culture. You can see them all over Twitter. They are ruthless.

Cancel culture isn't a thing. Being held accountable for one's actions and freedom of assocation, those are things.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szybEhqUmVI

That's not really relevant to what the folks who wrote that letter means by "all computer users".