It's an unfortunate fact that the GNU projects and their email lists have always attracted difficult people. If your organization is founded on inflexible ideological commitment (as the FSF is) then you will end up appealing to a lot of inflexible, idealistic people who are very committed to having things go their way. RMS has been one of the worst offenders in many well-documented ways, but every GNU project I'm familiar with has had its share of "missing stairs", who are often among the most vocal people on the project's -devel email list. Many of them are extremely proficient technically, but abrasive to others in ways that they might not recognize.
For newcomers to the projects this can lead to unpleasant interactions that push people away from volunteering on the projects.
At the same time, this shouldn't push you away from getting involved with a GNU project if you find it interesting. Many of the projects are full of kind, helpful, hardworking people. The maintainers in particular are mostly excellent. If you have an unpleasant interaction, I'd encourage you to reach out to one of the maintainers in a private message to ask for advice on how to contribute and work with the community. Often they can help by pointing you to specific people to talk to and interact with.
To me, they both come across as eminently reasonable, and it makes me think the the Guile project is going to be in good hands regardless of what happens.
The odd part here to me is that it seems to be the norm that, if you want to join the maintainer team of Guile, you ask RMS and you don't even need to talk to the existing maintainer team first. I agree that the response sounds reasonable too, and in any other development project I would be confused by how a reasonable-sounding person can take such an unreasonable-sounding approach - so I assume that this approach is reasonable and that this is in fact a norm.
I think that the idea that anyone who isn't involved with the project (RMS or otherwise) gets to pick the maintainers of projects, and doesn't just defer to the existing maintainer teams in all but exceptional cases. is untenable (and has been causing unnecessary interpersonal conflicts in GNU for decades), and I hope one of the long-term results of all this is to get rid of that norm.
For an example of doing things pretty firmly in the other direction, I've always liked how new hires on Canonical's OS engineering teams aren't immediately appointed Ubuntu maintainers - they have to go through the same process anyone else would. Of course they have lots of advantages (a full-time job where they work closely with most of the existing maintainers to learn everything they need to publicly demonstrate their fitness for the role), but it makes it clear that the maintainership of Ubuntu is driven by Ubuntu and not by managers at Canonical.
> The odd part here to me is that it seems to be the norm that, if you want to join the maintainer team of Guile, you ask RMS and you don't even need to talk to the existing maintainer team first.
Well, this issue was much more complicated than that, wasn't it? In this case the role of RMS is more as that f an arbiter.
Apart from that, RMS is the leader of the GNU project. When I submitted my little project to GNU, I first talked to RMS (it was many years ago, o I don't remember the details, but I wrote to some general address and he answered). By submitting my project to GNU, I accepted his leadership, and it was a conscious decision, I knew very well what to expect. Actually, RMS seemed to me quite reasonable and down-to-earth about technical issues, even though I often disagree with him on philosophical issues.
In an ideal world, everyone collaborates harmoniously and no intervention is needed. In practice, clashes do happen sometimes, and under such circumstances the role of the leader is crucial in helping to find a reasonable solution.
Mark is also, if maybe a bit short at times, the best mailing list support there is for the lower level stuff in guile. He has been doing an angels work there I would say.
Finally some concrete examples of what RMS is alleged to have done wrong.
All those references from stallman.org seems like perfectly reasonable opinions to hold and express though.
Seems like you'd have to be fairly deep into radical leftism to read it as anything that "speaks for itself" that the author is due for an extra large helping of sexual taboo condemnations and being ousted from his job.
But if this is the level of differences that will cause cooperation-breaking conflicts these people can't work together.
Many regular contributors to GNU projects didn't like RMS's involvement in the first place. He makes no technical contribtions, and he tends to post politically divisive flamebait-ey topics to the email lists. He'll also undercut his appointed maintainers by posting his own musings about decisions that have already been settled by the maintainers. More than once, he's used an effective "veto" power to force sub-optimal architectural choices in an effort to make sure GNU projects can't easily interoperate with non-GPL software. Refusing to expose gcc functionality through a library interface is the best-known example (which directly led many developers, researchers, and organizations to adopt clang and LLVM), but there are others, including a veto of Emacs features that would make it easier to talk to clang to power IDE-like features.
