rms-open-letter.github.io

https://rms-open-letter.github.io/

by p4bl0 • 5 years ago

128 122 5 years ago

edoceo• 5 years ago

Wow. Calls for the entire FSF board to step down. And signed by more than a few names that carry weight.

kazinator2• 5 years ago

Which is why I'm hesitatingly doing a rare thing and clicking on vouch.

This is a real thing happening in tech, by people who are serious; we can't just stick our heads in the sand and flag it out of the way.

Edit: too late; by the time I typed that, it was vouched into undead status.

joshuamorton7• 5 years ago

It needs another vouch now. I was at least one of the people who vouched earlier, I think this is an important thread to be seen on HN. It is weird to me that HN kneejerk flags this, when they didn't flag the FSF announcing his re-placement on the board. They're both equally important and equally controversial.

dragonwriter3• 5 years ago

I can't think of anything more likely to harden the FSF board in defense of Stallman than leaders of the OSI being prominent in a group calling for the FSF board to step down for having tolerated him.

runningmike2• 5 years ago

Why a public letter? This action should be done using non public pressure. It’s a bit like who does not sign approves this imho strange action from the fsf board. And still no good public response from the fsf on this delicate issue. Using the Gpl is already a statement for many Foss devs. The fsf should take care not to pollute the gpl with rms issues.

geofft3• 5 years ago

There was non-public pressure, from members of the FSF board in fact, in the past, when he stepped down:

http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2019/10/15/fsf-rms.html

It's clear that didn't work.

runningmike2• 5 years ago

Bradley M. Kuhn was one of the few who wrote a good retrospective in public and his own role. I can not imagine that he showed up at libre planet this year to receive his deserved award if he knew upfront that rms was back on the fsf board...

neolog7• 5 years ago

The list of opinions [1] may be interesting to people. I think they're probably very common opinions.

[1] https://rms-open-letter.github.io/appendix

toomuchtodo• 5 years ago

Regarding Down Syndrome, those who carry pregnancies are coming to a similar conclusion as Stallman (prenatal testing in many cases leads to termination of the pregnancy):

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/12/the-las...

EDIT: Sidenote: We were offered embryo genetic testing and selection as part of IVF rounds. Didn't give a second thought to not selecting unhealthy embryos.

spacechild1• 5 years ago

Another side note: here in Austria, prenatal diagnostics is even covered by health care for women older than 35.

amanzi• 5 years ago

So many of those quotes really need to be read in the context of the original posts. I have read them all in the original context and have also read the journalistic reports on them that conveniently omit the context. There are others who have broken down the claims and compared them with the original quotes and it's really criminal how RMS has been misrepresented.

madeofpalk• 5 years ago

It's a common opinion that possessing child pornography shouldnt be illegal?

teddyh2• 5 years ago

Again, in order to make sure this link is available in these comments: https://sterling-archermedes.github.io/

geofft3• 5 years ago

That link does not tell the complete story:

http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2019/10/15/fsf-rms.html

https://wingolog.org/archives/2019/10/08/thoughts-on-rms-and...

https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/52587.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25193674

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21000374

Don't believe everything the media tells you. Tech news sites only report on what they read in public sources, which leads them to wildly inaccurate conclusions like the idea that objections to Stallman started with his comments about Epstein, or that there was no objection to him from inside the free software community.

uncledave5• 5 years ago

For me, the undersigned list has now become a shitlist of projects with folk who are more concerned about public image, perception and signalling than engineering.

I am quite frankly tired of this.

I don’t give a crap what RMS thinks or says quite frankly or this lot.

What did being divisive ever solve? All they are doing is creating more problems, more animosity and discrediting us all.

rvz2• 5 years ago

We are calling for the removal of the entire Board of the Free Software Foundation.

Ready for round 2?

Let's see who u-turns first.

rubin552• 5 years ago

How does this not produce gnashing of teeth and rage in people? Seriously, what the fuck is up with this holier-than-thou virtue signaling bullshit? Good to have a list of people that apparently approve of this kind of thing so I know what to avoid.

creamytaco• 5 years ago

100%. This is a modern day witch hunt by dangerous fanatics that think they can gang up against and cancel someone they don't like.

