Stallman himself believes that his entire life's work is a failure
Context: https://medium.com/@thomas.bushnell/a-reflection-on-the-departure-of-rms-18e6a835fd84
Specifically:
I feel very sad for him. He’s a tragic figure. He is one of the most brilliant people I’ve met, who I have always thought desperately craved friendship and camaraderie, and seems to have less and less of it all the time. This is all his doing; nobody does it to him. But it’s still very sad. As far as I can tell, he believes his entire life’s work is a failure.
The future didnt turn out how he envisioned it, it rarely does when it comes to stupid humans. But i would not call it a failure, he managed to make me a true believer in Free Software and many others im sure.If it hadnt been for Stallman and the FSF i would not have learned programming or had such wealth of code to study.
The whole community around Free Software was glorious! It still is in a way, though in this day and age Freedom itself is on the chopping block.
These PC SJW characters are the soldiers stomping on the face of freedom, which means they must attack and remove all figure heads who stand for it.
So i still like Stallman and what he stands for, words alone could not make me hate someone.
Thomas Bushnell:
from wikipedia:
"Bushnell [..] is employed by Google LLC. He is a member of Saint Mark's Episcopal Church."
With all due respect to his employment and religious beliefs, he's not the sort of person I'd turn to to get a better understanding on rms in general, or psychologically in particular.
Legendary hacker Thomas Lord's take on it:
Seriously, WTF?! More from Wikipedia.
Stallman said the dismissal was because Bushnell had been inactive since 2001 and wasn't responding to mail.
Given that he was actually dismissed by Stallman back in 2001, it's no surprise that he links to the misquotes as primary evidence; it sounds like he may have not spoken to Stallman close to some 20 years now — what sort of position does that leave him to make these sorts of comments on the matter?
It was doomed to be.
The simple fact of the matter is that most people are fucking morons, with the only real difference being whether they're immoral and greedy morons who are actively contributing to fucking things up or complacent and ineffectual morons who are just going along with it.
Nobody can stop that. Humanity is going to do to the internet the same thing it's done to every civilization that's ever existed - its going to fuck it up. Between the morons who bring destruction by pursuing their shabby, short-term self-interest and the morons who can't manage to do anything other than follow one or another herd, that's just the way things go.
Basically, Stallman made an entire career out of trying to warn children of what would happen if they touched a hot stove. And that's just as much of a lost cause on that sort of scale as it is on an immediate and individual scale. The fucking morons are going to touch it anyway, and nobody can stop them.
being cybermobbed and publicly shamed
nobody does it to him.
Yea, sure. The level of hypocrisy is off charts.
From TFA:
RMS treated the problem as being “let’s make sure we don’t criticize Minsky unfairly”, when the problem was actually, “how can we come to terms with a history of MIT’s institutional neglect of its responsibilities toward women and its apparent complicity with Epstein’s crimes”. While it is true we should not treat Minsky unfairly, it was not — and is not — a pressing concern, and by making it his concern, RMS signaled clearly that it was much more important to him than the question of the institution’s patterns of problematic coddling of bad behavior.
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I was around for most of the 90s, and I can confirm the unfortunate reality that RMS’s behavior was a concern at the time, and that this protection was itself part of the problem. He was never held to account; he was himself coddled in his own lower-grade misbehavior and mistreatment of women. He made the place uncomfortable for a lot of people, and especially women.
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4) RMS’s loss of MIT privileges and leadership of the FSF are the appropriate responses to a pattern of decades of poor behavior. It does not matter if they are appropriate responses to a single email thread, because they are the right thing in the total situation.
Even Stallman's colleagues that are sympathetic to him think that he fucked up at his only job: representing MIT and the FSF in a positive light.
Unless Wikipedia is terribly outdated, this guy has been fired by Stallman in 2001 for not responding to emails, as of 2004, so, it sounds like they probably haven't spoken in nearly 20 years.
I'll take whatever he says with a very big grain of salt; also cue his choice of the original link he uses to make folk familiar with the issue — the original misquotes on Medium.
Yeah he doesn't qualify as a good leader. But i forgive him because he is a mad eccentric and can't act any other way.
It's a weird conflation of sentiments to be like "his behavior is sad" and "he feels his life is a failure." Why are these in the same paragraph?
As far as one guy can tell.
But you're on your way to become a good journalist with writing such headlines.
Not hard to see why. Completely unrelated to recent events, of course or at least I feel that his resignation has little to do with such feelings and if they do it's more of an icing on a cake than anything else. He has fought for free software and free computing for his whole life yet has witnessed how corporate entities have not only gained more power and influence but also found their way into the foss world. For example, Linux Foundation has a ton of corporate members and one would be a complete fool not to believe that they would try to use their position to influence linux and other foss projects through that.
I would believe that to Stallman that is a clear sign of failure of his lifes work. For him there would be no such membership or any corporate influence on free software. Now with him removed from the helm of fsf it will be left to be seen whether that organization will implode, be infiltrated by corporations or find a way to fight for free software as it has done in the past.