Most regular contributors found this behavior frustrating, and would discuss it privately, although rarely if ever discuss it on-list. These are people who are absolutely committed to free software, they were just sick of dealing with RMS. Wingo's stated attitude seems pretty typical: RMS was damage that needed to be routed around.
After developing this reputation, it's not shocking that most maintainers and contributors accepted his resignation from the FSF with a shrug. They were sick of dealing with him anyway - they're not going to protest to try to get him back.
If someone values optimal architectural choices even when it damages the political cause of software freedom, then what is he doing in the Free Software movement? There is a sister movement that was set-up explicitly to be technical and non-political: Open Source. The licenses are even compatible so if you discover you accidentally joined the wrong movement it is easy to switch to the other one!
The disagreement is over what hurts the Free Software movement more: letting people subvert your license and use it in non-Free ways, or having everyone simply switch to non-Free software.
Now, these are much more substantial complaints, in my opinion. But to the extent that sort of reasons truly drive the calls for removal, much of the rhetoric and all of the timing is extremely inappropriate.
The funny thing is, there is no calling for the heads of feminist philosophers and gender theorists like Gayle Rubin and Judith Butler, both of whom have expressed views on sexuality w.r.t. children that are more abhorrent than Stallman's. (Stallman could have even been using them as references.)
That makes me suspect that his personal political views are not the reason feminists want him out.
If by "feminists" you mean GNU maintainers and other free software hackers (who may well be feminists, but this is a sharp subset of feminists in society as a whole), then correct, his personal political views are not by themselves the reason they want him out. It's the fact that he is so committed to the advocacy of his personal views that he is harming the free software movement. See, for instance, this post from the author of this email (and linked in this email): https://wingolog.org/archives/2019/10/08/thoughts-on-rms-and...
> The great tragedy of RMS's tenure in the supposedly universalist FSF and GNU projects is that he behaves in a way that is particularly alienating to women. It doesn't take a genius to conclude that if you're personally driving away potential collaborators, that's a bad thing for the organization, and actively harmful to the organization's goals: software freedom is a cause that is explicitly for everyone.
> More importantly to the FSF, I attempted to persuade RMS that launching a controversial campaign on sexual behavior and morality was counter to his and FSF's mission to advance software freedom [....] After years of conversing with RMS about how his non-software-freedom views were a distraction, an indulgence, and downright problematic, his general response was to make even more public comments of this nature.
> Stallman is driving away our natural allies. It's inappropriate for him to continue as the figurehead for free software.
It is not because they simply disagreed with his political beliefs - he can believe what he likes. It is about the fact that, as a leader in the free software movement, he was driving away more people with both his public advocacy of his views and his behavior (hitting on women at conferences as soon as he met them, etc.), i.e, he was not doing his job.
No, Gayle Rubin and Judith Butler are not GNU maintainers or other free software hackers, as far as I know. I mean I'm familiar with their philosophical and sociological work but don't know of any software they've written.
I don't see how that disagrees with / responds to anything I wrote. Unless Gayle Rubin or Judith Butler called for RMS's removal? I am responding to "That makes me suspect that his personal political views are not the reason feminists want him out" - are Rubin and Butler the feminists who want him out?
I'm sorry for causing confusion. I doubt either Rubin or Butler have even heard of RMS.
While most of the GNU maintainers appear to have tried to resolve things amicably with RMS, the social-justice contingent within open source have been calling for his removal for at least a year now, probably much longer, and they usually cite his views on sexuality as the reason why he is "problematic".
However, there have to my knowledge never been similar calls for the removal of the likes of Rubin and Butler from leadership positions in their field by social-justice advocates (within open source or outside it), despite them publicly expressing even more abhorrent views about sexuality with respect to children than Stallman has. The work of Rubin and Butler is foundational to queer theory and gender theory, so modern feminist activists are likely to be at least passingly familiar with them. Stallman may even have been referring to their scholarship when he made his controversial (and imho very wrong) paedophilia statements.
This tells me unpleasant things about the relationship between social-justice activists and paedophilia. They're made more unpleasant by the fact that I have seen at least one social-justice advocacy group defend a known, active paedophile within their ranks.
