I'll begin by quoted this page, https://thenewstack.io/why-almost-everyone-wants-richard-sta...

And his public behavior has been equally worrisome. According to dozens of witnesses, Stallman actively sexually harassed women students and faculty at MIT, for 30 or more years. To the point that women have passed down RMS-specific avoidance tactics like he hates plants so faculty should fill their offices with them or “If RMS hits on you, just say ‘I’m a vi user’ even if it’s not true.”

It had allegedly reached the point that he was asked so many times to stop asking out colleagues and students that he decided to create and hand out a business card to non-verbally harass.

Georgia Lyle, who worked at FSF from 2015 to 2018, wrote a long Twitter thread about the exhaustive — and ultimately moot — efforts she and other FSF staff made trying to change Stallman’s toxic behavior and silence his “racist and sexist ‘hacker humor’.”

I don't think I can improve upon that.

> "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.'” — (Anonymous Bachelor’s in Computer Science, ’04)

https://mobile.twitter.com/secparam/status/13742198880893050...

This is the first time I've ever seen that quote. I would note it is evidently anonymous hearsay.

It also sounds like a joke and gossip.

I’m sure RMS could be like that, however having spent some time with him —- I didn’t see anything like that. He was frankly more interested in his laptop and food than people.

I personally heard a guy tell RMS "Forgive me, I use vi". And RMS responded by saying that if it was a free licensed vi there was nothing wrong.

Until he is criminally charged, I view such rumour mongering as simply a smear campaign against an innocent man. You can take a more "worried" view, but I believe we should hold more tightly to innocent-until-proven-guilty than is the norm these days.

From what I can tell, every allegation you repeated is false:

https://sterling-archermedes.github.io/

This doesn't rebut any of those allegations, and in fact adds new ones, like the time Stallman threatened to commit suicide if a woman refused to date him.

Doesn't it seem more likely that that was a cliched hyperbolic statement than a threat?

Hyperbolic statement or not, it's inappropriate to say if the person on the other end doesn't know you well

It is certainly inappropriate to say today. It may have been closer to being acceptable in 1985, when it (allegedly) took place. Customs and morals change with the times, sometimes more than we want to imagine or recall.

Remember, this was only one year after the movie Revenge of the Nerds was a lasting hit (it spawned one theatrical sequel and two more TV sequels). Viewed with today’s eyes, the movie is unequivocally terrible, with rape perpetrated by the movie’s protagonist being played for laughs, among many other things. But it was not viewed as terrible by audiences at the time. However, the people who liked the movie at the time, and even the people who made the movie at the time have presumably changed in the intervening years, and may not deserve to be judged by something they did forty years ago.

This is the second time on this thread you've suggested that in 1985 it was acceptable to threaten to commit suicide to coerce someone to date you. No, it was not.

No, but this is the second time that you have hallucinated that I did.

> It is certainly inappropriate to say today. It may have been closer to being acceptable in 1985,

It was not.

> Remember, this was only one year after the movie Revenge of the Nerds was a lasting hit

Holy non-sequitur Batman!

> It was not.

I’ll take your word for it (and I upvoted your other comment which stated this).

> Holy non-sequitur Batman!

It was not a non-sequitur. It was an example meant to conclusively illustrate of how radically morals and attitudes (in the time period in question) differ from the current ones, even though we collectively might feel and remember otherwise.

I found more information about that incident: https://stallmansupport.org/debunking-false-accusations-agai...

Stallman said that it was a misunderstanding, that it was never meant as a threat, nor a demand.

What'd you think he was going to say? He obviously didn't attempt suicide over the refused date. This is such a strange hill to die on.

No, it was not in fact OK to coerce someone into a date with a threat of suicide in 1985. I was there. It's telling, about this whole Stallman debate, that anyone would even try to make this claim.

Anyways, I didn't know anything about the suicide threat before seeing this link, and didn't know my contempt for Stallman could get any deeper. So thanks for that!

>No, it was not in fact OK to coerce someone into a date with a threat of suicide in 1985.

