The Stallman report

FYI: if you are an active apologist for Stallman in this thread, you will be indefinitely banned from Beehaw. to the extent that Stallman has salient critiques of anything he's under fire for (as @t3rmit3@beehaw.org notes), his use of those critiques is almost exclusively to advance horrible, indefensible, actively harmful ideas. if you actually care about the merits of these subjects, nothing he argues is actually best argued from him. almost anybody else would be better served as a mouthpiece. and it is just incredibly silly to stand by the guy who took until 2019 to retract his belief that pedophilia isn't harmful to children just because, as a foundational belief informing that position, he reasonably thinks we infantilize people between the ages of 12 and 17 too much
- Aside for all his pedophile view points, he is correct about infantilizing 12-17 year olds. We have helicopter parents removing every roadblock for children, they grow up not knowing how to plan or resolve conflict.
  
  Aside for all his pedophile view points, he is correct about infantilizing 12-17 year olds.
  ...you're just repeating my point back to me, and why Stallman is the worst mouthpiece for this position.

Mere possession of child pornography should not be a crime at all. To prosecute people for possessing something published, no matter what it may be, is a big threat to human rights. – stallman.org, 5 June 2017 “Possession of child porn”
I'll honestly be surprised if he doesn't end up being revealed to be in possession of CSAM.
- Entirely possible but he's also a stubborn man obsessed with his own ideological consistency and absurdly precise (if not commonly understood) language. He's clearly a creep but having kept up with him over the years I think it's similarly possible that those statements aren't self-serving and are instead sincerely held dominoes 15 down the line from following the implications of some core principles.
  That doesn't make them not disgusting and also does not mean he should remain the voice of our movement, of course.
  
  Wise people know when to adjust core beliefs to not get into a situation like this, but I'd say that there's at least a bit of intention here.
  
  yeah kinda like Aaron Swarttz made some sus statements but he was still relatively young. never got vibe he was pedo, just did not undersatnd the issue.

There is a very real discussion of the way that we have conflated "minor" (a legal status) and "child" (a developmental state), and used that to infantilize adolescents who are very much not children...
but that discussion is not about sex, it's about the way that people abuse that legal status in order to deny adolescents normal choices that they are developed enough to make, such as what books to read, medical decisions, what they do with their property (or even the ability to own property), etc.
Stallman is using that very legitimate discussion as cover to argue about whether children (i.e. pre-adolescents) should be able to have sex with adults.
He is, at best, the worst kind of provocateur, doing this because he knows it riles people up, so that he can feign some position of superiority about not being upset about his very intellectual ^/s take, and at worst, desiring to enable or normalize pedophilia and hebephilia.

Stallman doesn't seem to get that pedophilia is wrong because of the hierarchy of power, and the power imbalances between older/younger people, not because of some inherent wrongness about being attracted to a prepubescent person. This is shown by how he condemns some pedophilia, but is accepting of 12+/past puberty. (I despise this logic, because it would also make gay sex and sodomy wrong, as well).
I find this deeply ironic, because his primary issue with proprietary software is the way that it gives developers levels of power over users. From his article Why Open Source Misses the Point
But software can be said to serve its users only if it respects their freedom. What if the software is designed to put chains on its users? Then powerfulness means the chains are more constricting, and reliability that they are harder to remove.
You would expect someone who is so in tune with the hierarchies that appear with software developers, publishers, and users, to also see those same hierarchies echoed in relationships between people of vastly different ages, but instead, we get this. I'm extremely disappointed.
These failures to understand hierarchy and power, are exactly why Stallman shouldn't be in a position of power. Leaders should continually prove that they understand hierarchy and the effects of their actions on those below them. Someone who doesn't understand how their power could affect another, shouldn't be a leader.

I had heard that his behavior was problematic, but I was unaware of the depth of the issue.
- Not just problematic, but consequential too:
  Richard Stallman has also embarked upon a decades-long political project to normalize sexual violence. Under his ideological leadership, the free software movement is unsafe, particularly for women. Women represent just 3% of the free software community,2 compared to 23% of industry programmers generally.3 This is no accident. There is a pervasive culture of sexism and a stark lack of accountability in free software, and it begins with Stallman’s unchallenged and reprehensible behavior.
  
  Yeah, that's what I meant. I guess problematic means more objectionable, but I mean that it presents a serious difficulty within FOSS culture.
  
  holly molly... girls got cuties?

I hate that this happens, because he's a goddamned prophet when it comes to software freedom, the harms of proprietary dev models and related stuff, he's also in mastodon and regularly posts about international news i see no one else mention, but damn there's just no coming back from all this shit, how the hell would you share stuff he has said with all this gross stuff staining him? Goddammit, Stallman, you were supposed to be at least an OK person!
- Responding mainly because I second this and feel the same way.
  The ethical bar is so low and yet he still chooses to not clear it.

I knew he had said problematic shit, but this is disturbing.

