So instead of rushing to exclude people from society, society needs to provide people enough room to be themselves to keep from dangerous fiddling.
Further, forgiveness is a more critical tool to the forgiver than the forgiven. To forgive a grievance isn’t to forget it. It’s to put an end to the part of your resources devoted to punishing your opponent or thinking ill. That frees up those resources for more positive uses. The forgiven never needed to expend resources to earn your forgiveness and thus doesn’t have the same resource commitments - hence forgiveness offers less to the forgiven than the forgiver.
There's a big difference between excluding someone from society or even contributing to a project, and appointing them to the board.
To reject a completely correct mathematical concept because it was contributed by an awful person--even the worst person in history--would be madness, and any attempts to suppress or disenfranchise the work of "inconvenient contributors" indicates that you're not actually pursuing mathematics, but engaging in political warfare.
But I fear you’re being over constrained by this specification. My larger point is it’s important, very, to not draw too many lines and wind up with a “polite party” of 0.
Absolutely.
> But I fear you’re being over constrained by this specification. My larger point is it’s important, very, to not draw too many lines and wind up with a “polite party” of 0.
I'm not sure I understand where we disagree. Or I'm missing what you are getting at with this paragraph, my apologies. I think contributions to mathematics should be open to anyone, everyone, and everything.
If you believe there is value in campaigning for increased freedom for users of software, then you might benefit from the FSF having concrete campaign goals and the ability to be taken seriously.
Inviting RMS back to the board does not help them in that regard.
Your ability to benefit from the software produced by RMS has no dependency on his being elevated to a seat on the board of an organization whose opinion might be sought, say, if congress were debating laws mandating access to source code of voting machines.
Writing good software is hard. I’d recon it’s similar to mathematics in difficulty often. It’s worth it to consider someone can both be awful in other factors of their life but still make meaningful contributions to society through things like math or software. It helps that he’s always willing to show you his code for audit purposes.