I'm glad they put their names down as I want nothing to do with these people.

xtracto• 5 years ago

I was so disappointed in reading Federico Mena Quintero's name in the list. I have respect on him as a Mexican developer and open source evangelist.

To think that a lot of people here In Mexico laugh at the crazy Political Correctness and overreaction of Americans... I would think he would be more on the side of just getting shit done, live and let live.

jcastro4• 5 years ago

Have you not ever met the guy? Yeesh.

uncledave5• 5 years ago

I have. He’s less of an asshat than my father. At best my father got called a prick. We didn’t form a consortium of people to cancel him. That’s just batshit crazy.

olalonde2• 5 years ago

I agree that Stallman is probably not the best PR person for the FSF, but that's not what this is about. This is about canceling Stallman due to his "problematic opinions". It's a modern day witch hunt. Notice how all of the evidence against him[0] is just about his controversial opinions rather than his behavior.

[0] https://rms-open-letter.github.io/appendix

_ea1k• 5 years ago

I think that's a fair statement, but this letter calls for the removal of all FSF board members. Is that a fair response to RMS' opinions and behavior?

rubin552• 5 years ago

I actually did meet Stallman on a few occasions. In all cases he was a kind and generally awesome human being:

  * 2000's, Linux Conference in San Francisco / Silicon Valley, I asked him about porting some app from LibC5 to GlibC6, I bought the GNU LibC manuals there. I imagine he was more confused than me about my newbie questions, but he patiently heard me out and gave me some valuable insights.
  
  * 2010-2016ish, FOSDEM conferences in Brussels. Attended multiple talks of him about FOSS.

Edit: Small spelling fixes and clarifications here and there.

rvz2• 5 years ago

The whole trendy cancelling thing is already completely senseless, out of control and is comparable to medieval standards.

Even if RMS dares to 'apologise' or say 'Sorry', those who already signed that list will never redeem his 'sins' and to them he is condemned forever to the lost and banned.

bit-rot• 5 years ago

Look, without getting into a debate on cancel culture, I’m wondering if it’s specifically virtue signaling that you object to. Because RMS is specifically known for a massive amount of virtue signaling. It’s all over his website and was written all over his office at MIT. And he would join discussions and change the subject to whatever he felt like talking about in order to, we’ll, spread the good word. And of course the free software movement more broadly is about taking a moral stance and aggressively spreading it through copyleft and other forms of activism.

So I wonder if it’s not “virtue signaling” here that’s the problem, but the virtue being signaled itself that you don’t like.

verytrivial• 5 years ago

Having read the apparently damning set of things RMS has said linked from the page, they sound very similar to the sorts of things I would have thought when I was an unsocialised 10 year old. All 'reasoned' in some technical sense, but hurtful, misguided, ignorant, impolite and basically no longer defensible. To be honest these sort of 'internally consistent but clangingly bad' takes on morality and social norms come out a lot in ASD people. The puritanical bent to RMS's prognostications on Software Freedom are also like this: if X then Y, and it MUST BE Y, and I don't care how you feel about it. I have no idea if this is in play here. It sounds like he is being excluded based upon his views (they mention "actions" but this seems to be 'act' of sharing his views?) but not actually taken to task or challenged about them?

threatofrain2• 5 years ago

I understand seeking to exclude Stallman from leadership, because I'd be pretty disappointed if my org leader kept getting caught in completely unforced errors far outside of mission focus, such as on issues of pedophelia, rape, or Epstein. When a person becomes a leader, the calculus on them is no longer on whether they are merely an acceptable individual.

What is troublesome is that this letter seeks to oust the entire FSF board.

detaro• 5 years ago

The FSF board that just decided to put Stallman back. Seems like an obvious conclusion for people strongly opposed to him and the culture around him. Before he left there was always going to be the defensive argument of "but what are they gonna do, throw out the founder?", which is now more "they looked at the entire package and decided that yes actually, that's what we want from a fellow leader".

bitwize2• 5 years ago

What is troublesome is that this letter seeks to oust the entire FSF board.