FWIW, I don't think what you said was confusing. It was clear to me that you were discussing Rubin and Butler as potential targets of criticism, not potential sources. It's a reasonable point, it's just explained by
- Rubin and Butler's jobs are to make controversial statements about sexuality, Stallman's isn't (i.e., the call is to remove him as leader of the free software movement, not to get him to take down stallman.org; if he wants to wage a campaign to change social norms about pedophilia, it's a free country, but people ate equally free to point out that he can't also wage a campaign to change social norms about free software and be successful at both)
- while there may be a group more closely associated with the academic feminism community than the free software community who is dissatisfied with his statements on the merits, and we can discuss whether they are hypocritical in not criticizing Rubin and Butler (or whether there is a fourth wave of feminism and they are in fact criticizing Rubin and Butler, or whatever), the successful campaign to remove RMS from the FSF was not solely or primarily their doing. It was the work of free software hackers who a) have made it clear their concern wasn't solely views but effect of RMS's advocacy of those views on the health of the free software community - a concern that doesn't analogously apply to academic feminists advocating such views - and b) aren't obligated to have opinions about Rubin and Butler anyway.
Or put another way, if a feminist thinks Rubin and Butler's advocacy re pedophilia harm the feminism movement, they can start fourth-wave feminism with differing principles and values. If a free software hacker thinks Stallman's advocacy re pedophilia is harming the free software movement, they can't meaningfully start second-wave free software because there are no different principles and values with respect to free software.
I find the most interesting and concerning part of the post from Bradley Kuhn to be in the end.
> I still think the FSF is a valuable institution worth helping and saving
Worth saving, as is heading towards implosion and it need to be saved.
If you told members of the FSF Board of Directors that FSF would destroy itself over a political dispute over a question like "was metoo a media frenzy", it would had sounded silly. If I would had said after the 2016 election that FSF would need to take a side, left or right, no one would even consider it. FSF a year ago would never had said if they are pro-feminism, pro-MRA, pro-socialism or pro-liberalism. The closest to a political affiliation that FSF had done in the past has been their occasionally aligning with the goals of the natural allies EFF and ACLU, but even there it has only been in technical topics such as patents, copyright, forced backdoors, and crippling of software. To my knowledge FSF has never commented on non-technical ACLU work.
> If you told members of the FSF Board of Directors that FSF would destroy itself over a political dispute over a question like "was metoo a media frenzy", it would had sounded silly. If I would had said after the 2016 election that FSF would need to take a side, left or right, no one would even consider it.
I don't think this is true - my sense is that 10-20 years ago, claiming "in the future, the FSF will destroy itself because RMS waded into a controversy he didn't know how to back down from" would have gotten responses of "oh, yes, of course," and at least as far back as Gamergate, "the FSF will get caught up in the broader 'culture war'" would have sounded totally plausible too. (I'm not sure "culture war" is exactly the term I want to use, but it serves the right denotational purpose here.)
Oh, and people had accused free software of being socialist/communist as far back as the '90s. The whole reason the "open source" movement got started was to rebrand free software in a corporate-friendly way.
>10-20 years ago, claiming "in the future, the FSF will destroy itself because RMS waded into a controversy he didn't know how to back down from" would have gotten responses of "oh, yes, of course"
This is an excellent way to view recent events. My compliments to the author!
>All those references from stallman.org seems like perfectly reasonable opinions to hold and express though. Seems like you'd have to be fairly deep into radical leftism to read it as anything that "speaks for itself" that the author is due for an extra large helping of sexual taboo condemnations and being ousted from his job.
Alright, I guess we're gonna have to unpack this.
In the item "prudish ignorantism" [0,1] Stallman suggests that a British woman having sex with adolescents is not an issue as long as they used protection, and that adolescents don't need to be "protected" from sex. The adolescents involved were reportedly as young as eleven. It is not perfectly reasonable to consider sex between a sixty year old woman, her seventy year old husband and children as young as eleven to be appropriate.
In the item "pestering women" [2,3] Stallman dismisses the behavior of a man who constantly pesters women for sex as not being an issue because he didn't force them to have sex, or punish them for refusal. While it is true that both of those would be worse than the behavior described, the behavior described is nevertheless a form of sexual harassment and it is not perfectly reasonable to consider such behavior harmless.
