Richard Stallman has resigned from the Free Software Foundation and MIT

Quoting: appetrosyanOn a side note: F?CK GNOME . They owe their entire existence to the distinction between copyleft and opensource. I'm alright with them not defending him; the guy has some antics, and defending everything he does is... well.... impossible. But attacking him so actively is something else entirely, it's like if I started railing on my parents and saying that they should move out of the house they built and I grew up in, because of something that my dad said, when he was drunk.

lol

Love the enthusiasm of multiple people attacking GNOME here.

I don't like them (GNOME) and consider them to be a horrible organization, for a laundry list of reasons... Glad to see I'm not alone.

We truly live in a f*cked up world. Just like in the Orwell game. Destroy someone by publicizing a statement out of context. So easy!

2 + 2 = 5


Last edited by LungDrago on 18 September 2019 at 10:47 am UTC

Most seems to have been said on this topic but I'm still so surprised how "an angrier-today 23Y old Selam Jie Gano pseudo-me-too" can triggers the leave of Richard. I fully agree with Patola & others regarding those SJW (that are lurking even right there checking for every little miss steps in our posts).
Long quote from Patola

The GNOME's stand to take benefit of the situation is unacceptable. The tools/techs should remain neutral & that one will never reachs any of my future distros.

Thank you so much Richard for all you hard work and your life's fight to make Linux(Amongst other things) what it is today.

Thank you so much Liam for your every day's Linux dedication & for courageously publishing this article while keeping the comments opens knowing the amount of work moderation requires.

:)

Quoting: dubigrasu

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: dubigrasuHow can I filter out these kind of not (really) gaming related topics?

I filter out topics I'm not interested in by reading the article's title. Works pretty well.

Yeah sure, but I'm asking specifically about the control panel settings.

I think if Liam added a NON-GAMING tag, and added it to articles like this one, then it would solve Dubigrasi's issue (Not wishing to view non-gaming articles.)

I don't know if this blog post have been posted here, but here it comes: https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2019-09-17-rms.html

It's a bit difficult to read (aesthetically), but I think it is worth it, at least the conclusion if you don't have the time to read everything.

And, as he says: "it is possible (but unlikely) that RMS is not a harmless sort but a scheming criminal mastermind. Still, one can only work with the evidence as it is presented at the time."

So many confusion. The facts are: a professor of the MIT send highly problematic comment to a whole departement (students included) while the MIT was in a deep crisis and had to resign from his position of visiting researcher. Folowing its resignation from the MIT, he also resign from the head of the FSF. He still has FSF membership.

Quoting: GuestThey have also given Socrates the poison cup for no good reason. So it's not like the average person has changed.

He was planning a coup, hardly what I call "no good reason".

Quoting: razing32Curios what is the best way to handle this.
Should an organization terminate all contacts with an individual for their opinions ?

That has not happened yet. He is still part of the FSF. For the MIT, Grotendick who was a incommensurably greater genius than Stallman has to break tie with the French college when he starts saying that science should stop at his conference.
Some opinion are incompatible with some function, you have the freedom to voice those opinion and loose your function. It's liberal America, you also have the freedom to die from poverty and malnutrition.

Quoting: soulsourceStallman is not wrong about the fact that laws about this topic are different in different countries. Where I live, Austria, consent between a 17 year old and a much older person is legally possible, unless there is a situation of power or money involved.

Which there clearly was. It's hard to argue that a 70-years old academics has no authority over any 17-years old girl. The distinction is made so that you can have someone 19 and someone 17 having sex without problem.

Quoting: Phlebiac

Quoting: johndoeCurrently I don't see anything, that MS or Apple did to enrich the FOSS ecosystem

I'm no big fan of either, but: Apple funds development of projects like CUPS, LLVM, and Webkit (not that Webkit is terribly relevant any more). Microsoft has become a big contributor to Git, and funds the guys who made Mono.

These contributions/funds are a drop in the ocean. None of them are in-house developments.

Quoting: g000h

Quoting: dubigrasu

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: dubigrasuHow can I filter out these kind of not (really) gaming related topics?

I filter out topics I'm not interested in by reading the article's title. Works pretty well.

Yeah sure, but I'm asking specifically about the control panel settings.

I think if Liam added a NON-GAMING tag, and added it to articles like this one, then it would solve Dubigrasi's issue (Not wishing to view non-gaming articles.)