Seeking to oust the entire FSF board is kind of the point of the entire exercise -- Stallman or no Stallman. As long as the FSF board is committed to the Four Olds, there will be an army of twitterati searching their entire blog, mailing-list, and social-media history for the six words that will hang them. As long as the FSF and other institutions remain authoritative and outside the control of the "woke" (who are really lickspittle agents of corporate interests mixed with a few assorted grifters), they will be considered hostile and a threat, to be dealt with accordingly: subverted and neutralized, or failing that, destroyed.

The next step is to gain control of the OSI so as to change the Open Source Definition.

bonzini• 5 years ago

From https://medium.com/@thomas.bushnell/a-reflection-on-the-depa...:

I feel very sad for him. He’s a tragic figure. He is one of the most brilliant people I’ve met, who I have always thought desperately craved friendship and camaraderie, and seems to have less and less of it all the time. This is all his doing; nobody does it to him. But it’s still very sad. As far as I can tell, he believes his entire life’s work is a failure.

This is also a very sad epilogue, and the FSF board is to blame for not being able to explain to RMS why reinstating him was an awful idea.

At the same time, it's also sad that the open latter calls out RMS for ableism, when it's obviously clear that he is in turn not able to understand the situation that has arisen around him and the problem that he constitutes for the FSF.

To be 100% clear I am not saying that this should excuse or justify rms's misogynism or his well-known (by now) views on sexuality. But all this contributes to my feeling of sadness and I am pretty sure I am not the only one that feels like that.

So I am torn. I agree that the FSF board has failed, and I wish RMS would resign from his other leadership positions (including from the GNU project, which has been so instrumental to my career), but this open letter leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.

See also https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2019/joint-statement-on-the-gnu-pr... (Joint statement on the GNU Project, October 2019) for something that instead I agree wholeheartedly with, though I didn't sign it at the time because I am not a GNU maintainer anymore.

salawat3• 5 years ago

I just wanted to point out something out:

Welcome to logical structure parsing. Believe it or not, internal consistency in language snd action is actuallu a pretty hard thing to get right, easy (and natural) to dismiss out of hand. In philosophy, we call it the self-referential inconsistency, and there is a shocking number of the population who not only indulge in it, but get very upset when you point it out due to the cognitive dissonance that comes from it. It really gets the lizard brain going. Bmwhen you strip away the emotional aspects of it though, you will find that there are linguistic roots of almost every conflict. It isn't the way of life the selected words represent that is at issue, but the words assembled by the other party that are at issue.

I second there is a level of immaturity at work, but not with Stallman; instead it is with his detractors. They take any challenge to the respect or superiority of chosen pronoun use as an act of transphobia. It is not. It is an adherence to clear unambiguous communication. They create the perception of transphobia in their own minds where it simply isn't just as readily as the oft derided "conspiracy theorists" see nefariousness behind every corner. His actions, nor his words are transphobic. His detractors, however, are phobic of everyone else that just doesn't care, or prioritizes things differently.

Which, I might add, is just something you learn to deal with as life goes on to get things done.

zokier• 5 years ago

I'm kinda confused what FSF was even thinking reinstating RMS. This was such a obvious reaction and consequence.

Either they should have stood by RMS in the first place, or they should have let the matter be. But flipflopping like they did is pretty silly.

temp0826• 5 years ago

No room for redemption these days

tablespoon2• 5 years ago

No room for redemption these days

Yeah, especially since it seems like the comments he's being condemned for here are ones he's since disavowed:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/03/richard-stallman...

"Many years ago I posted that I could not see anything wrong about sex between an adult and a child, if the child accepted it," Stallman wrote. "Through personal conversations in recent years, I've learned to understand how sex with a child can harm per [sic] psychologically. This changed my mind about the matter: I think adults should not do that. I am grateful for the conversations that enabled me to understand why."

howeyc3• 5 years ago

No. Someone having opinions you don't like isn't reason enough to ruin their life. Put me in the anti-rms-open-letter camp.

