October 14th, 2024 Richard Stallman (aka “RMS”) is the founder of GNU and the Free Software Foundation and present-day voting member of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) board of directors and “Chief GNUisance” of the GNU project. He is responsible for innumerable contributions to the free software movement, setting its guiding principles, organizing political action, and directly contributing to a flourishing free software ecosystem. The majority of Stallman’s political activity has been of priceless value to society at large.
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?
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)
When he should be thinking of it like “Invalid certificate. Issue date in future.”
Him being physically incapable of understanding the taint of coercion might also explain the years’ long delay in releasing the AGPL? Interesting.
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.
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.
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.