In 1985 you still had towns where blacks weren't allowed after sundown in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundown_town

The sort of things that were OK then would make the average sjw have a meltdown, just like how eating meat will be viewed in 40 years and everyone will pretend they always ate soy burgers.

I grew up in a part of Chicago where it was not safe for my Black friends to be on the street with me after dark. And even then, you'd have been ostracized for using a suicide threat to coerce someone into dating you. It's a remarkably fucked up thing to do.

> > No, it was not in fact OK to coerce someone into a date with a threat of suicide in 1985.

> In 1985 you still had towns where blacks weren’t allowed after sundown in the US

Literal, de jure, sundown towns were no longer permitted by federal civil rights law and the interpretation of the 14th Amendment for…quite some time before 1985.

The term persisted (and persists) for systems of informal racial discrimination (which may or may not have any significant association with time of day), and in that sense, yes, “sundown towns” existed in 1985 – and also in 2022.

(Not that even if you were literally correct would this be anything but a total irrelevancy to the point you responded to with it.)

Were there some significant cultural differences in 1985? Yes, sure. Were threats of suicide to coerce someone into dating within the window of acceptable adult behavior? No, not at all. It was viewed as a sign of unusual and dangerous obsession and instability when the person doing it was a teenager.

I mean, at least, it was by everyone of all ages the one whole time it occurred anywhere in my social circle within a few years of 1985.

I'm struggling to understand how the author of this page thought Stallman's "voluntary pedophilia is fine" statement would seem better with them providing the context that he wrote that in reference to a movement to lower the age of consent in the Netherlands to from 16 to 12 and from there eliminate it entirely.

Firstly, it is slightly disingenuous of you to bring that up, since RMS has not held that opinion for more than seven years now¹.

Secondly, you are mischaracterizing what he actually wrote¹.

The context, that this was a debate specifically about the age of consent, is relevant. Otherwise you seem to imply that any discussion of the age of consent is reprehensible. The age of consent differs quite a lot over the world, and you could declare every citizen of those countries to be terrible people, which would at least be consistent, or you could concede that there was a debate to be had. You might not agree with what RMS wrote (neither does RMS, now), but would you declare every person in a debate to be a terrible person who does not argue the side of the prevailing one? Even if they have since changed their minds?

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21092184

Well, what Stallman actually wrote in his post referenced by this portion of the page I was referring to was:

"I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing."

There are no links in this original post besides the one to the news article about the Dutch party pushing to lower the age of consent to 12. The page defending Stallman quotes from the news article (omitting the detail about the party's goal to go on to remove the age limit entirely) and then adds this comment:

"When people talk about pedophilia, what usually comes to mind is prepubescent children. Not what Stallman was referring to."

I'd say my previous comment contained an accurate statement of the view Stallman expressed there (and later retracted): that pedophilia is fine, if it's voluntary. Stallman's own later distillation of his prior view in his own words was "I could not see anything wrong about sex between an adult and a child, if the child accepted it."

This page was written in the context of Stallman already having disavowed those earlier posts, but its tack for defending Stallman in relation to this quote is still to essentially say "12? misleading to call that pedophilia." On the one hand, this statement is itself misleading (Stallman offered no lower age limit for his views on voluntariness, in the context of discussing an article that included the idea of completely removing the age of consent, and further, the idea that he didn't really mean pedophilia here rests on the idea that famous language pedant Stallman repeatedly misused the word).

Beyond that though, my point in my previous comment was more that, as an implied statement of the author's idea of what the public generally believes and as a matter of rhetorical tactics for defending Stallman it was... a choice.

> "When people talk about pedophilia, what usually comes to mind is prepubescent children. Not what Stallman was referring to."

Yes, that was what they actually wrote.

> "12? misleading to call that pedophilia."

Mischaracterization of that same sentence.

However, what you are actually criticizing is apparently not actually Stallman, but the defense of Stallman? In that case, perhaps this page does a better job:

https://stallmansupport.org/debunking-false-accusations-agai...

They’re exactly the sort of allegations one would level against a principled activist who couldn’t be removed any other way.

