The issue around unfettered inclusivity is that it enables grifters to gain positions of power based purely on superficial elements that they possess.
The original meaning of diversity was "diversity of thought" -- it has been co-opted to mean something totally different.
I have a black friend who recently got a new boss, was forced to do months of intensive training training to "keep up". He ultimately ended up leaving the company despite being one of their most productive engineers.
It this sort of regressive opinion that keeps perpetuating the stereo type and forcing people out of jobs. Judge people based on what they are doing not what color their skin is.
Let's say I have two candidates, one is asian and the other is black, and on paper they both look great. They both attended Harvard, and they both interviewed well.
Now if I know that the average SAT score required for Asians to be admitted to Harvard is 1580, and the average SAT score required for Blacks to be admitted to Harvard is 1360, and all other metrics (GPA, conscientiousness, work habits, etc) fall along similar lines of differing standards, then I would have a statistical bias toward selecting the Asian candidate. Not because I'm racist, but because DEI and other equity efforts at Harvard have pre-biased the candidate pool for me.
In the absence of equity efforts, "I went to Harvard" would be a metric that stands on its own, independent of race. But with DEI, it is not. We have eliminated the "I hate them damn blacks" style of racism and replaced it with a more insidious "In order to make a statistically correct decision, I need to be biased against Blacks" style of racism. I'm not sure this is an improvement.
This is an example from college admissions, but the same analogy can be drawn in any environment with strong DEI influence.
Either way, people using stallman as an antidiversity advocate makes me belly laugh. The guy is on video eating skin off his goddam toes while lecturing CS. If that dude or any of his followers are antidiversity, they need to look themself in the mirror. Public foot autocannabilism is well beyond eccentric and if diversity movements or mindsets didn't exist the guy would be jobless
people pointing out that what the man said and did was fucked is somehow a character assassination attempt?
Literally none of the factual claims of “RMS said X” have been false, it’s pretty much all been on the record.
On the contrary, literally every single claim about what RMS said or did was fabricated, or pulled out of context so badly you could still see the severed threads trailing behind. The original posts and subsequent press articles were one big patchwork of lies and manipulative statements; this was all trivial to verify and apparent to anyone except those who, for some reason, really wanted to believe it's true.
Look, if you take any public figure, and spend enough time looking through all the things they ever written or said in their lives, you can probably find some terrible thing to paint them as a terrible person. Someone could be a role model, have a lifetime of charitable work and positive achievements, bbbbbbut years ago they once said they didn't like gay people (or whatever), all of a sudden none of their achievements matter and they're actually monsters!
Any of us with a long posting history on the Internet probably at one time said something that wasn't nice. Cherry picking that one thing and holding it up as the summation of who we are, is character assassination.
I also remember him being called a creep because he used to sleep in his office.
And at no point was any kind of change of opinion and/or public apology even hinted at.
It didn't feel like an honest attempt at all.
This is especially important, as time moves forward and people who never even met RMS read about this, to make sure we are relying on contemporary reports and not just fading memories.
You're defending the indefensible - why?
0 - https://stallmansupport.org/debunking-false-accusations-agai... (with links to primary sources throughout).
That’s certainly the one I remember, and everything else was just people piling on to try and provide more ammo or more legitimacy to that claim because “look he’s a creep in other ways too!”.
But the claim that he defended pedophilia is itself false. The lady making the claim quoted him as saying one thing and then immediately criticised the quote as if it said another thing. I don’t remember the details now, but I remember reading the original open letter at the time and being baffled by how that was considered as evidence against RMS.
Im not saying he’s not a weirdo or creep, I don’t know if he is or not, just that the accusations against him about his comments on minsky’s visit of epstein’s island were strawnan accusations.
rms seems to forget that people will read not the words you write, but what they interpret you to be driving at based on the words you write. They took this to mean he was defending pedophilia (when in fact he wrote no such thing, being both neurodivergent and precise).
This is rms' fault for being bad at PR whilst being a public figure and leader.
