[COFF] Stallman resigns under pressure from CSAIL and FSF.

[Dan Cross]

On Tue, Sep 17, 2019 at 10:00 AM Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

> It's interesting what finally got him.   His bad behavior has been around
> a long time.
>

Indeed. I remember hearing about his predations years ago; they were
well-known then just as they are today. Nasty business like propositioning
the female custodial staff at MIT when he lived in his office; being sleazy
to women at conferences: as you say, he's been a bad actor for a long time.

I think that what got him was this era in which this latest kerfuffle
emerged into the public eye. People have finally had enough and are
(rightfully) demanding action against those who repeatedly behave poorly.
Women in particular are tired of being treated badly in CS and technology
in general and are pushing back (to which I personally say, "good. How can
I help?"). Hiding behind a thin guise of faux "rationality" or rhetoric or
appeals to pseudo-scientific "questions" or just being socially awkward is
no longer a shield for being a harasser or predator. The myth of the
quirky intellectual who delights in irreverent behavior as a foil to
established norms in order to break free to some higher level of thought
have been exposed as the shams they mostly are. These people aren't
geniuses, they're just jerks.

Stallman's position as the revered patron saint of Free Software has been
crumbling for some time; this outburst in the current environment was the
straw that broke the MIT camel's back.

        - Dan C.

PS: Semi-related story: during the aftermath of the 2013 Boston marathon
bombing, and in particular after the ambush-style murder of MIT police
officer Sean Collier, much of the greater Boston area was under lockdown
while combined police forces tracked down the bombers. Collier was killed
in his patrol car an intersection about a block from the Stata Center,
which houses CSAIL and Stallman's office. Stallman was known for propping
the doors to Stata open as he's somehow morally opposed to the RFID key
cards usually used for accessing MIT buildings (apparently he doesn't like
being "tracked"). During this time I'm told he raised something of a stink
because people were closing the doors: nevermind that armed killers who'd
already murdered a cop were running around the neighborhood. It's a great
example of letting the perfect (some abstract notion of "freedom") be the
enemy of the good (not getting killed because someone motivated to launch a
terrorist attack and actually murder people was running around outside).
The man is unreasonable and I'm not at all sorry to see him go. Like Larry,
I've got kids: I'm happy they'll grow up in a post-RMS world.

On Tue, Sep 17, 2019 at 8:56 AM Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Richard Stallman, known colloquially as 'RMS', has resigned from MIT's
>> Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Free
>> Software Foundation, after making comments defending Jeffrey Epstein, the
>> late sexual predator. Those comments sparked wide-spread outrage across the
>> MIT community and beyond.
>>
>>
>> https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html#16_September_2019_(Resignation)
>> https://www.fsf.org/news/richard-m-stallman-resigns
>>
>>         - Dan C.
>>
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>
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