We all interact with people that have strange opinions everyday, we just usually don't hear them, let's all move on.

untitaker_4• 5 years ago

By that standard my life is already ruined, as I too am not on the FSF's board.

tacoforlunch• 5 years ago

Are you an excellent developer that has spent their life towards FSF activism rather than working for $BIG_CORP?

throwaway3229• 5 years ago

Their reasoning for kicking him off is pretty weak. I'm taking these quotes from the list of incidents linked from the first.

Especially chilling is when Stallman addresses the accusations that Marvin Minsky sexually assaulted one of Jeffrey Epstein’s trafficking victims

This incident as it was initially reported was fabricated. This letter admits that but tries to reify those fabrications by twisting his words. Saying that maybe his friend Minsky didn't realize what was happening is not defending Epstein or rape.

He regularly and repeatedly makes comments about “the dishonest law that labels sex with adolescents as ‘rape’ even if they are willing.”

The US criminal code is not above criticism. From Stallman or anyone else.

He recommended that, should someone find out they are pregnant and the child tests positive for Down’s syndrome “the right course of action for the woman is to terminate the pregnancy.”

Not really an uncommon opinion. The movement to not abort down syndrome babies was really an offshoot of the pro-life movement. Stallman is vocally not pro-life, and you really shouldn't expect him to be. If he believes sometimes abortion is the right choice, more power to him.

RMS has spent years on a campaign against using people’s correct pronouns. This is poorly disguised transphobia.

Having literary standards is not transphobic. There's no evidence Stallman ever prevented someone from participating because of their identity. There's no evidence Stallman doesn't mean what he says or that he says and speaks coded language only his detractors understand.

These signees should do better.

EDIT: Removed "Stallman-phobic" wording. Even if that's an apt description the phrasing has proved distracting in a different comment thread.

neolog7• 5 years ago

Stallman recommends the singular gender-neutral pronouns "person/per/pers" [1].

[1] https://stallman.org/articles/genderless-pronouns.html

untitaker_4• 5 years ago

This really has nothing to do with whether you find those positions agreeable or not. You have to understand that the core argument here is that Stallman is unfit to lead an organization that is supposed to be welcoming to all kinds of people, and that includes people with down syndrome or rape victims. The point is that constantly being the center of controversy is not helping here, not that any of those positions are reasons to make him homeless (which is still very much a step further than removing him from a position of power).

There's no evidence Stallman ever prevented someone from participating because of their identity.

The standard for being in a leadership position is usually much higher than the one that a regular employee/IC is held up against. Stallman is the public face of an organization comprised of a lot of people. Everything he says publicly is representative of what the FSF stands for.

zozbot234• 5 years ago

You have to understand that the core argument here is that Stallman is unfit to lead an organization that is supposed to be welcoming to all kinds of people

Who is "fit to lead" by this standard? The FLOSS community also includes many people who align themselves with various sorts of social traditionalism and are quite skeptical of any fringe notion of social "progress". The kind of FSF board or leadership that promoters of this open letter might perhaps demand would be wholly contrary to such people's lived experience. There is no solution that can satisfy everyone, other than increased toleration of differing views.

DiabloD33• 5 years ago

I, too, have an issue with people jumping on "RMS has transphobia" bandwagon without actually reading his words.

He is argument boils down to, some languages have four (or more) sets of pronouns: male, female, single and/or plural of people that is genderless (either explicitly or implicitly), singular and/or plural of inanimate object(s).

English has male, female, plural of people that is explicitly genderless (but not singular), and singular only of inanimate objects (but not plural). We don't have a pronoun that can fit a singular third gender or genderless reference. Using they as a singular pronoun in any situation often leads to awkward speech.

Other languages do other things, such as inanimate objects often being referred to with male or female pronouns (independent of having a singular inanimate pronouns), having both singular and plural inanimate object pronouns, or having singular genderless pronouns.

