Come on: this is a massive trivialisation of RMS's achievements. I have often disagreed with him but his contributions to OSS, and to the wider foundations of modern software and software development, are huge and are the product of decades of devotion - of consistent, motivated effort - from him.
Like it or not, all of us who work in software - even those of us who aren't necessarily strong advocates of free software - benefit from RMS's work.
I've also got bad news for you: we all exhibit _patterns_ of bad behaviour. Fortunately, we are all equipped with the capacity to change even long ingrained habits and patterns.
(To be clear: I am in no way defending any bad behaviour from RMS towards other people, or suggesting that he shouldn't change that behaviour.)
Like, I recognize that what he did back in the 80s matters, but somewhere around the turn of the millenium, he seems to have done very little of actual note and in the past 3 years or so seems to have become an active liability since the main things that got him attention were:
- Using his rights as GNU lead to veto the removal of a bad, outdated, US-centric, abortion joke from the glibc manual. This is after all other project maintainers agreed to remove it.
- Made appalling comments about the Epstein case (yes the media spun the story badly, that doesn't change that what Stallman said was horrible).
Even outside of that, there's also literal years of the following:
- Many examples of Stallman being a creep to women and an insensitive dickhead in general is something that existed before but really came to a head.
- The FSF maintaining a very egocentric approach to FOSS (thinking it's the sole relevant authority on advancing thoughts and ideas behind FOSS, as well as getting very cranky when projects don't want to join the GNU), something which seems near universally pushed by Stallman since every case of this somehow ended up involving him.
- Consistently vetoing plugin framework support for GCC out of an ideological fear that seems to consistently be cited as the main cause for it being superseded by clang/llvm.
> Fortunately, we are all equipped with the capacity to change even long ingrained habits and patterns.
It does come at the prerequisite that the person in question actually wants to change. Stallman is notoriously stubborn and it took him literally getting fired from the FSF to even admit that the most outstanding problem with his views (his stance on pedophilia) was wrong and he's never even bothered to address any of the others.
For one he managed to keep the whole GNU project true to its values by being someone people listen on the subject. How many other people do you know you can guarantee not to "monetize" and sell out such a huge project to a highest bidder in the meantime?
>Like, I recognize that what he did back in the 80s matters, but somewhere around the turn of the millenium, he seems to have done very little of actual note and in the past 3 years or so seems to have become an active liability
You do realise that his role is not so much being a coder nor even a manager, but being what in business is sometimes called "a visionary". Thankfully there are enough coders and managers involved to have GNU and Foss going. The value of Stallman in the 80s and earlier was not just in the code he wrote but the ideas he managed to implement in our collective consciousness by doing that. Now more than ever we need someone we can count on to offer advice and leadership that has no agenda other than the original values.
>Made appalling comments about the Epstein case (yes the media spun the story badly, that doesn't change that what Stallman said was horrible).
What is it that he actually said that was so "horrible"? Are you sure you are actually talking about what he said or have your opinions been formed by lies? Read this and tell me what is so horrible in his actual stance on the subject: https://www.wetheweb.org/post/cancel-we-the-Web
>Stallman is notoriously stubborn and it took him literally getting fired from the FSF to even admit that the most outstanding problem with his views (his stance on pedophilia)
Please do enlighten me on what Stallman's stance on pedophilia is? But please use actual text written by him (not ripped out of context) rather than he said she said.
I believe this lie that Stallman justifies pedophilia came from an opinion the previously linked article describes like this "(his point) is mainly that we overuse and distort the term child pornography to refer to any depiction of any minor in any context that is even vaguely sexual." Is that untrue? Have you not heard about cases where actual 17 year old people were prosecuted for pedophilia because they had their own photo on their phone that was deemed sexual in nature by some judge?
Stallman said several times adults having sex with children was fine if the children consented.[3][4][5] He changed his mind in 2018 or 2019 apparently.[4][6]
[1] https://twitter.com/paulnivin/status/1374499598853545986
[2] https://twitter.com/NovalisDMT/status/1172573166956437505
[3] https://stallman.org/archives/2003-may-aug.html#28%20June%20...
[4] https://stallman.org/archives/2006-may-aug.html#05%20June%20...
[5] https://stallman.org/archives/2013-jan-apr.html#04_January_2...
[6] https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html#14_September...
Quite a lot of them actually. In a sense, that is the big advantage that free software (but really the copyleft, since let's be honest that's Stallmans most meaningful contribution to the current ecosystem that everyone who does use FOSS uses) offers.
If someone ends up being a malicious, self-serving actor who sells out their project to the highest bidder, the copyleft is there to ensure that even if the copyright is signed away using an CAA (which if you want to argue about that, I would recommend you don't do it in a thread involving the GNU/FSF since they have notoriously bad and outdated CAA systems from what I heard), you can still keep that project going.
From projects such as Emby getting forked to Jellyfin, from Owncloud to Nextcloud, from the long history of adblockers getting sold to big corporations and then other maintainers stepping in to fork them back; THAT is the big strength of FOSS and copyleft. The idea that a sufficiently big and developed project can never truly "die", even when it changes hands. Sure the road is rocky sometimes (ffmpeg vs avconv was a case of maintainer drama that led to forks and eventually withered away), but that is what makes it worth it in the end.
None of that really falls back on Stallman's seemingly singular attempt to claim ownership on the entirety of FOSS. It does on the countless developers, project maintainers and the like who don't sell out and in the event that one does, that their damage is limited.
> You do realise that his role is not so much being a coder nor even a manager, but being what in business is sometimes called "a visionary". Thankfully there are enough coders and managers involved to have GNU and Foss going. The value of Stallman in the 80s and earlier was not just in the code he wrote but the ideas he managed to implement in our collective consciousness by doing that. Now more than ever we need someone we can count on to offer advice and leadership that has no agenda other than the original values.
Except he's also pretty much *the* public speaker for the FSF and their main PR person. And at that role he is just an objective failure. There is a constant stream of PR disasters. I am by no means a PR person, but you don't have to be an expert at something to note when someone is doing something really wrong.
We don't need Stallman anymore. There's plenty of great voices and developers in Free Software. Stallman is what, 68? He's past retirement age in my country. He won't be around forever. If anything, we should be looking to successors for him. Both on the PR and the visionary end. Stallman should have been put on a backseat by the FSF years ago. Instead, the organization has turned itself into a bloated singularity around the opinions of one man, backed up by a not insignificant amount of Free Software projects to give it weight.
> What is it that he actually said that was so "horrible"? Are you sure you are actually talking about what he said or have your opinions been formed by lies? Read this and tell me what is so horrible in his actual stance on the subject: https://www.wetheweb.org/post/cancel-we-the-Web
Redefining sexual assault in a way that would exclude many victims of sexual assault, reiterating his own stance that he thinks the age of consent is meaningless. Just about the only thing the media got wrong was because Vice (which yeah, is a shitty outlet) went for a cheap headline that most news sites copied. I have linked below for you the original email exchanges if you want to check them.[1]
> Please do enlighten me on what Stallman's stance on pedophilia is? But please use actual text written by him (not ripped out of context) rather than he said she said.
He's since walked these back as stated before, but here's the two biggest ones: [2][3]
[1]: http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6405929-0913201914205...
[2]: https://www.stallman.org/archives/2006-may-aug.html#05%20Jun...
[3]: https://www.stallman.org/archives/2012-nov-feb.html#04_Janua...
