I skipped the rest after his trying to equate concluding you're not going to get accepted to a particular conference with 'ego'.
Having self-respect and deciding not to keep uselessly abasing yourself to a clique that's never going to anoint you is perfectly reasonable. As the previous poster said the article author seems over-blessed with ego thinking he knows enough to hand out blanket advice putting the fault on others.
He's clearly a freethinker, and we have all gotten a lot of advantages from his courage doing his thing and making his vision for FOSS a reality.
Now he's said his thoughts on this too... it's legitimate for him to do so and "problematic" everyone is in a huge panic to punish him in case the mob should get set on them.
We all have second-hand stories of how, when Stallman came to our cities (in my case Paris) for a conference, he acted like the worst fucking person on earth towards his volunteering hosts.
He was a terrible human being, and surely not very aware of how to treat other humans. He had no place in a research institution, or getting paid to pretend to be relevant on free software.
Good riddance, whatever reason we can find in his statements (yeah sure, I was 18 when my wife was 17, it wasn't rape, surely... but is that really the point people were making about his nice friend of Epstein ?).
People aren't for free speech, at all and anywhere: they are for people having the same opinion as them or follow an official line. He didn't do either, now he pays. For a genius like him, it should have been easy to understand you have to adapt if you want to lead, or you shut up if you see you can't lead.
I hope this isn't a minority opinion, but making people uncomfortable should not be a reason to take their livelihood from them. If they actively mistreat people and abuse their power to hurt people, that is different. Being socially awkward and insufferable might make you not want to associate with them, but to me that's not enough of a reason to take their life from them.
I don't agree with either of your statements. There is a dividing line, which I was pointing out, between making someone uncomfortable and being toxic. I'm not sure, tbh, but it sounds closer to rms was just socially uncouth, he didn't abuse his position of power or anything like that, he just was an unpleasant person. I don't mind may be some sort of intervention over that, similar to what Linus Torvalds faced. Perhaps he has been "called-in" so to speak but that hasn't been stated in this conversation so far. What I consider toxic is closer to retaliating professionally against subordinates you don't like, forcing subordinates to do unprofessional things like favors to curry good standing with you, etc. I could be proven wrong, but a lot of what I've read from rms is he was just annoyingly pedantic, silly at times with off-collar humor, and too much of a "true believer" in various causes. None of that I consider beyond the pale for being toxic, some of those traits (like the "true believer" bit) are actually somewhat commendable, and why extremists often are good in pushing us to better ourselves or at the very least question the foundations of the status quo.
Also, firing someone is taking their livelihood from them. rms might be more comfortable than the average worker, but part of the reason there are special rules around work is in society today people need to work to survive. rms might be wealthy and have a cushion, I have no idea and so this might not apply to him. On the other hand however, free software has been his life's work, and he is being forced out of the organizations he started in order to further that cause. He probably will be hampered from ever contributing to free software moving forward. It might not be on the level of a walmart worker living paycheck to paycheck (which sure is a larger problem) but it is a wrong, at some level, to him if he is not offered a better deal or a chance to change.
You may not like the source, but they link to actual examples.
It's the leader's responsibility to create an environment that others feel safe joining.
He did a shit job at that.
I'm in a group he had been fine towards, but I've never found him someone I'd like to follow.
His bad behavior is not new, it's been going on for a very long time, why does he need more time to change? His statement on why he left makes it pretty clear he feels like he didn't say anything problematic.
> part of the reason there are special rules around work is in society today people need to work to survive.
In America at least, we have an entire social safety net intended to avoid that scenario. Doesn't always work as intended, but there are too many counter examples to that simple description to accepted it at face value.
What people often do need work for is self-actualization, money for non-essentials, or to feel like they're making meaningful contributions to society. I don't see anything about RMS stepping down from the FSF that precludes him from submitting patches to whatever open source project he would like, or precludes him from publishing his own thoughts and research on his own website.
> People aren't for free speech, at all and anywhere: they are for people having the same opinion as them or follow an official line.
This just isn't true. Sure I want every one to respect my opinion but I don't want them to be a slave to it. I mean think about it if every one thought the same life would be boring as fuck.
>We all have second-hand stories of how, when Stallman came to our cities (in my case Paris) for a conference, he acted like the worst fucking person on earth towards his volunteering hosts.
No we don't. Your vague unspecified second-hand stories aren't any kind of evidence or argument. Come with specifics or this is just slander.
Really? He was a "terrible human being" because he said something ignorant and was socially awkward / a bit rude in person?
I'm not defending what he said but this is a really backwards way to look at things. There are plenty of manipulative CEOs and public figures who are very careful with their speech while doing harm in their actions. Stallman turned down money for decades to do something good for the sake of public interest. There really aren't many people like that, in this industry or even on this site. It sucks he conflated his movement like this, but jumping to that conclusion based on something so shallow seems just as stupid.