They weren't. The things he actually said played a minor role in that kerfuffle - it all started with a lot of smears thrown at RMS by a person with some grudge. Additional quotes came later, as people started fishing for them.
> rms seems to forget that people will read not the words you write, but what they interpret you to be driving at based on the words you write. They took this to mean he was defending pedophilia (when in fact he wrote no such thing, being both neurodivergent and precise).
Why exactly are you defending people being irrational or engaging in power plays? You note yourself what the facts were, so why justify mistaking them?
> This is rms' fault for being bad at PR whilst being a public figure and leader.
RMS was doing fine until someone decided to destroy him for personal gain. Do you expect every person doing something interesting in a niche community should behave like a Hollywood celebrity or a politician, having their communications managed by teams of spindoctors, on the off chance someone wants to destroy them and picks mass media as their weapon of choice?
He was not destroyed, literally or figuratively. If that is the basis of your claim, then everything else based upon that has no supporting evidence.
Who do you assert yielded personal gain, and how? I saw nothing of the sort.
He's bad at communicating. It may be because he's autistic, but ultimately that part is not relevant.
The way humans in bulk receive public communications is a fact of nature; it would be like someone swimming in the ocean and drowning and saying that it was bad that the ocean couldn't accept their style of swimming.
He's a public figure and certain actions undertaken by public figures when communicating with millions of people are bad. He undertook those actions and suffered the negative consequences. It's ultimately not related to his neurodivergence; there are autistic people who don't make huge PR blunders.
That's what happens when you put all your eggs into one basket, and then realize that basket had a hole. Maybe free software would be better off if the FSF had spent time building a resilient movement rather than a church to RMS.
He is a white male who’s in power despite eating toe gunk, while also supporting an environment hostile to woman. He’s in no way a good representation of diversity simply because he’s odd.
For what exactly ? There are countless examples of compagny who innovated or succedded well while everyone being the same race / gender (cf microsoft / apple in the 1990s or literally any china compagny right now).
I do enjoy diversity at work because I don't like when all my peers look / think / speak the same, but it's not exactly "important" beside my personal enjoyment
My point is Its a huge unproven assumption that diversity would have magically solved that problem.
The problem is that there will always be biases in hiring, "meritocracy" is a myth. It has been shown numerous times (e.g. [1]) that there is a significant bias towards men even if male and female candidates are equal, with the most decisive bias being an assumption that women may not be willing/able to work longer hours.
Besides, meritocracy is fraught with other issues as well, see e.g. [2][3][4] for more detailed writeups than I could possibly write here in a HN comment.
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/08912432221137...
[2] https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/how-meritocracy-worse...
[3] https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/a-belief-in-meritocracy-is...
Inclusivity is grift by definition. It is hiring for characteristics other than merit. Note this doesn't mean characteristics can't be meritous; if your business has a demographic, you better involve that demo. A 100% male company isn't going to invent the best tampon.
If you're concerned about bias in hiring, then eliminate bias. Do blind interviews and redact resumes, broaden your candidate sources. You don't eliminate bias by... introducing bias.
The "problem" is that when this purist meritocratic approach has been tried, it results in more white men being hired, not less. Therefore such approaches are swiftly cancelled, in favour of introducing deliberate bias on the basis of superficial characteristics. See here as a good example: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tri...
What an ignorant and bigoted thing to say. Next your gonna say the same thing about Asians.
Meritocracy is blind to race and focuses solely on aptitude. The fact you don't like the outcome says more about you than about meritocracy.
I mean… a man did invent tampons https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earle_Haas
Granted there were previous, less good, versions
...As opposed to what happened before, where every single person hired was amazing and never the nephew of some boardmember.
I'm starting to think there's more harm than good with these inclusivity movements. It creates two categories of students (and grads) when looking at hiring: people you know are there on merit and people who maybe got a little bit of help from "the quota".