This covers the Epstein comment drama, but what about the actual sexual harassment allegations?

The link I gave does cover those, from what I can tell.

> “If RMS hits on you, just say ‘I’m a vi user’ even if it’s not true.”

A normal person probably doesn't see the double-indirection and ambiguity in this. The first indirection lies in using 'I'm a vi user' as a proxy for 'I don't like Emacs'. The second indirection lies in using 'I don't like Emacs' as a proxy for 'I reject you romantically'.

The ambiguity is even less visible. Some women use an indirect 'No' as a shit test. The man is supposed to ask again. This is phenomenon invisible to normal people because it occurs in a social context of body language and flirting. Normal people find this social context conspicuous. Consequently, normal people are oblivious to the phenomenon of men with poor social skills failing to navigate the treacherous waters around the "ask again no" and the very different "don't ask again no". These waters are a normie's paddling pool.

Remind yourself of the big picture here. We have a highly intelligent man with embarrassing blind-spots around certain social skills. We have intelligent women attempting to communicate with him. They choose a code with two properties. First, it aims at a social skills blind-spot; the message is likely to be misunderstood by the target. Second, it is a trivial code that normies will not even notice breaking. They get to have a sneer and a laugh at the expense of the loser who misunderstands the coded message. The joke lies in the weakness of the code. Everybody except the victim gets the message effortlessly.

So long as 'I'm a vi user' is a private joke, its heartless cruelty is mitigated by its pettiness. But RMS is the victim. To tell the tale as a strike against him lacks self-awareness.

i don't know if the allegations are true and if he sexually harassed people then sure, cancel him. but none of the "hacker humor" shit people reference seems that serious.

* stuff like "knight for hot ladies" is just corny not bad.

* the abort() joke was as follows: "Proposed Federal censorship regulations may prohibit us from giving you information about the possibility of calling this function. We would be required to say that this is not an acceptable way of terminating a program." that's not that bad honestly. it's more pro-abortion than anti-abortion so i'm not sure why progressives got mad.

* the "emacs virgin" shit is cringe but not rly sexist? anyway i think he switched it to be either men or women later so it was still cringe but not gendered.

idk if there's other stuff i missed but that covers what your article and the twitter thread you mentioned point out. like, yeah, it's cringe asf. but is it rly "cancellable? nah.

btw i still think his presence in the open source community is a negative in part because of goofy ahh shit like emacs virgins or knight for hot ladies, mostly because the amount of cringe it produces attracts more asocial weirdos like rms and puts normal people off open source stuff. like, i'm a outgoing person and can sit and enjoy a coffee with almost anyone. but i feel like spending 5 minutes face to face with rms would make me lowkey want to unalive. i also really don't like a lot of his politics. so i'm in no way an apologist, just don't think a lot of what you referenced is problematic.

ofc, i think there's enough evidence of creepy behavior, especially now, to kick him out and don't really have a problem with it. just the goofy ahh jokes isn't the right reason to do it.

It seems to me that he created a toxic work environment - especially for women, and got away with it because of seniority and it seems having narcissistic personality traits.

It is illegal to sexually harass women in the workplace. Gather all the evidence you have and send it to the district attorney and he will be given a fair trial at a court of law.

It's typically a civil matter, not a criminal one.

Ok, he will have a fair trial in a civil court. You just have to convince the alleged victims to sue for damages. If the case has merits, it will be decided upon the available evidence.

Oh you sweet summer child.

Cancelled or not, it's a bad look to put a super-cringy and offputting old guy in charge of a group in serious need of recruiting and support.

yea i completely agree. "he's a asshole" is a perfectly good reason to not make somebody the public face of something. as i said i feel like he's one of a fairly small number of people i'd genuinely dislike spending time with

> it's more pro-abortion than anti-abortion so i'm not sure why progressives got mad.

"Progressive" got mad at him for being pro abortion, because anything goes.

I wrote about it here: https://stallmansupport.org/testimonies-letters-writings-and...

