He wasn't aware of women working on GCC. There's nothing to correct. I'm not aware of women working on GCC. GNU has thousands of people working on it, he's not aware of most of them. So much criticism of him is taking his comments out of context and misrepresenting them, including so many things that are just complete fabrications that it makes it hard to actually understand what "real" problems there are.
> Did anyone ever tell him the Emacs virgins thing is very inappropriate?
Yes, and he agreed and stopped.
> And no, it's not normal for adults to be sexually attracted to teens.
K. You totally lost me there. Ever been to a porn website?
....
>Sandra Loosemore is the lead author of the GNU Library Reference Manual;[3] RMS is listed as her co-author.
As a father of daughters this stuff is really skeevy to me. But as for “normal,” society has a ways to improve. Remember that Britney Spears became super popular at 16 and 17 and had many fans who were not kids. The first time I saw “Hit Me Baby One More Time” I was in Best Buy and it was showing on the 100 TVs and I remember thinking “What the fuck is this, how old is that poor girl?” And the store, as typical for BestBuy, was full of like 99% adult males.
~1 million years of human history disagrees with your statement.
This was how it started and this was also what most news reported on so I do not believe that it misses the point.
>Did anyone explain him that he downplayed the role of women in the GNU project?
Did you ask him?
>Did he ever correct his statements about no women volunteering to work on GCC? Did he even read the author lists?
Did you ask him?
>Did anyone ever tell him the Emacs virgins thing is very inappropriate?
He changed it after someone complained about it.
>That he doesn't have the innate wiring to recognise those subtle cues makes it more necessary for him to listen and take action on his behaviour because he is seen as the person behind the FSF and his actions and opinions reflect on the entire community.
This is a very ableist/sanist view. I would argue that it is the neurotypicals that should put the extra effort to be more explicit and not assume stuff.
This isn't about not understanding social cues or lacking intuitive empathy, this is about actively choosing to ignore victims telling you what you're doing to them because your position allows you to get away with it.
This isn't the first time I've seen autism (or the implication thereof) being used to reframe gross sexual misconduct as naïve ignorance and it's simply disgusting and insulting towards other autistics who can't read emotions and are socially awkward but understand consent.
What he did went well beyond "locker room" jokes like the Emacs virgins thing or "tonedeaf" postulating about the age of consent. The reason he didn't understand that it was wrong wasn't that he's bad at social cues, it's that he didn't think of women as human beings.
This is still downstream of his autism. One of the common attributes of people on the spectrum is that they struggle immensely in terms of having a theory of mind of other individuals. Basically all human interaction and interpretation of that interaction is grounded in self-reference. TLDR as a default he (probably) has a hard time thinking of anyone other than himself as "human beings" in the way you mean it. I imagine w/ women it's doubly hard for RMS, because he has no experience as a woman that he could bring to the table.
I understand it is harder for him than for other people to be nice to others, but he is intelligent enough to work around his own limitations. If he's not, then, again, he will hurt a lot of people and should reconsider his role with the FSF.
> I sometimes made others uncomfortable or even offended them -- especially women. This was not a choice: I didn't understand the problem enough to know which choices there were.
Did anyone explain him that he downplayed the role of women in the GNU project? Janis Johnson, Sandra Loosemore, and Dorit Nuzman, to name a few, all did extraordinary work. Did he ever correct his statements about no women volunteering to work on GCC? Did he even read the author lists?
Did anyone ever tell him the Emacs virgins thing is very inappropriate? I'm pretty sure someone must have done that and, if not, he must have read the account of one young girl about how she felt. The fact he did that routine for years indicates he didn't listen or didn't care enough to change. And no, it's not normal for adults to be sexually attracted to teens.
I am very sure he now has been informed his behaviour is unacceptable. Is he doing anything to change that? That he doesn't have the innate wiring to recognise those subtle cues makes it more necessary for him to listen and take action on his behaviour because he is seen as the person behind the FSF and his actions and opinions reflect on the entire community.
All these are clear indications he, and the FSF board, don't see any of these as problems and that, sadly, makes them unfit to lead the Free Software community.