It's also well-known that he would hit on any woman who moves. When conference organizers finally told him to stop coming up to women and asking them out, he started printing out "pleasure cards" with his contact information and an invitation to fuck on them and wordlessly handing them out to women instead.
In order to ward off his advances, women faculty at MIT have taken to taking advantage of his phobia of plants. They decorate their offices with as many plants as they can and have even taken to wearing plants just to keep him from hitting on them.
This is not and should never be acceptable behavior.
Taking in mind that there are dozens, maybe thousands of photos of him on internet smiling near flowers, pots, pots over tables, cut flowers, taking photos of wild flowers, or posing relaxed on several jungles and forests, my congratulations to Mr Stallman for having overcomed his botagnuphobia so well.
This is not what you would expect from a real phobic person IMHO, so I wouldn't discard still that is just another stupid rumour (or perhaps some female students are overreacting badly to a rumour?).
> he started printing out "pleasure cards" with his contact information and an invitation to fuck on them and wordlessly handing them out to women instead.
Did anyone ever report this behavior to law enforcement? Did anyone try to obtain a restraining order against him?
To my knowledge that's not a crime. However, it is creepy and unprofessional, and the sort of thing that gets you fired (unfortunately not quickly enough)
Epstein has always reminded me of someone Batman would fight. He even had henchmen and an island lair.
A while back some friends and I came up with his super-villain name. Batman had The Riddler, but Epstein would be... drum roll... The Diddler! Now roll that into one of those old campy Batman episodes from the 60s and you'd have a hell of a skit.
All I can do is laugh at this stuff sometimes. The alternative is to get depressed about the lack of judgement that seems to be routinely shown by otherwise very bright people who should know better. People seem to be such suckers for these charismatic psychopath types and their "energy."
> They decorate their offices with as many plants as they can and have even taken to wearing plants just to keep him from hitting on them.
I used to live and work around MIT and I'm trying to decide if this equals or exceeds the ludicrous batshit insane ass clowning that I witnessed. I'm not sure.
My stories don't involve Stallman, but... well... I'll just say "tech weenie weenie" and anyone around MIT who knows will know.
Mahketing mahketing! (maniacal clap)
In any case I'm not at all surprised that someone like Epstein would be sleazing around MIT.
I think most people, especially in America, are very much for free speech. But inertia. And that inertia is especially pronounced when the mobs are going after somebody you don't agree with. Like the old poem goes:
- First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a socialist.
- Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a trade unionist.
- Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.
- Then they came for me— and there was no one left to speak for me.
That holds very true to this day in America. I really vehemently disagree with Stallman's views in many ways. So it's easy to not say anything, yet I do believe he has a right to say the things he does without getting depersoned. In any case I'd much rather the people that do abide his views do so publicly rather than in secret.
But beyond this, I think he chose a reasonable hill to die on. He undoubtedly knew his comments would spark a mob in the zeitgeist of today, but they really are about as tepid as you could get. He was saying it was a bad idea for terms, even if legally accurate, to be used in general speech when they mislead people as to the nature of a situation. If that's the new standard for moving from words to 'let's get rid of this guy', we may not even have a standard. And I think that's a point that will resonate for more and more people. Even if these people might be afraid to speak out for fear of becoming the mobs' next target, it helps bring about a positive change in society.
An analogy I love to consider is Lincoln. Did Lincoln end slavery and direct society accordingly or did society reach a point such that the creation of a Lincoln was, sooner or later, inevitable - even if by another name? And I think things like this bring us ever closer to creating our Lincoln because solving the problems of social media is not something that's going to be done in a clean fashion.
I'm sorry, no. Women at CSAIL cultivated plants in their office because they knew it would keep him out of their offices. He's a train wreck and has needed to go for a while.
Wish them all the best, but I tried the latest firmwate image on my dev kit last week and although there's plenty of progress, many things are not there, at least on that image + platform combination.
No lte, no wifi, browser scrolls at ~10fps, browser crashes, display has some hw jittering if you look closely.
I guess some of these are solved on the production hw (they use a different lte module) but still, only consider it if you have a pain threshold or have booked to go into hypersleep for 18 mo.
Developing good smartphone userland and OS is very software engineering resource intensive. You cannot do it on a shoestring budget. Even Nokia with its Maemo was only 80% there - and they were able to throw hundreds of software engineers on it. I was also part of one early smartphone development team where you had 150 people at its peak and they still could deliver the product. Not to mention OpenMoko.
Even when Librem delivers, it will be subpar UX to what people are used to. It is a trade off, but I feel only very hardcore enthusiastic are willing to take it.
