I know a lot of y’all are probably reeling from that Stallman report and I’ve even seen people remarking on how no one was listening until now.
What you need to understand is that the things in that report have been known, widely, for many years. They are not “open secrets”. They are things people have actively tried to address, at significant scale, many many times. Some of those times even resulted in (brief) consequences.
The man Is like a cockroach in more ways than I care to describe and what we should all be noticing here is the how incredibly impossible it is to remove an influential white man from power and have him face real consequences. He’s not even remotely rich.
The people defending him aren’t turning a blind eye. They are actively, knowingly enabling him. And that’s not because they care about the movement…
…it’s because they know they are like him, and if he suffers consequences, they’ll be next. And that just won’t do. They don’t give a shit about a “movement” that’s basically petered out by now.
@zkat I've been trying to have that RMS discussion with people quite a few times over the years and yep, every time people immediately started desperately searching for reasons why it could be dismissed.
I was reading the introductory section of the report which pretty much boiled down to "I have taken away any kind of ignorance you could try to hide behind, because I am sick of people doing this, you can no longer pretend not to know" and I rarely read things that resonate with me that much.
@joepie91 @zkat
From memory their answer went something like that:
"Sure, Stallman has bad opinions on topics other than Free Software, but the Free Software movement needs a leader. He is right when he talks about Free Software, and there is no one else to replace him with, is there? It's people's fault for asking his opinion on other things".
They also had excuses for the MIT mailing list thing as well as what many people see as… let's say being very difficult to organizers of events as a guest (they told me there's a rms manual for that… Lucky be the people who are made aware of it before inviting him 😅): him being on the autism spectrum.
@joepie91 @zkat
As much as I don't want Open Source people to replace Stallman (and the Invisible Pink Unicorn knows places like OSI are far from being harassment-free… there are articles online about it too), I'm not sure the Free Software movement needs a (single) figurehead.
A project may benefit from the vision of a benevolent dictator, but an organization with political ambitions can gain more by sharing power in a more democratic way and having several representatives, as long as the core principles remain clear.
@ciourte @zkat
Yeah, that response tracks with what apologists have told me as well. Curiously the "there's nobody to replace him" never seems to involve any actual analysis of whether there *is* someone who can replace him (there are many such people), and nobody claiming "the movement needs a leader" can credibly explain *why* it needs a "leader" either, especially at this kind of cost...
(For the record, being autistic is absolutely not an excuse for this kind of behaviour. Yes, accommodations are often necessary, but it doesn't absolve one from personal responsibility not to harm others, and it also isn't a wildcard to demand anything and everything. I say this as someone who is autistic.)
@joepie91 @zkat
I had a casual discussion with a friend who's on the board of a Free-Software promotion and protection association some months ago, where I mentioned my opinion of RMS was influenced by the pro-pedophilia post on his personal blog I was pointed to many years earlier, rather than the incident that lead to his temporary leave from the FSF board.