In the item "age and attraction" [4,5], Stallman is upset that men should ever be expected to find a woman over the age of eighteen to be attractive, and likens the societal norm that considers relationships between older men and younger women to be akin to an attempt at conversion therapy for gays.
In the item "sex according to porn" [6,7] Stallman believes adolescents should be allowed to pursue sexual relationships and are harmed by the unrealistic image presented to them in pornography.
While I do actually agree, in theory, that pornography creates unrealistic sexual expectations, especially for men (but I would have to bring up certain trigger words that HN doesn't like to read to have that conversation) most reasonable people would consider the "cure" of having adolescents pursue sexual relationships with adults for the sake of sexual education far worse than the problem of adolescents being exposed to, and misinformed about sex from, porn to begin with.
In "Respecting people's right to say no" [8, 9] Stallman expresses outrage that anyone would condemn someone claiming he cannot be attracted to a woman over 50. In a vacuum, this probably wouldn't be an issue - he's right, there's no accounting for tastes. But given Stallman's prior views on the sort of relationships that most would consider pedophilic at worst, or maybe (because some people like to be pedantic on this point) ephebophilic, it implies that he is once again defending what many would consider inappropriate relationships, not simply someone liking women a few years younger.
In "stretching meaning of terms" Stallman does not accept that a doctor who reportedly secretly spied on young male athletes at Ohio State, was engaged in sexual abuse of any sort, because he wasn't actually touching them while doing so. In other words, he wouldn't consider spying on women without their consent to be harmful either, so long as physical contact wasn't involved.
I'm not going to continue because I shouldn't need to, but the point I'm trying to belabor is that all of these examples, anecdotal evidence [10] provided by others regarding their interactions with Stallman, the emails which led to the viral outrage[12] leading to his resignation [11] and his infamous (and now redacted) belief that pedophilia is not harmful [13], all point to views on his part which would not require one to be "fairly deep into radical leftism" to object to, and would not be considered perfectly reasonable by most people.
One can object to such views leading to his dismissal, but it is simply not the case that RMS's views and behavior are harmless idiosyncrasies blown out of proportion by radical feminists, leftists, a secret cabal of corporate agitators looking to undermine Free Software, or whatever bogeyman the community chooses to latch on to. The fact is, the culture around tech and RMS in general simply does not consider his "sexual taboos" or objections to his behavior to be relevant in the light of his status in the community of Free Software.
I don't know anything about the current goings on, but I read Wingo's blog for his fascinating technical insights. He has written some controversial things on hiring and collaboration that I do not agree with but do find helpful to understand what he's writing here about RMS:
I read the email that this post links to, and thought he seemed fairly reasonable, even if he seemed to be airing some dirty laundry that didn't seem to do much other than to stir up drama.
Now that I read the two articles you posted, I feel unsure of who is in the wrong here. As someone who almost certainly falls into a part of the political spectrum that he views as "problematic", I feel less inclined to take his plight seriously...
As some of the comments in the linked articles explain, he seems to uncharitably read into comments people make. He assumes the worst in people and then publicly paints them as personae non gratae based on what may be, at best, a mischaracterization.
I can't say I disagree with your take on the matter, but I don't think airing anybody's personality flaws on HN is in the best interests of Guile or GNU. The individuals involved are probably already aware of each other's personality quirks and don't need this forum to help them discuss the matter.
I think they are relevant to his discussion of RMS, not his discussion of Mike Weaver.
I read the e-mail thread and was trying to understand its relationship to the ongoing public arguments over the leadership of GNU. Andy Wingo's blog posts seemed to illumine his perspective in that debate.
His criticism of Stallmans leadership is almost entirely based on Stallmans blog posts that are independent of the GNU project. Seems fair that his leadership should be questioned in the same way doesn't it?
Stallman is GNU. GNU is Stallman. If the project maintainer has a problem with Stallman issuing orders then he has a problem with being part of GNU. If a GNU project has problems with GNU then the solution is to fork the project into a non-GNU project, not try to usurp the name GNU into meaning something that is not RMS.