Yes, that's basically what I asked for.
Through the use of tags, any reader of this site can adjust the content of what he wants/needs to see.
Yeah sure, you can choose not to read what you don't need. But the functionality is there for a reason, and is already used for other topics.
You're an AMD user and not interested of Nvidia drivers/software related news?...use the Nvidia tag to filter out those news.
You do only native gaming and don't wanna hear about Proton?...use the SteamPlay tag, and so on.
Or of course, you can use tags to specifically search for the same subjects. Is just a handy option to have.

So I don't think is an unreasonable request for a tag in this case. What actually the tag name would be, that's up to Liam.

I think this article by Chris Hedges is pretty pertinent:
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-curse-of-moral-purity/

Now for those of you who aren't familiar with him, it doesn't get any more 'progressive' than Chris Hedges -- but see the point he makes about the obsession with moral purity.

Since the other day, the one issue brought up by critics that is at all RELEVANT to a call to Stallman's resignation was the allegation that through the years, he has been consistently driving people away from the community. I've heard this claim coming from people that I respect (e.g. Michael W. Lucas, great technical writer from the BSD universe, & novelist) -- but never in a form other than anecdotes & hearsay. Claims such as this demand more support -- now, I'm aware that this is a well abused principle, and often an excuse to 'blame the victim'; but still, one has to be more demanding. I'd love to see all manner of bullies & assholes (with or without the sexual abusiveness dimension) get their comeuppance; but the kind of simplistic thinking laid out so well by Chris Hedges is definitely not the way to achieve that. (For one thing, what he calls the 'curse of moral purity' is a breeding ground for ever new big-ego bullies & assholes.)


Last edited by wvstolzing on 18 September 2019 at 1:56 pm UTC

Quoting: Cyba.CowboyI haven't read Stallman's latest comments personally, but my understanding is that one of the comments which got him in hot water was a comment that suggested some of these chicks went into these situations of their own free will... Which is a perfectly valid - and very likely accurate - point (like it or not, most 12+ year old children of both sexes have a much better understanding of sex than they should, at least these days!).

(Emphasis mine.) It’s not even that. He said that it was likely that these girls, while coerced by Epstein to offer sex for money, were probably also made to act like they were willing when approaching their clients (presumably so as not to scare them off; my words, not his). In my opinion, the headlines are a gross and either careless or malicious exaggeration of his statements.

It’s not even a long chain of e-mail when you figure out the weird PDF formatting. Here’s Stallman’s original e-mail in question, which as soulsource said seems to originally be in (partial) defence of an accused (and deceased) client of Epstein’s sex trafficking. Or I should even say, in defence of accurately describing his offence.

Quoting: StallmanThe announcement of the Friday event does an injustice to Marvin Minsky:

Quotedeceased AI "pioneer" Marvin Minsky (who is accused of assaulting one of Epstein's victims [2])

The injustice is in the word "assaulting". The term "sexual assault" is so vague and slippery that it facilitates accusation inflation:
taking claims that someone did X and leading people to think of it as Y, which is much worse than X.

The accusation quoted is a clear example of inflation. The reference reports the claim that Minsky had sex with one of Epstein’s harem.
(See (link))
Let's presume that was true (I see no reason to disbelieve it).

The word "assaulting" presumes that he applied force or violence, in some unspecified way, but the article itself says no such thing.
Only that they had sex.

We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing. Assuming she was being coerced by Epstein, he would have had every reason to tell her to conceal that from most of his associates.

I've concluded from various examples of accusation inflation that it is absolutely wrong to use the term "sexual assault" in an accusation.

Whatever conduct you want to criticize, you should describe it with a specific term that avoids moral vagueness about the nature of the criticism.

I won’t analyze it with Stallman’s rigour, but there are a few points worth repeating although others have already said so; from top to bottom:

1. Stallman’s correspondence is mostly interested in the differences between sex, rape and sexual assault and using the proper terms in an accusation, as the acts imply different levels of severity and mal-intent (in this case on the part of Minsky, not Epstein).

2. To reiterate, he says she likely presented herself as entirely willing, not that she actually was. The difference matters here since he is evaluating Minsky’s culpability as a client, not Epstein’s as a pimp. I’m not sure whether Stallman implies that it makes the situation any better, but keep in mind he’s still arguing against the use of the term "assault", which leads us to:

3. He is not wrong to say that in such a scenario, it’s entirely possible that there was no use of physical force and "assault" would not apply.

The whole thing gets more wobbly and weird as the discussion goes on, and certainly provides fodder for anyone wanting to get rid of him, but at the very least Stallman clearly expresses that "We know that Giuffre was being coerced into sex -- by Epstein. She was being harmed. But the details do affect whether, and to what extent, Minsky was responsible for that."

Source: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6405929-09132019142056-0001.html