What Efforts to Cancel Richard Stallman Ought to Teach Us About the Media

https://techrights.org/n/2026/06/02/What_Efforts_to_Cancel_Richard_Stallman_Ought_to_Teach_Us_About.shtml

by amcclure • 2 months ago

24 11 2 months ago

yladiz• 2 months ago

I’m not going to go sleuthing into the links and beyond (the one I clicked was for the Stallman Support website which presumably is biased), but I’m somewhat aware of the controversies around Stallman. Can someone with more knowledge weigh in on what the post says?

EA-31674• 2 months ago

They all appear to be links back to the blog itself or said support site. Speaking for myself I don't need a messiah figure to support elements of FOSS, and I don't need Stallman to be a decent or functional human being to have made good points in the past.

Speaking for myself the first HUGE red flag out of Stallman was his famous comment about pedophilia circa 2006, which this "Stallmansupport site" actually addresses.

https://stallmansupport.org/debunking-false-accusations-agai...

The defense seems to be summed up in this line: "Whatever the reasoning that led Stallman to write those statements, the fact is that later he changed his mind."

It seemed pretty clear what he meant, and walking it back 13 years later under pressure doesn't make me think that he didn't mean it the first time.

gmerc• 2 months ago

our president and his friends are pedos.

avaer2• 2 months ago

This is the literally the point TFA is making.

That Stallman's statements were seen as a "red flag", while Bill Gates's dealings with Jeffrey Epstein were seen as perfectly ok.

avaer2• 2 months ago

The post is highlighting the discord between the MIT/associated media hit pieces on Stallman (free software advocate) for having problematic views, while compelling evidence of Bill Gates (founder of Microsoft) Epstein-class behavior was pretty much ignored.

bfkwlfkjf• 2 months ago

I looked into this a year or so ago. My take away was that at some point someone published a very long piece which quotes stallman and step by step concludes "this is bad". And then people started quoting the piece conclusion. However I remember reading the originals from stallman and not finding anything wrong with them. (If someone wants to disagree please cite stallman, not someone else's conclusion about stallman.)

pmdulaney• 2 months ago

Cancellation is about a self-appointed minority taking malicious action against someone for an action or opinion for which the law itself does not specify a penalty. No one should be cancelled. And no one should be downvoted (or worse) on HN.

What Efforts to Cancel Richard Stallman Ought to Teach Us About the Media

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