I've heard it (in engineering only meetings) "you know this guy is solid, he went to X and he's Asian so you know he's there for the right reasons". And the thing is, you can't really argue with that logic.
Something I have to wonder is are women and minorities... ok with this?
Honestly it sounds more like a problem with your job's hiring process than with diversity movements. Even if you restrict your pool of candidates to a minority, if that minority is large enough, it's very likely someone from that community is capable of filling the role.
If you really don't care about the background then you can ally yourself with someone who does and get someone who both increases diversity and is competent at their job.
> The issue around unfettered inclusivity is that it enables grifters to gain positions of power based purely on superficial elements that they possess.
That's not specific to diversity. Dick measurement contests have existed forever. It's a myth that the past was more meritocratic that now. The proof is actually that if it were then the high ranks would be a lot more diverse than they are now. At least if you accept the premise that background is not related to capability (ie you are not racist/misogynic).
No, I'd much rather see the FSF's core principles defended and expressed better than see them "tackle inclusivity issues". Wasting time, resources and breath on this kind of thing is the problem.
RMS has been directly responsible for scaring away people from the core mission of the FSF. Not just because of what other people have mentioned, but because he directly insults and threatens other individuals when he doesn't get his way. He's been doing this for decades now [1], long before anyone can claim the current furor is because of 'cancel culture' or whatever. And the end result is a more and more irrelevant FSF.
[1] https://news.slashdot.org/story/12/12/23/1945248/gnu-grep-an...
Given the last attempts to remove Stallman, I'm confident that he isn't alone in OSS having these traits.
And so the FSF becomes more irrelevant because they're more interested in the cult of personality rather than the actual principals of free software.
Edit: First commit of the rms-open-letter is by Molly de Blanc. TIL she is an ethics moralist like Coraline Ada Ehmke, which paints the whole RMS controversy in a new light.
And I hope you realize the deep irony in you complaining about character assassination while you set out to do the same thing to try and prove an irrelevant point.
> Richard M. Stallman, frequently known as RMS, has been a dangerous force in the free software community for a long time. He has shown himself to be misogynist, ableist, and transphobic, among other serious accusations of impropriety.
I think if someone wrote it themselves as a comment here on HN it would constitute flaming and would get flagged.
Why are you supporting and repeating such vile accusations that have repeatedly been debunked by people that actually worked with Stallman?
https://whoisylvia.medium.com/richard-stallman-has-been-vili...
https://meribold.org/2021/04/07/critique-of-rms-open-letter/
Yes, I get it - he's weird. So what?!
Why do you spread this nonsensical rumors?
The link you posted doesn't even reference whatever behavior your vilely imply - instead is all about "technical and administrative disagreements".
If the FSF has a bad reputation, it's because of people like you spreading FUD about Richard Stallman's behavior and person.
Why don't you stop with this crap and just take RMS as the kind and flawed human being he is?
1) Age
2) Race
3) Gender
Why is it ok to be ageist, sexist, AND racist in this context?
Or, in other words that might make sense to a programmer:
assert (old && white && male) + (!old || !white || !male) >= (old && white && male)If the composition of your organization does not reflect the composition of your target audience then both of those tasks become a little harder. This is not specific to the FSF and is why many organizations hire at least a few people who match their target demographics to do things like research, marketing, messaging, and outreach.
It's target audience are human being. The organizations composition reflects this; all of the FSF coworkers are human beings.
The composition of a group does not limit what it can do or stand for. Anything else would imply that some humans are more valuable than others.
> and how it compares to tech more broadly
Big citation needed
Attempting to socially engineer your way out of that is a potentially impossible road, lined with injustices.
Fwiw, though, the creator of Bash is black: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Fox_(computer_programmer...
I think of the FSF as doing something entirely different and the work that it does is valuable in and of itself and also, in addition, enables benefiting humans regardless of anything including what they think or what they say.
That said, Emacs is still rubbish, vim all the way.