Adding additional words to English may be required to deal with people who do not wish to use male or female pronouns, but also do not wish to be called an it, or be forced to be called a they inappropriately (since they are not a plural, nor a royal we). Such words should appear similar to regular words, such words should be also standardized and regulated.

/End of RMS boiling down: at no point does he say trans people don't deserve pronouns that can fit their needs, he only illustrates that how we handle it now is not a good solution.

joshuamorton7• 5 years ago

English has male, female, plural of people that is explicitly genderless (but not singular), and singular only of inanimate objects (but not plural). We don't have a pronoun that can fit a singular third gender or genderless reference.

Except that we do. Singular "they" has been used since Shakespeare. And you likely use singular they in your normal speech. When you don't know anything about a particular person, you ask about their attributes. Who they are and what they like, what their name is.

Adding additional words to English may be required to deal with people who do not wish to use male or female pronouns, but also do not wish to be called an it

Indeed, and we generally do this by asking what those people want to be called, not by prescribing what they are allowed to be called. Prescriptivist language is both ineffective and rude, much as you trying to tell me what my name is is rude.

That said, even if you're interested in prescriptivist approaches, Merriam-Webster[0], and the OED[1] recognize singular they, as do the APA, NYT, and WaPo style guides.

Singular they, for a nonbinary person who prefers the pronoun, or for a person of unknown gender, is the standard. Stallman is the one causing needless conflict by trying to push a different approach when there already is a standard.

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/singular-nonbi...

[1] https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they...

thefz3• 5 years ago

Citing the letter:

RMS has spent years on a campaign against using people’s correct pronouns. This is poorly disguised transphobia.

This is spread so thin just to allow it to reach another allegation of -phobia.

DiabloD33• 5 years ago

Can someone explain to me how this is not cancel culture? Us folks on the liberal left end of the spectrum can't complain about the right for employing cancel culture tactics, yet use the same tactics hypocritically.

Not only that, if this isn't cancel culture and/or this needs to serve as the one exception, would we not also be required to go for the full nuclear option and stop using not only the GPL family of licenses, but all software that refuses to migrate off said licenses? Merely asking the FSF board to stand down is a meaningless gesture, as the entire foundation would need to cease to exist as it shall always be under rms's shadow.

Cancel culture is a dangerous thing, and shouldn't be tolerated in any liberal community that intends to protect the rights of individuals using ideals such as Freedom and Free Speech.

Note: Although I dislike how RMS conducts himself in person from time to time, that isn't a good reason to shove him under the bus. He makes arguments with zero tact, but does not make arguments made in bad faith. He clearly is somewhere on the Autism spectrum, and most likely was never diagnosed due to proper diagnosis not being invented until his 20s, and proper treatment not being invented until his 40s. The community needs to make sure we don't become some violent revolution that turns around and eats our own because its convenient.

dragonwriter3• 5 years ago

Us folks on the liberal left end of the spectrum can't complain about the right for employing cancel culture tactics

Except in pointing out the hypocrisy of the right, no one on the left is accusing anyone using the right-wing ”cancel culture” buzzword (which differentiates it from the old-standard “political correctness” that it replaced, which was used in internecine disputes within the left before being adopted by the right, but even that was never generally deployed against the right even though they used the same tactics; pretending that the main flow is the other way around reads like false-flag concern trolling.

DiabloD33• 5 years ago

That didn't actually answer my question. I am maybe one of the furthest left regulars on the HN, and I'm concerned that this open letter is not being made in good faith.

I don't care about the etymology of the phrase, it is just the most apt description used by current internet culture. We called it something else before it was named cancel culture, and we shall name it something else in the future, as we shall with all other things. Your red herring does not answer my question.

skissane• 5 years ago

Except in pointing out the hypocrisy of the right, no one on the left is accusing anyone using the right-wing ”cancel culture” buzzword

Not everyone who believes there is a problem with "cancel culture" is on the right. Some people on the left (e.g. [0]) believe that there is a real problem being described by that term, and that the term's popularity with the right is not a reason why people on the left should reject it. Of course, left-wing believers in "cancel culture" don't necessarily agree with every example of it cited by right-wing believers in it, but there is definitely some overlap in cases–for example, the article I'm linking cites a Latino truck driver being fired for making the "OK" sign as a case which was criticised as "cancel culture" by people on both the left and the right.

