A Reflection on the Departure of RMS

A Reflection on the Departure of RMS(medium.com)

83 points by rwolf 6 years ago | 43 comments

geofft 6 years ago |

For some context, Thomas Bushnell was the chief architect of the HURD from its founding in 1990 until 2003. He understands the FSF and Richard Stallman as well as anyone does.

speedplane 6 years ago | |

> Thomas Bushnell was the chief architect of the HURD from its founding in 1990 until 2003. He understands the FSF and Richard Stallman as well as anyone does.

I invited Stallman to speak at my law school, along with other high ranking FSF members. I may have worshiped him at the time, but many of the tight-laced budding lawyers in attendance thought he was weird, mildly anti-social, and did not understand his relevance. Developers "got it", but most law students didn't connect. The traits that endeared him to the software community cut against him when trying to reach a broader audience.

Even though "open source" is everywhere right now, the GPL and true sharing of code is not. The Apache license, which allows you to do what you want and not share any changes, rules the day. I wonder if a more mainstream leader, who was just as committed to copyleft software would have been more effective.

scohesc 6 years ago |

I'm pretty sure RMS exhibits most of all of the symptoms of Asperger's and would immediately get the diagnosis if he walked into a psychiatrists' office.

It's a bit ignorant for Bushnell to be degrading RMS by calling him a "a whiny child who has never reached the emotional maturity to treat people decently" when the man 99.9% likely cannot cognitively do so.

It's really unfortunate that people with Asperger's (potentially like RMS) are at a massive disadvantage when holding positions of any kind of power in a public setting.

geofft 6 years ago | |

> It's a bit ignorant for Bushnell to be degrading RMS by calling him a "a whiny child who has never reached the emotional maturity to treat people decently" when the man 99.9% likely cannot cognitively do so.

Have you interacted with RMS? Do you know what his cognitive limitations are?

Bushnell has. (And he doubtless knows plenty of people with Asperger's - it is certainly true that Asperger's is disproportionately common in this industry.)

Matthew Garrett, another person who has worked closely with RMS (in his case, on the board of the FSF), has said that he does, indeed, have the cognitive capacity to understand the impact of his actions, but chooses not to care: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/52587.html "I've spent a lot of time working with him to help him understand why various positions he holds are harmful. I've reached the conclusion that it's not that he's unable to understand, he's just unwilling to change his mind."

It seems like it is both unfair to RMS, unfair to people who have worked with him, and unfair to people with Asperger's to make this comparison.

snowwrestler 6 years ago | |

Some smart people do have Asperger's, per a professional diagnosis.

It does not help those people to just take anyone who acts weird but seems smart and say "they probably have Asperger's."

Mental disorders should be taken seriously. That means helping and accommodating people who suffer from disorders, including Asperger's. But it also means resisting the temptation to invent pop diagnoses in order to excuse behavior that would otherwise be objectionable.

scohesc 6 years ago | | |

I have lived most my life with 3 people who have Asperger's and I've worked with many people who have Asperger's.

He's exhibiting 99.9% of the signs that he has Asperger's.

It's not a "pop" diagnosis of any sort.

viraptor 6 years ago | |

> "a whiny child who has never reached the emotional maturity to treat people decently" when the man 99.9% likely cannot cognitively do so.

This is simply not a black and white situation. I'm familiar with people with Asperger's who can both behave nicely to others and who are aware of their limitations and actively work on thinking through their situation to counteract those limits. Being diagnosed is not a license to be a dick. If someone actually can't handle this, then it is a disadvantage for a public position and they likely shouldn't hold it.

rongenre 6 years ago | |

RMS has all the resources he needs to get an Asperger's diagnosis and appropriate therapy.

dyno12345 6 years ago | | |

since there is no known therapy this comment can easily be construed as wrongly blaming those with autism spectrum disorder for not having solved their autism spectrum disorder simply out of laziness and lack of motivation. I'm not a fan of RMS in general, but we're saying that the apparently untreatable condition he is allegedly affected by is effectively his own choice and own fault, an attitude that at the very best fails to help anyone with untreatable mental conditions and is also not uncommon. It may help those without such condition feel like they're living in a just world, on the other hand.

malandrew 6 years ago | | |

Why should those that are aspie modify themselves to satisfy those that are neurotypical instead of those that are neurotypical learning how to work with aspies?

Not saying the aspies shouldn't work on themselves, but it should be a two way street, where NTs also learn to recognize and tolerate aspies.

nonamenoslogan 6 years ago | |

Yeaaaa...how about we don't use "The Autism Spectrum" (pseudoscience's latest pump-my-kids-full-of-drugs excuse for what ails anyone who's a little slow or a full blown snowflake) to levy criticism without having a clue? As someone else mentioned, its not fair to RMS and its not fair to the genuinely mentally affected.

zozbot234 6 years ago | |

It's far more than 'ignorant', Bushnell knows better than that. He's demonstrating a severe lack of empathy - and let's just say, he's not the only person who has shown tell-tale signs of this trait so far (and leave it at that). What I have to wonder is whether the radical activist politics that's becoming all-too-common in academia and elsewhere is making people less empathetic, or simply selecting for the least empathetic of us.

(As an aside, the notion that Aspergers sufferers "cannot cognitively" reach "the emotional maturity to treat people decently" is a deeply, deeply unfair stereotype that reflects a severe misconception as to Aspergers behavior. Autism and Aspergers has nothing, zip, zilch to do with sociopathy! The way sufferers might treat people may be less-than-satisfactory to us, perhaps even socially-impaired in some sense; but to say or to even imply that they they lack decency is simply outrageous. Sorry for the admittedly-pedantic nitpicking.)

bbanyc 6 years ago | | |

From what I can tell, it's Stallman who lacks empathy here. If he had ever thought about the impact of his behavior on the people around him, maybe he wouldn't have driven them all away.

zozbot234 6 years ago |

I'm quite willing to entertain the notion that RMS was a problem in some sense (though, if he has been 'coddled' for decades, one has to wonder if that problem was due to any fault of his own that he ought to have been cognizant of!) But pay attention to what this post is actually saying. It's inappropriate to defend Minsky in the wake of the Epstein scandal? (And there are people, considered reliable by others, who have said that when sex was inappropriately offered to Minsky, he turned the offer down! Of course RMS did not say that, and what he did say was rather tone deaf to say the least. But still...) RMS must go because he is fat and ugly, and thus makes women uncomfortable (the horror!) even when he's simply trying to joke around and be charming? Come on.