There is a lot misinformation about RMS out there, you've posted some of it. This addresses some of it https://stallmansupport.org/

"Georgia Lyle", there is no such person, the Georgia you are thinking of wrote ~3 tweets, the FSF staff who were her coworkers did not agree that they were accurate. She rarely interacted with RMS, it was not part of her job, she was spreading rumors she had heard (and posted years after she had left the FSF and had no further involvement with Free Software). It looks like she's deleted them since. I think a lot of RMS misinformation has been an attempt to support feminism at his expense, and because his personality/autism tends to make some people rather unsympathetic to him. Note, the current FSF Executive Director (who's job is to work with the board, thus RMS), is currently a woman who was on FSF staff for years before taking that job.

From the first link in your post:

"In fact, Stack Overflow’s 2020 survey found that “developers who are men are more likely to want specific new features, while developers who are women are more likely to want to change norms for communication on our site,” a request that’s frequently paired with the terms “toxic” and “rude.”"

It is difficult for me to seriously treat an article that considers "rude comments" more important issue than "features". What a regular person wants is something that works. Whether it was done in a way that kept Susan happy is tertiary at best.

Is this all that RMS is accused of? If so, I am only glad I am nowhere near that scene.

edit: Come to think of it.. is the reason new software sucks so bad lately ( the focus on stupid stuff )?

> "In fact, Stack Overflow’s 2020 survey found that “developers who are men are more likely to want specific new features, while developers who are women are more likely to want to change norms for communication on our site,” a request that’s frequently paired with the terms “toxic” and “rude.”"

> It is difficult for me to seriously treat an article that considers "rude comments" more important issue than "features". What a regular person wants is something that works. Whether it was done in a way that kept Susan happy is tertiary at best.

I think it's worth considering the fact that calling an issue "stupid stuff" and saying a "regular person" wouldn't care about it is essentially a self-reinforcing confirmation bias. Most people won't try to talk to someone about something if they know they're going to get a dismissive response, but that wouldn't stop them from being more vocal about it in an anonymous survey. If your daily experience differs so drastically from the reported survey results, how would you tell if it was the survey's data that was inaccurate or your own anecdata? Alternately, if you think the results are accurate but that the people who responded to it are out of touch, how would you be able to tell if it wasn't them but actually you?

I know it goes against everything people are being taught today, but not all opinions are equally valid. I will hesitate for a little bit since I know for a fact I do not have all the answers, but eventually my internal firewall will start marking things as "drivel". To be perfectly honest, it is this weird insistence that I not only have to agree with someone's opinion, but act on someone else's belief that I almost automatically pull back and say no. This is not how a conversation works. So thanks to those vocal individuals I mark the use of word "toxic" and automatically dismiss it as a person with no arguments.

<< If your daily experience differs so drastically from the reported survey results, how would you tell if it was the survey's data that was inaccurate or your own anecdata? Alternately, if you think the results are accurate but that the people who responded to it are out of touch, how would you be able to tell if it wasn't them but actually you?

And here I do not have a good answer that would scale. The dismissive approach works well on an individual level. I think experience ( and knowing that surveys have all sorts of flaws ) helps. Now, anecdata has its own obvious issues, but at certain point anecdata becomes data.

<<I think it's worth considering the fact that calling an issue "stupid stuff" and saying a "regular person" wouldn't care about it is essentially a self-reinforcing confirmation bias.

You might be right on confirmation bias. Still, I challenge you to defend the proposition that focusing on making a given piece of software work or adding features is less important than "toxic" behavior. As a user, do I care that, say, notepad++ was created in an environment that was not "toxic" or that it does what I want it to do and that it does it well? To me, at least, the choice is simple and not controversial at all.

> I challenge you to defend the proposition that focusing on making a given piece of software work or adding features is less important than "toxic" behavior. As a user, do I care that, say, notepad++ was created in an environment that was not "toxic" or that it does what I want it to do and that it does it well? To me, at least, the choice is simple and not controversial at all.

For starters, the survey was given by StackOverflow, so my interpretation is that these responses were given by people about what they would prefer as developers working with other developers. It seemed to me that the idea was that some people did not feel like they were being treated fairly when as members of the tech community, but I guess I could be inferring incorrectly.