[0] https://arcdigital.media/the-whispered-left-wing-dissent-on-...

teddyh2• 5 years ago

Can someone explain to me how this is not cancel culture?

What I increasingly hear are definite assertions that there is no such thing as “cancel culture”, only people’s actions having consequences. Also, following naturally from this, anyone then using the term “cancel culture” is therefore also subject to said “consequences”.

cforrester8• 5 years ago

Can someone explain to me how this is not cancel culture?

If the definition of the nebulous concept of 'cancel culture' is so broad as to encompass disassociating ourselves from a person we consider heinous, and encouraging others to do the same, then I'm not sure there's any value in the concept to begin with. It's hard to argue that we should all limit how we use our freedom of association so that someone else may occupy a position that they are not entitled to.

salawat3• 5 years ago

Can someone explain to me how this is not cancel culture?

I'd look forward to hearing that, bit I wager the answer is no. You can call a pile of feces a rose, and it doesn't change the nature of what the pile of feces is

I'd like to thank you, and invite you out for a beer or the drink of your preference if you're ever in my neighborhood however, because you sound like one of the precious few sensible folks that actually project political action through past it's first order consequences to the inevitable conclusion.

It's rare enough at times that it's nice to call out when it happens, even in passing.

zingplex• 5 years ago

I must be missing something. Why was RMS brought back?

squarefoot• 5 years ago

Am I the only one who sees the timing and tone of this open letter somewhat suspicious? Technical stuff aside, I am not a RMS supporter or friend, I just exchanged like 5 words and shook his hand once, like huh... maybe 20 years ago at a conference. He may not be a winner in politically correctness, but I would expect a letter like that to be written against someone who actively behaves in some way, not just by being so stupid for making his odd ideas public.

viklove• 5 years ago

not just by being so stupid for making his odd ideas public

We're reaching the point in our society where thought-crime is a reality. You're not allowed to hold certain opinions, and if you do, you can't have a job or participate in the commons anymore. You must be imprisoned, stripped of your ability to provide for yourself, and ostracized from society.

Soon, these people will begin to claim political offices and they will have the police and military at their disposal to enact their will. Delete your post history, and lobotomize yourself before they come for the rest of us as well.

taylodl2• 5 years ago

Meanwhile the majority of software we're using was made possible by RMS. Let's not focus on that, let's instead focus on the fact that RMS isn't a saint and doesn't say what we believe to be the "right" things. Yes, RMS has made provocative statements on controversial topics - but I believe throwing out decades of his work and essentially throwing a human being away because you disagree with what he says on hot-topic issues to be much more repugnant than anything RMS has said or done.

And this coming from someone who disagrees with most of what RMS has said on these topics.

cforrester8• 5 years ago

I don't see anyone talking about throwing away decades of his work. The good that he's done won't go away any time soon. But it's becoming more and more evident that the free software movement can't survive unless it continues to push past the rut in which people like RMS are content to remain.

pieter_mj• 5 years ago

Is it the author's and signatories' goal to rescue libre software? I don't think so, they couldn't care less.

taylodl2• 5 years ago

From their statement: “It is time for RMS to step back from the free software, tech ethics, digital rights, and tech communities” - in other words they want RMS to step away from everything he’s worked on over the past 40+ years over pronouns and different thoughts on what constitutes consensual sex. They demand for him to simply walk away from his life’s work because they don’t like his opinions. Incredible. This is the manifestation of cancel culture. It’s repugnant.

thefz3• 5 years ago

The good that he's done won't go away any time soon.

These letter subscribers just want to put "their" face on another man's life work.

adolph• 5 years ago

Don’t feed trolls.

h2odragon• 5 years ago

I was a kid when i heard about RMS, his words moved me and helped me find the courage to be weird, and live to my own principles.