This has been done before multiple times and the resulting technical work significantly improved GNU (ECGS and EGLIBC come to mind). Also, historically, GNU maintainers aren't obligated to give total deference to RMS (the glibc steering committee comes to mind). So while "RMS is the king" might be true on paper, it's been neither true nor helpful to GNU in practice, and insisting on it simply hurts projects that are less well-staffed to fight political fights or organize forks. It doesn't help the free software movement at all.
Stallman hasn't been a significant technical contributor to any GNU project for more than a decade. Making important contributions to a project doesn't mean you own it forever - it's a bittersweet fact that groups, organizations, and companies can grow and evolve in ways that are incompatible with their original founder sticking around.
The FSF owns the copyright to most GNU projects, and RMS has resigned from the FSF. It's unclear why he would continue to have any formal authority beyond his personal power of persuasion.
When I was 17, I started dating the woman who I married when I was 20. She was older than I was, so it's fairly horrifying to me to see people publicly equating "pedophilia" with "sex between adults and teenagers". It makes my old wounds ache to see respected community leaders like Andy Wingo publicly accusing her of pedophilia and, implicitly, of abusive behavior, promoting the unwarranted social stigma we had to struggle against for the entire duration of our relationship.
Although we were only intimate partners for seven years, the relationship was not in any way a matter of her taking advantage of me or abusing me. The relationship changed my life dramatically for the better, and I still love her, even though it has been some years since we last saw each other.
I thank God I lived in New Mexico, where the age of consent was low enough to protect her from legal risks in addition to the social ostracism she did suffer.
To state my position clearly, there is nothing wrong with sexual relationships between adults and older teenagers. It is not a result of pedophilia, nor is that situation inherently abusive. It does require special attention to issues of inequality of power stemming from economic and social differences, as well as the special difficulties faced by any relationship involving teenagers or people in their early twenties stemming from inexperience and higher levels of impulsivity.
Of course, the relationship that provoked this controversy had nothing of this egalitarian character. According to the account of Virginia Giuffre, the victim, she was enslaved by serial rapist Jeffrey Epstein, who preyed on teenagers precisely because of their economic and psychological vulnerability; he ordered her to have sex with a variety of men who were presumably unaware of her enslavement. Her obedient efforts at seducing Stallman’s friend Marvin Minsky included accompanying him on travel around the country, but she has not alleged that they actually had sex or that he knew of her enslavement. Physicist Gregory Benford testified to observing Minsky reject Giuffre’s advances.
Epstein may have had an additional motive for preying on teenagers: he maintained a large library of surreptitious video recordings of famous men having sex with enslaved underage women. There is evidence that Epstein was working for the US Intelligence Community; prosecutor Acosta accepted an unconscionable level of impunity as a result.
Stallman defending his dead friend Minsky from wholly unfounded allegations of “sexual assault” on the basis of the above facts is what provoked the current controversy.
I find it profoundly appalling to see people like Andy Wingo equating people like my beloved first wife to perpetrators of atrocities like Jeffrey Epstein, asserting that the most important fact about our relationship is that I, like Giuffre, was 17 years old when it began.
Your point of view is still pretty common in any non-puritan country on this planet, so I also are a little bit puzzled everytime, when RMS is judged that way.
And Mr. President "infinite wisdom" still "grabs them by the pussy". This is totally schizophrenic even for a plural society.
I doubt many of RMS's critics, if any, support Trump or at least that comment by Trump. Society seems "schizophrenic" because it's composed of many people who all have different perspectives and opinions. You should only look for ideological coherency from organizations and individuals, although even then you'll be disappointed fairly often. But looking for ideological coherency across the general population is certainly an exercise in folly.
One of the problems with Stallman is he doesn't realize that it's a normie's world and normies make all the rules.
The upshot of this is that his autistic well-actuallyism w.r.t. definition of terms (like "sexual assault") is at best annoying and at worst causes psychological harm to vulnerable individuals. What Stallman needs to do is read more Wittgenstein and understand how words are actually used by real humans. Their meanings are not DEFUN forms in some piece of Lisp code. A spoken word's meaning is the effect it has on those spoken to. Mainstream society considers any sexual activity by an adult on those under a certain age to be assault, therefore, "sexual assault" is an appropriate term to use for any such activity. Mainstream society considers copying a copyrighted work without permission to be a form of theft; therefore, "theft" is an appropriate term to use for copyright infringement. RMS insisting it is not theft does not change the fact that James Gosling feels very much stolen-from.