As for the actual question, this seems similar to me to the question of whether we have obligations to others in society or if things are "everyone for themselves". This obviously is predicated on the fact that the complaints of the survey responders are valid (which my previous comment is my attempt at explaining my view on), but assuming they are valid complaints, the question is whether I should care about the treatment of people who made a product that I use. There's a spectrum of potential issues that they could have to deal with; I don't pretend that everyone will react the same way to if notepad++ were being developed by workers who were forced without pay to develop 12 hours a day to if they no longer got free coffee in the break room, but there's undoubtedly a line we have to draw somewhere about what we're willing to tolerate and even a spectrum on what "toleration" looks like. Personally, I don't have any issue with the idea that the people who make the software I use would insist on an environment free from harassment, and I wouldn't want new features at the expensive of the treatment of the people who make it. This feels pretty simple and non-controversial to me, but I guess this could be my own confirmation bias that makes it surprising that anyone would feel differently.

People love Stallman as a moral figurehead.

A lot of people who have 'worked for' him consider him to be a terrible boss. There has been many posts like this over the years, when a true believer figures out the leader is terrible at leading. You could even look at the history of FOSS organizing as setting up alternative organizations where RMS has no pull. Even Debian was about "laws, not men".

I also do not believe Stallman 'got' SaaS or ever even really understood the basic economics of the software industry. Emacs was originally SaaS software if you weren't aware.

I think it's clear RMS has some good principles, and an absolutely awful personality that doesn't make for a good leader.

There's a solution to that: shove him off somewhere to the side, enshrined as a "spiritual leader" people consult with for nuggets of wisdom, and then 99% of the actual functioning of the organization is done by other people.

If anything, I think Stallman represents an increasingly-obsolete view of computer freedom. It is perhaps worth meditating on what happens to the protagonist of A Man For All Seasons.

This article gives good reasons why modern financial incentives make it increasingly irrelevant if software is copylefted (the Corps interpret copyleft as damage and route around it; the free software community has not demonstrated enough organizational energy or proactive vision to outpace moneyed development with their copyleft solutions). Meanwhile, some of the Fundamental Freedoms are philosophically undercut in the Cloud era; why should you have the right to view the source code or modify what runs on someone else's computer? The best the GNU philosophy gave us is "don't use Cloud," which is head-in-sand ignorant of how modern developers value things.

New approaches are needed, and the approach represented by GNU has run its course. The Overton Window moves regardless of RMS's opinion these days

> Meanwhile, some of the Fundamental Freedoms are philosophically undercut in the Cloud era; why should you have the right to view the source code or modify what runs on someone else's computer?

Because the user should have that right regardless of where the program happens to execute.

> The best the GNU philosophy gave us is "don't use Cloud,"

Er, no? They wrote the AGPL.

> Because the user should have that right regardless of where the program happens to execute.

Sorry, that makes no sense. I have no right to the source code of the bank's ATM, and even less right to run any software I choose on that hardware.

You're welcome to that opinion, but you're just arguing against Free Software in general; that's exactly the same argument as saying that the user has no right to inspect or control the software running on their own machine.

It's not the same because the ATM isn't my own machine.

Nor is an AWS node.

No idea why you're being downvoted. You're completely right. Computing is increasingly centralized in corporation servers. Our computers are becoming appliances. We're no longer in control. We can't run software on them without some corporation's blessing.

Free software presupposes free general purpose computers. It assumes we can write software and run it on our devices. What is the point of free software if we can't run it because the corporation that actually owns the keys to the machine won't sign off on it?

> The best the GNU philosophy gave us is "don't use Cloud," which is head-in-sand ignorant of how modern developers value things.

Lol wut? I feel like this comment is willfully ignoring hugely popular projects such as Nextcloud! There are lots of GPL web services that are available which provide 'Cloud' functionality without being crazy invasive proprietary data-mining platforms....

It seems to me that these services certainly reflect a good portion of 'GNU Philosophy'...