I dunno. RMS is a software developer. I think we should listen to him on matters related to software. For other topics, I listen to other people.
It kind of reminds me of ASD symptoms, not reading social cues properly, etc. So from the viewpoint of inclusion we maybe should not go too hard on these negative aspects and focus on the positive sides?
- It kind of reminds me of ASD symptoms, not reading social cues properly, etc.
  i know you mean well but, respectfully: having autism or another disorder (if Stallman even does) is probably not the reason why Richard Stallman has historically defended what amounts to pedophilia; why he continues to defend bestiality and necrophilia; and why he has extremely malformed opinions on what constitutes sexual harassment and sexual assault. and even if it is, that's an explanation and nothing more. it does not excuse or make acceptable his behavior or the consistency with which it has skeeved other people out. he deserves to be strongly rebuked, as anyone else would, for his refusal to take accountability in this situation.
  
  from his stand point the kids gave consent, he did not seem to grasp that due to age or vulnerabilty/power differential they can't consent. It is like he is thinking of it like a code problem not a human problem. i.e. IF (Consent=true)(AllOK) else(NotOK)
- I think we should listen to him on matters related to software. For other topics, I listen to other people.
  Completely disagree. No matter what he might have expertise in, he has entirely invalidated his voice by taking the stances he's taken and the acts he committed. Even listening to his hard technical knowledge gives him validity.
  This all comes back to the same abhorrent shit that has permeated the tech industry, and FLOSS particularly, that we should never consider soft skills or anything else about a person, that they can be the most vile, toxic person possible, but as long as they're a good developer, It's Fine. But it's not fine. It's never been fine, and we should not normalize continuing to have people like this in our midst just because they're a good dev, or that they once made some good technical points.
- Your comment strikes me as particularly harmful and misguided because autistic people are often specifically targeted for abuse and even seen as deserving of abuse.
  I am sort of grateful, because you've unintentionally really made it starkly clear to me. We should not platform unrepentant enablers of abuse regardless of their prior contributions, it simply causes too much harm.
- Drew DeVault (sway, sourcehut, hare... creator) wrote an article on this exact topic, asking autistic people on mastodon what they think of it. The tldr is that autistic people (those who answered) hate this excuse because they rather know when they make people uneasy to try to adjust, and also that if we need to tolerate this kind of discourse to make room for a minority of autistic people, then we are not doing a good job because it makes a lot of people really uneasy.

An anonymous hit job that reads like it was written by Ehmke. We should give this any credence because…?
- An anonymous hit job
  it's literally his own words all the way down here. if it's a "hit job" it's entirely Stallman's own fault for being a freak with morally abhorrent takes. one of the first things mentioned here is that he had to retract the position that "voluntarily pedophilia" doesn't harm children (a category of person he defines as anyone under about 13)! any reasonable person would find this abhorrent and Stallman a horrible person for ever having defended said position in the first place, because it is genuinely abhorrent to defend something like that. that's just child abuse.
  
  Not defending pedophiles, but there was a time when 13 was considered adult. It’s still legal for teenagers to marry in most countries.
  Anything can be taken out of context.
  
  it's entirely Stallman's own fault for being a freak
  Takes notes
- It looks pretty well cited to me. The fact that it was written anonymously doesn't really take away from that.
  
  It really kind of does. If the author is so ashamed of the work that they won’t sign it, that speaks volumes.
- Not so anonymous, see my other comment: https://phtn.app/post/programming.dev/20566574?thread=0.12859284#12859284

Stallman pushed false propaganda about BSD for ideological reasons because the BSD developers allow freedom of choice to let people do what they want with their own computers and BSD developers don't fight proprietary software, they simply don't allow it as part of each BSD base operating system. Stallman and his followers think they know better than UNIX developers which software everybody in the world should use.
It's because of his kind that I only support open source software and comdemn free software and the politics of free software. A whole complete BSD operating system is 100% open source compared to the generic Linux kernel. Why doesn't the Linux-libre develop their own drivers like BSD develop drivers and commision hardware companies for specs for the BSD's to write their own drivers?
- I catch a lot of shit for my distaste of GPL. I don’t think I should be able to tell you what you can and can’t do with my source code. I’ve released it into the wild. If I put caveats on it it’s not really free.
  
  While I understand where you're coming from, I believe that it distracts from a massive positive effect that the GPL has: the way it ensures collaboration. Lots of contributors to GPL software do so in the knowledge that they are working on something great together. I myself have felt discouraged to contribute to MIT licensed software, because I know that others might just take all the hard work, make something proprietary of it and give nothing back.
  I see GPL as some sort of public transaction, it is indeed more limiting than MIT and offers less pure freedom in that sense. But I just love how it uses copyright not for enforcing licensing payment for some private entity, but enforces a contribution to the community as a whole. I find this quite beautiful.
  
  I agree with you 100%, no exceptions. Strongly agree. I say the GPL is socialist. What those people don't consider is that there are many countries in the world where no court will take a case over a software license.
  The ISC license is a libertarian license.
  Tell me your opinion on one thing. I've considered that if Torvalds changes the license to AGPLv3, meaning servers have to publish their source code, it would an extremely quick collapse and abandonment of Linux. The GPLv2 Linux kernel can have binary code in it, but a AGPLv3 must be 100% open source, and Google would ban Linux on all corporate systems, Microsoft would ban it, CISCO would ban it, IBM would ban it, a complete implosion. What do you say?
  But if all those corporations adopt one of the BSD's operating systems, due to the BSD and ISC license, the corporations can ignore those licenses and develop on more complete, stable, secure, long term reliable system. Linux is a collection of various parts forced together. BSD is a complete operating system from a single couple of developers who all have commit access to every part of the system.

eh.. fuck this guy (RMS)