I wonder how many of the people personally offended by what they think RMS said have taken it up with him? "Transphobic"? really? I haven't spent more than a few minutes speaking to RMS, and that years ago; but "-phobic" isn't a word i can see applying to him.

the_only_law• 5 years ago

I can perhaps see how he could be accused of misogyny but how is RMS been ableist or transphobic? Is the former supposed to be some stretch about GNU software accessibility or something?

tzs• 5 years ago

The transphobic thing appears to be because he advocates using gender neutral pronouns, but apparently not the right gender neutral pronouns. I'm not sure how this is supposed to be transphobic.

The ableist thing is probably his recommending that women with Down's syndrome fetuses should abort them.

bitwize2• 5 years ago

I'm not sure how this is supposed to be transphobic.

Trans, genderqueer, or nonbinary people often express their preferred pronouns. If you do not use these pronouns to address or refer to that particular person, it is considered transphobic.

By far the most common gender-neutral pronouns are "they/them". It does not matter what Strunk & White says -- you are considered a transphobe if you do not use "they" for someone who has an expressed preference for "they". Period. By choosing deliberately not to respect their preferences, you are thought to deny or "erase" their gender identity.

You may think this doesn't matter. Ultimately, even in the grand scheme of terrible things that have been done to trans people, it's quite a small issue (the buzzterm is "microaggression" after all), and it certainly doesn't matter in a technical discussion. But securing compliance in small things like this is a dry run in pressure tactics: if people, especially if held in high esteem, buckle under and adopt and enforce the orthodox practice with regard to gender pronouns or other detail, the tactics worked. Ultimately the goal is to use those tactics to sway decisions on issues that matter, like who gets an authoritative say in what constitutes open source and which overarching goals should the movement serve.

sleepysysadmin• 5 years ago

Lots of Open Source Initiative.

Can anyone explain to me what the OSI even does and why they seem to have the time to protest RMS?

From their website:

For over 20 years the Open Source Initiative (OSI) has worked to raise awareness and adoption of open source software, and build bridges between open source communities of practice.

So they build bridges? That's a great goal.

So what bridge are they building here? Seems more like they are starting a fight. That seems against their stated mission.

devit• 5 years ago

Stallman is voicing his opinion about things he has scarce or no direct experience in to reinforce his self-image of being smart.

These people are attacking Stallman to reinforce their self-image of being "good" and "progressive".

Both are deluded. Stallman has no influence on the topics they contend but these people unfortunately have some influence in this matter.

cforrester8• 5 years ago

These people are attacking Stallman to reinforce their self-image of being "good" and "progressive".

This is a poor assessment, as it doesn't account for the fact that people cultivate the environment they want to be a part of. Removing people like Stallman from positions of influence within the community changes the tone of the community; while you may believe that change would be for the worse, it's better to acknowledge that others genuinely believe the inverse, rather than dishonestly dismissing it as blind reinforcement of self-identity.

waterhouse3• 5 years ago

Wanting the tone of the community to be a certain way, is one thing. The means of getting there—a public campaign to get someone and everyone who supported him to lose their place in their organization—is its own thing, and some would say it's below the belt, and that exercising this means has its own detrimental effect on the tone of the community, and that it harms the claimed ends more than it helps.

ltrls23• 5 years ago

Why is this link flagged? It's an important discussion in the FOSS community and doesn't break any guideline...

samtheprogram• 5 years ago

I came to see if this was posted on HN, found that it was flagged. What's going on?

thereddaikon3• 5 years ago

ESR said that the open source movement would give us better software that was free from the influence of corporations.

He was wrong. The last decade has shown the FOSS ecosystem trapped, packaged and resold by companies offering "services". And when the FOSS leadership should have been doing something about it, they devoured each other over modern notions of morality and social justice.

Nice to see that big names at Gnome and Debian apparently have nothing better to do than throwing a public hissy fit. Seems these organizations are run by man-children.

IBM, Microsoft, Amazon etc are laughing all the way to the bank.

dang• 5 years ago

Recent and related:

Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26535224 - March 2021 (814 comments)

delsarto• 5 years ago

I'm not sure publishing a letter via pull requests on a closed-source platform owned by Microsoft is going to convince the Free Software Foundation (it's in the name) on the merits of the argument.

smitty1e• 5 years ago

May fortune have mercy on those who engage in character assassination.

