We, as a society, have established due process in the government and courts because we believe it's the right thing - the moral thing - to do. If it's the right thing to do for the most powerful entity in our land, what makes it not the right thing to do in all venues?

If I come to your house for dinner, and am an asshole to you and your family, do we need to get the law involved or should you just not invite me over for dinner again?

They shouldn't invite you over for dinner again, but it ends there. They don't get to come for your job, your career, your legacy.

Right, so if the assholery happens at work then the equivalent of "shouldn't invite you over for dinner again" is being asked not to come back to work.

Except that in this analogy, RMS is the one who invited them for dinner. You don't simply get to tell the host that "we don't like you but I think we'll keep meeting in your house for dinner.

So you're saying that RMS, is the sole owner of everything GNU?

No. This is equivalent to a threat to strike. RMS without the GNU project maintainers is just a dude with a blog. And this approximates a vote of no confidence.

No - analogies are imperfect. But it's certainly a better analogy, RMS is not just a rude guest.

Perhaps I pull you aside, call you out for your actions, and give you the chance to change your ways.

One strike and your out isn't even how we play baseball.

... from the sounds of it, I assume the pull-aside convo happened and failed.

Maybe I'm too trusting. I have no evidence that kind of a convo happened. But the allegations are that RMS has been a missing stair for well over 20 years. I find it very hard to believe that someone who's been causing problems in a community for 20+ years has never had a friend pull them aside and ask them to change their behaviour.

If we're changing the analogy to specifically look at Stallman again, we need to make a few changes. Specifically, a quick note that now you're visiting his house for dinner. This changes things a bit. He may have the best open source dinner spread out there, but it's ultimately your choice to keep participating.

It's absolutely maddening to see such vociferous "defense" of Stallman in ways we know he could not stand. If you think he would tolerate an "open source dinner spread", you don't appreciate what he's actually done and have just glommed onto the bizarre 4chan personality cult surrounding him.

He is no longer the sole occupant of that house.

yeah, the only way this makes sense is if you slide right past the "multiple conferences" part in the comment rooting this thread( which, apparently, you are). And of course also the "multiple women have come forward" part in the statements online. The mental gymnastics here to justify this is awe inspiring.

Then fork. Why don't they fork? The XFree86 group didn't have an issue forking and disbanding. Yet these people, with projects like Guix that noone has ever heard of, are simply using a GNU name to lobby against the hand that fed them.

Dr Richard Stallman is a person, too. It's no longer a secret that he likely has high-functioning autism. What is he supposed to be being now being disbarred from his own project that he founded in 1985? If people think he doesn't deserve to be credited as the founder of FSF, just fork, and be done with it. Instead what they're doing is trying to actively ostracise the very hand that fed them.

This is the important point frequently omitted.

They don't _have_ to do any of this. They _should_, though, as society demands it.

Folks are free to disagree, but this is very much the right move.

The problem is that they want to keep his ideas and achievements, but don't want to keep him.

They're free to walk away from Stallman and the movement he created, but they won't because they can't let go of the shiny. Instead, they convince themselves they deserve free software and GNU without the nasty man who built it.