Accept that you'll never find the perfect messenger. There's always someone more alienated, someone more disfavored and someone more ignored, someone even less privileged. You can keep finding "better" messengers, but that's just a distraction.
Focus on the message.
Stallman is nothing like the caricature from the slanderous hit-pieces, but in their zeal to defend him from both fabricated and legitimate complaints the FSF seems to be cultivating a smaller but more fanatical audience. Turning the FSF into a cult of personality centered on Stallman may be good for donations but it may also prevent them from achieving their mission.
[Citation needed]
>The A.C.L.U. has in fact often gloried in its internal contentions. It split over decisions to represent the Nazis in the 1930s, the Ku Klux Klan in the 1960s, and the Nazis in the 1970s. After Skokie, a leader of the left-wing National Lawyers Guild complained of its “poisonous evenhandedness.”
The psychologist said he was faking it (and schizophrenia) but that didn’t matter to the ACLU.
Totally disgusting.
That's not to say you can criticize RMS, quite the opposite, but that criticism needs to be focused on his position in regards to Free Software, not the person and I really haven't heard much of that.
Almost all I read is people criticizing him and repeating the idea that he is somehow unassailable.
If this is "diverse" as in the political sense, I am glad RMS passively blocked them. Nothing good comes from pursuing "diversity".
And before anyone calls me a white supremacist: I'm Japanese, specifically a Japanese-American not that that should mean anything. People should be judged for their character and merit, not what color their skin is or whether they have a vajayjay or whether they exhibit rightspeak.
Eesh. Nothing? Not one good thing comes from encouraging a diversity of people?
> People should be judged for their character and merit,
Yeah, they should. But they're not. Because humans are inherently biased, even when they don't mean to be.
Nope, why would I want to be deliberately racist, sexist, or whatever else discriminatory? Why would doing so lead to anything good?
>Yeah, they should. But they're not. Because humans are inherently biased, even when they don't mean to be.
That isn't an excuse, though.
If we wanted to encourage diversity in the free software space, we should make sure every type of free software user feels welcome. Not just Linux users, but also BSD users, as well as folks who use Windows or MacOS but enjoy free software like Blender.
Of course, free software naturally has a greater appeal to tech-savvy computer users and software developers, which is a group that is overrepresented by Americans, English speakers, men and white people, mostly due to economic reasons. But these characteristics have nothing to do with free software, and there is already a diverse range of viewpoints and user profiles within the free software space.
In the open source world big tech are trying to use the diversity as a way to cynically get representation for themselves. They hire people who hit their diversity quotas and then use them for open source outreach to get their voices amplified among the progressive minded who actually... write all that open source.
The people who would be pushed as candidates for open source boards (e.g. black people doing dev outreach for Microsoft/Google) are blameless (they need a job!) but they are still being used by rich white men to serve a mostly corporate agenda.
This isnt to say that we dont need more diversity, just that we should recognize when the shallow appearance of diversity is being cynically used as a corporate and political weapon by elites to push a regressive agenda.
This strategy is very similar to the one employed by one of the most racist countries on earth, although theyre more blatant and less implicit about their accusations. The strategy works very well, too - progressive minded people can be easily manipulated through guilt.
Through the 1960's, the majority of computer science jobs were held by women[1].
Your worldview is not compatible with reality.
This.
You can even trace when it happened by clustering the awards given to Margaret Hamilton:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(software_...
Three in the 47 years between 1969 and 2016, Eight in the 7 years between 2016 and now.
The tech industry was built by women, then had their jobs stolen
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/02/19/women-buil...
The problem is that today the supposed CS skills are atrocious. Most self called "engineers" would be laughed at the rest of the world. And, if they dared to stay in an actual engineering job in Europe (with civil accountability) without a proper degree, they would end in jail if something really bad happened. Literally.
The campaign was so intense and extreme it nearly destroyed the FSF. It continues to this day.
Stallman has a 15 year written record of his commitment to these causes. If he and the FSF can be canceled in this way, how are any of us safe?