If there is legally actionable evidence against someone, then let there be a court case.

Sick of seeing public figures disparaged in this way without proven basis.

thefz3• 5 years ago

We are also calling for Richard M. Stallman to be removed from all leadership positions, including the GNU Project.

GNU, which he created. So basically the point here is to appropriate another man's life work and make it your own putting another label on it.

bhaak• 5 years ago

What are the people having signed this letter back in 2019 do now?

https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2019/joint-statement-on-the-gnu-pr...

I know what I would do if the organization I do free work for disregards my opinion in such a blatant way.

I would just walk away. I wonder how many will do this?

rflec0282• 5 years ago

Please remove log from own eye first. Will review after that.

rflec0282• 5 years ago

Hello Contributors,

*RMS* may not conform to your societal standards, but condemning the man (him, or Torvalds, who also comes under fire,) marrs your reputation, and not his.

He has shown himself to be misogynist, ableist, and transphobic, among other serious accusations of impropriety.

I have met RMS in person, (had Chinese food with him, in fact,) and though he may ignore some social conventions, he is a person who has very valuable and unique opinions, and a force to be reckoned with. These accusations appear to be, while not baseless, motivated by an extremely twisted socio-political ideology.

*Shame on you for bringing cancel culture into the world of software.*

https://github.com/rms-open-letter/rms-open-letter.github.io...

kazinator2• 5 years ago

RMS has spent years on a campaign against using people’s correct pronouns. This is poorly disguised transphobia. In the original publication of the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines, he said “there are various ways to express gender neutrality in third-person singular pronouns in English; you do not have to use ‘they.’”14 This text has since been updated, but is still transphobic.15 The main page on his web site includes the statement that “‘They’ is plural — for singular antecedents, use singular gender-neutral pronouns.”16

Wow, this seems to be a complete lie, on the surface of it.

When you read all these documents, you find that they care 115% about the issue of how to refer to people in order to respect their gender idenity.

The singular gender-neutral pronouns Stallman refers to in [16] are actually gender-neutral: they are ones he invented himself and uses. He's just bothered by the bad grammar of using "they" as a singular, and the ambiguities it causes in sentences where it could plausibly have either multiple people as an antecedent or just one person.

Or is there some new development that I'm missing? Are there people who would like to be referred to in plural, due to multiple personalities, so that using singular pronouns makes hurtful assumptions against them?

"I am not a 'perse', Mr. Stallman! I am two people: a man named Bob and a female named Stephanie. Please refer to me by the correct pronoun 'they'."

... kind of thing? I admittedly don't keep up with this stuff.

taraharris• 5 years ago

When they tried to cancel RMS for the first time in 2019, I am ashamed to say that I used it as an opportunity to pile on him on Twitter. I was sore about petty differences such as the architectural crippling of GCC and the viral nature of the GPL.

Since then, I have seen user freedoms continue to erode. Statists continue to push for more controls and backdoors on encryption. Repressive governments have the cooperation of the companies that run the mobile device app stores. Desktop operating systems continue to degrade with the addition of advertisements and increasing amounts of DRM, spying and "trusted computing" features that limit what you can do with your own machine. In short, we are one or two steps away from Stallman's nightmare scenario, where the illegal use of debuggers and compilers is considered a crime.

I used Stallman's first cancellation to advance my own permissive-licensing agenda (albeit by a very small amount, as I'm an unknown). Introspecting upon the way I reacted initially, I now suspect that this is simply another attempt by powerful interests in government and business (notably, a great deal of enmity against RMS comes from Microsoft and Salesforce) to destroy a man that has dedicated his life to keeping computing free.

threatofrain2• 5 years ago

On an aside, I don't think Stallman or the FSF are really part of the tech freedom story anymore, whether on the PR, civil rights, or the technological front. What's the most recent FSF victory?

rms-open-letter.github.io

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