That sounds about right for where they are in the development process right now. Anyone expecting a remotely 'consumer' device experience should be waiting for the Evergreen release at least. Only early adopters willing to deal with some pain should be jumping in right now.
I paid for a "dev kit"... it's not like I have unreasonable expectations. I went back to check it to figure out if I should buy an actual phone... I kept my money in my pocket.
I can handle quite a bit of dust and pieces coming month by month but I can't handle no wireless comms and a crashy and slow browser. At least the internet and the browser operation have to be reliable and fluid or nobody can use it for normal operations. I'll try it again in a few months.
The UI is being reworked right now to better fit the screen, but it's generally there in GNOME Settings (latest changes broke the password field and I think it's not restored yet, but you can fill it in by editing NetworkManager's config anyway). For LTE you just have to set the correct APN. I've just connected to the internet with LTE to test it and it worked; and I'm using WiFi connection daily.
Make sure your kill switches actually turn WiFi and LTE on. Also, the modem is generally way more stable when used with battery inserted, as USB might not be able to supply enough current.
It's the Gnome webKit browser Epiphany (aka Gnome web).
I'd prefer firefox but I don't have any real beef with it. Except on the dev kit the scrolling is more or less unusable. It might be a 'feature' of the dev kit since the imx8 runs hot enough to burn your hand on that due to hardware problems that shouldn't exist on the real device.
I'm sure Mozilla would accept Purism's work if they did it, but even a lot of work for desktop Firefox (tabs in the titlebar, wayland) is done by Red Hat people.
> Firefox doesn't resize small enough to fit on the screen.
What exactly does this mean?
* I can make the FF desktop window super tiny
* I can do browser zooming down to 30%
* even if the chrome would obscure the webpage viewport I can go into fullscreen mode
* FF itself has a responsive design mode and ships with Iphone and other small form factors in the dropdown
I understand that it may be easier to tweak Gnome's browser for adding navigation gestures/url bar appearance, etc. But I can't imagine how FF wouldn't be able to display a web page in a way that fits the Librem 5 screen.
Can I ask what you mean by that? Firefox's core has been used on the mobile phone in multiple applications that function just fine and Firefox's desktop version is perfectly capable of resizing down to mobile phone sizes, even emulating a phone if you want.
There's no mobile version of Firefox that would work on GNU/Linux. There was one, but got ditched when Fennec got rewritten into being a native Android app.
There's no distinction between the "desktop" and "mobile" versions of GNOME Web. It's literally the same code (compiled for the appropriate processor architecture), just at a different window size.
Since I am personally unfamiliar with GNOME’s toolchain for compiling apps for both mobile and desktop, I didn’t want to speak too confidently about the matter above.
So, all options shown in the preferences of the desktop version will automatically be shown in the preferences of the mobile version?
These large rich tech companies are really responsive to 'compliance' with the letter and spirit of laws that otherwise might cause severe losses. Look at, eg, gpdr, and google suddenly getting religion about you being able to mass-download your data. Yes you can legislate solutions to corporate behaviours.
"These large rich tech companies" are not the ones getting breached. The likes of Google and Microsoft take security seriously already. The problem is the likes of Equifax and Capital One and government databases with poor security that nonetheless contain all kinds of sensitive information that they shouldn't be aggregating and retaining to begin with and they certainly shouldn't be required by law to collect and store, even though they frequently are right now.
Also:
> and google suddenly getting religion about you being able to mass-download your data.
Letter, yes. Spirit, I'm not so sure, it feels like Google and FB want to keep doing what they're already doing, and comply where they have to, instead of reconsidering whether they actually need all that data and need these dark patters for consent (which would be the spirit of GDPR)
And the smaller-than-FAANG companies... too many checklists, contracts and theater ("GDPR requires us to disable autofill on this form") and not enough actual rethinking what they're doing and if they should change their approach to data... so we'll still be seeing plenty of breaches where they shouldn't even be having the breached data
It'll probably be a decade before we see real effect from the GDPR...
If he was though, it'd have various implications such as it not being difficult to prove he had access to his own private keys.
I can imagine you might be the guy and not want to prove it, or it to be known. But actively claiming to be the guy and not proving it indisputibly when you could... what'd be the point?
According to most peoples definitions if you can't do what you please with it or make a derivative product and do what you please with THAT I cannot imagine why you believe its free as in speech anymore.
Important code needs love, it needs to be improved, made more robust, have security issues handled, consolidated if it starts to bloat, to be cleaned and kept legible even for whitespace so you or the next guy can easily see and continue to look after all the moving parts.
If it's important, it needs and deserves all those things; they are not "churn" but maintenance.
Having self-respect and deciding not to keep uselessly abasing yourself to a clique that's never going to anoint you is perfectly reasonable. As the previous poster said the article author seems over-blessed with ego thinking he knows enough to hand out blanket advice putting the fault on others.