The problem with the use of "sexual assault" in this context is not that most people would consider what seems to have happened to be a "sexual assault" by Minsky, while Stallman does not; the problem is that, on one hand, almost anyone familiar with the facts as I stated them above would agree that there's no reason to believe Minsky sexually assaulted anybody; and, on the other, almost anyone would agree that Virginia Giuffre was the victim of something far worse than sexual assault: she was enslaved and repeatedly raped. There's just no reason to suspect that Minsky was the culprit. Many reasonable people condemned Stallman's words not because they disagreed with him on his use of terms but because they had false beliefs; for example, many of them believed Stallman was arguing against believing something that Virginia Giuffre had said.
If "autistic well-actuallyism" is the only way to rebut entirely groundless accusations of sexual assault, then I guess society needs a great deal more autistic well-actuallyism, because widely-believed baseless accusations of serious crimes are very destructive to society; they were the major excuse for lynchings, for example. Rather than "autistic well-actuallyism" I usually use terms like "due process", "justice", and "rationality", but if you want to call those "autistic well-actuallyism", that's up to you.
It's also factually false to claim that mainstream society considers any sexual activity between an adult and a 17-year-old to be assault. While my wife did suffer social ostracism due to our relationship, almost nobody believes that she "assaulted" me. That is far from a mainstream belief. Are you saying you think she did?
I've already explained what happened in the Gosling case in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21252185, but I'll summarize again here. Gosling was just lying about what happened. After Stallman had been maintaining EMACS for five years, Gosling wrote a clone of it for Unix, incorporating code from some other people. He gave permission to one of those people, Fen Labalme, to redistribute his modified version of it. Stallman wanted a Unix Emacs, so he started working on Labalme's version of Gosling's clone, but had to replace most of it. When he published his version, Gosling had apparently changed his mind about the redistribution permission, so he threatened legal action. Stallman at first responded by protesting that Gosling had no right to attempt to retroactively revoke his permission (particularly when Gosling was profiting by selling his Emacs clone, including the contributions of Labalme and others, to Unipress), but after a short time, he replaced the remaining pieces of Gosling's code to eliminate the issue. This all happened within a few weeks in 1985. As far as I've been able to find out, the Unipress lawsuit Gosling referred to never happened.
Gosling doesn't, I guess, "feel very much stolen-from". He tried to make a buck by copying Stallman's work and sending legal threats to Stallman about it. This led to Stallman publicly vilifying him; that's why he hates Stallman. Most people wouldn't respond to hating somebody by lying about them to damage their reputation, but that's what Gosling did.
I think Andy Wingo issues with GNU should be more focused on his RMS management style and not his political or social views.
But it is clear that a number of people involved in the GNU projects have had issues with the management style and personality of RMS quite separate from his non-conformist views raising views on sexual mores.
Andy Wingo focusing on his views relating to sex risks turning one thing into another. He should just focus on the management issues within GNU projects and ignore the unconventional sexual views.
The Epstein case shouldn't be an excuse or a rationale for focusing on the leadership of RMS.
Having RMS as the leader of the GNU project is like having mildly eccentric relatives, especially parents. You just have to live with them.
I think it was sort of the opposite. That was about the new "walrus operator" (:=) and there was quite a lot of proposals, consultation, a PEP, and lots of flaming on public mailing lists, and apparently this flaming included people who Guido respected the opinion of, and some would be quite angry at him either way he chose over this issue, IIRC.
That email says how the author doesn't like rms or his various writings, then switches to an unrelated drama about how the author fell out with a major contributor and there's some ongoing shitstorm in the project due to that.
The title makes it sound like rms' fault but he only features to be ritually denounced in the first half.
I had to google what guile was I'll certainly be trying to avoid it now.
