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I read through as many specific quotes as I could find and it all looked like your typical tenured male professor running his mouth. Is Stallman kind of creepy? I think so. Is it a good idea to explore the philosophical points of under age sex in an academic setting or in public? No, but thank the gods you are allowed to...sort of. Has he DONE anything wrong? If so, someone should notify the police.

That blog post calling for his removal was way overblown and quite childish.

I worked in a college setting for years and tenured professors were found in possession of pornography on school grounds and on school equipment. We in tech, who discovered and reported it,thought it was a big deal. Academic freedom policy and union protection gave it the big shrug. That didn't protect their reputation but it did protect their freedom.

I came to hold dear the notion of academic and intellectual freedom from my years working there. Web filtering and monitoring were completely off the table. Not because it might protect some creepy dudes from exposure but because it protects us all in ways that most people don't even fathom.

I predict that the author of that post will deeply regret their actions one day when they grow up.




> I predict that the author of that post will deeply regret their actions one day when they grow up.

The original signers of that letter are:

* Molly de Blanc (Debian Project, GNOME Foundation)

* Nathan Freitas

* Matthew Garrett (Former member of the FSF board of directors). See: https://twitter.com/mjg59

* Shauna Gordon-McKeon

* Elana Hashman (Debian Technical Committee Member, Open Source Initiative Director, Kubernetes SIG Instrumentation Chair)

* Faidon Liambotis (Open Source Initiative Director)

* Katherine Maher

* Tom Marble (Software Freedom Conservancy, Evaluation Committee Chair)

* Neil McGovern (GNOME Foundation Executive Director, Former Debian Project Leader)

* Deb Nicholson (OSI General Manager, SeaGL Co-Founder)

* Nadya Peek

* Julia Reda

* Eric Schultz

* Joan Touzet (Apache CouchDB PMC, Former Apache Software Foundation Director)

* Luis Villa (Former Director of the Open Source Initiative and the GNOME Foundation; contributor to the GPL v3 drafting process)

* Stefano Zacchiroli (Former Debian Project Leader and Former Director of the Open Source Initiative)

See:

* https://rms-open-letter.github.io


They can all still grow up, I hope. But the probabilities are slim. Still, it would probably be a bad idea to ostracize all of them just because they say weird things.


> I think so. Is it a good idea to explore the philosophical points of under age sex in an academic setting or in public? No, but thank the gods you are allowed to...sort of.

Uh? No, I don't think you should be allowed to advocate for the morality of statutory rape in a university mailing list on an entirely unrelated topic. I was on some csail mailing lists and I certainly wouldn't want to get that.

And we wonder why this field is so gender lopsided.




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