[1] https://stallmansupport.org/richard-stallman-commitment-to-s...
[2] https://stallmansupport.org/richard-stallman-is-not-transpho...
But I somewhat agree that people that criticise Stallman should be vetted closely as many of the accusations were very dishonest.
I agree that the FSF shouldn't tie itself to an individual, but the behavior of his distractors seem personal and much more "problematic". He has a strong opinion and isn't a people person, but that is certainly not a problem.
We don't really need unqualified market researchers that believe they know what some blurry target group might want to support.
Agreed. He has done cringe-worthy things (and worse), but his detractors take malicious glee in trashing him. That is low and dishonest behavior.
You have to understand that there was corporate influence that tried to topple him multiple times. So in that regard, yes, sadly his critics must be vetted closely. If that hits valid criticism, I am very sorry for that.
what kind of disagreement? hard to understand without knowing that.
They became members when there was an attack on RMS from inside and out.
In a way I think one root cause is about professionalism. Corporates like sensible professional behaviour. Activists don't. Activist organisations could be seen as compromising by becoming clean.
Perhaps it's about the hobby internet and big internet businesses via arguements about tone and attitude.
I cannot see it being any other way really. He is the founder. He sets the tone. He know exactly what he wants FSF to be.
Maintaining the core principles (especially if they are uncommon) of an organization is really, really hard if you have ever attempted it. You have to actively avoid, or even let go of people who are not near totally aligned with the principles .
The organization right now seems headed for irrelevance, when the ideas seem to be really more needed now that ever. Right now he’s and his camp are in charge, so if he and the group want to run it into the ground so be it.
Hopefully the ideas live on and some group can carry it forward.
I always thing back to media goblin as something that should be something more than it is. Though I’ll note it’s a “gnu” project which might mean it’s part of the FSF? It’s kinda a mess, but it seems whoever is running that is doing something different with the branding (I knew someone who was a big fan of Mediagoblin)
It is never the case is my observation (as much as I want you to be correct). Any attempt to detach individual form the goals/idea of an organization leads to bureaucracy, incompetence, and perhaps most importantly authoritarianism of the evil kind. ( there are relatively benign versions of authoritarianism )
>when the ideas seem to be really more needed now that ever.
Can agree here, but who really steps up? who really want to make that sacrifice at great cost to one's personal comfort? It's easy to criticize RMS, ( or similar people) when one is a arm chair philosopher.
Thanks, will have the look at it.
At some point in time you just have to be ok with the best people to the job, doing their jobs. This doesn't even have to be controversial. If you can't do open heart surgery, you can't do it. You shouldn't be allowed to do it. People shouldn't be asked to be ok with not wanting to be treated by sub-standard doctors. I wouldn't be happy with boarding an airplane built by bad engineers, or drive on a bridge built by bad engineers.
This is where it gets controversial. In some places the best person to do the job might not necessarily have the same religious, political, social, racial, economical or whatever view you associate with.
OTOH, you need some of these heroes to run things for you. Don't get me wrong, if everybody could be writing a emacs or gcc, they would already be writing it. Pretty much anything that anyone would need to do something awesome with a computer today is free. The barrier is you.
Anyway, I still think that the FSF is doing an important job and that it is necessary to have such groups. But I just don't think we need more RMS, really not, given what it appears to entail. Groups such as the FSF should really not be so tied to a single individual, whoever that is. And especially not with someone who's behavior has repeatedly been problematic while we need to tackle inclusivity issues in our communities.
Even with the disclaimer at the beginning of the article, this title doesn't work for me. That said, I agree with most of the content of the article. The same article could have been titled "We need more copyleft", and it would be for the best.
EDIT: to answer some comments: nobody's talking about diversity for diversity's sake here, nor specifically about diversity hiring. Inclusivity is also something to enjoy in public events for example, and we need public symbols to emphasizes that, which RMS (who, whether he wants it or not, is de facto a public symbol and a thought leader) is clearly incapable of.