You appear to have missed where RMS was supposed to have appointed a new co-maintainer without asking anyone in the current team, therefore asserting ownership of a project he was uninvolved with in what appears to a spiteful reason related to his speaking out against RMS. It's in the bottom of the message. It's weird that your response is to threaten to avoid something you've never known about before. Unless you were active in the GNU community already you wouldn't have had reason to use it, so you've not created GNU extensions, were unaware of the language and the threat you're making is that you'll avoid it.
Regardless of whether the statements are accurate, I'll hold judgement until hearing the other side though it does seem odd. I'd be curious what the prospective co-maintainer wants since he quit prior without resolving issues.
Mark's reply should really get a lot more attention.
> Secondly, there was a specific purpose to raising my grievances on the
> internal mailing list. It's because you are vigorously arguing for
> collective decision making within GNU, while at the same time you are
> acting in a dictatorial manner within the Guile project, failing to even
> consult your co-maintainers on core language changes. I think that's
> hypocritical, and I said so.
The email in the original post felt very one-sided and strange. Every single action felt like it was being analyzed to find the worst possible reading. The additional perspective from Mark's reply (especially the above quote) feels more balanced and more rational.
The first half was the setup for the last half, where he talks about how RMS appointed his sort-of-nemesis as co-maintainer without consulting him, which is especially shitty because the author is the actual maintainer of Guile and RMS has nothing to do with it in terms of development, maintenance, or leadership. It's a bizarre and unwise thing to do that threatens the future of the project, and it's all on RMS. So it totally makes sense to me that he spent the first half describing his background with RMS.
There's an appearance of impropriety. Guile's maintainers have been critical of RMS, and now RMS is meddling in the governance of Guile. It seems like the meddling may be to ensure that RMS has allies on that project...
Bradley Kuhn also wrote an article with regard to recent matters with RMS, which was submitted on HN a couple of days ago, and (I think) received inadequate attention:
From his post, the only reason he spoke up now instead of earlier because he was being censored by the FSF and had to resign his FSF membership to be able to speak freely. However, Conservancy (his employer) spoke up quite a while ago, before RMS resigned: https://sfconservancy.org/news/2019/sep/16/rms-does-not-spea...
RMS is a difficult person. Anybody who has had anything to do with him knows that.
But he is also (relatively) a old person. He comes from a era when to get heard you had to shout. His generation turned out a lot of well intentioned, but bullying, people.
We are much more inclusive these days, we make efforts to broaden the appeal of our groups and ensure that people other than the usual alphas can function in them. But in that process we have become intolerant of the shouty bullying men (usually men, but not always) of old.
This is mostly good. But for RMS and Linus and lots of others of the old guard there is a difficult adjustment.
It is OK to have opinions. It is OK to express them. But what RMS and co. (me too, I had to, I am the same generation) had to, have to, learn is that we need to always speak our opinions softly. Because those who are "weaker" personalities than us view our shouted opinions as a affront. And if we want them in our groups, and I know I do, we have to accommodate them.
It seems RMS is stepping out of the way. I know Linus did. Any takers for a sweepstake on when Theo de Raadt will?
>It seems RMS is stepping out of the way. I know Linus did.
When and how did Linus step out of the way? Are you referring to this event (quoting Wikipedia):
>On Sunday, September 16, 2018 the Linux Kernel Code of Conflict was suddenly replaced by a new Code of Conduct based on the Contributor Covenant. Shortly thereafter, in the release notes for Linux 4.19-rc4, Linus apologized for his behavior, calling the personal attacks of the past "unprofessional and uncalled for" and announced a period of "time off" to "get some assistance on how to understand people's emotions and respond appropriately". It soon transpired that these events followed The New Yorker approaching Linus with a series of questions critical of his conduct. Following the release of Linux 4.19 on October 22, Linus went back to maintaining the kernel.
For newcomers to the projects this can lead to unpleasant interactions that push people away from volunteering on the projects.
At the same time, this shouldn't push you away from getting involved with a GNU project if you find it interesting. Many of the projects are full of kind, helpful, hardworking people. The maintainers in particular are mostly excellent. If you have an unpleasant interaction, I'd encourage you to reach out to one of the maintainers in a private message to ask for advice on how to contribute and work with the community. Often they can help by pointing you to specific people to talk to and interact with.