The Stallman Report

How curious to see that the authors of this character assassination are anonymous. I wonder if it's a cabal of closed-source proprietary software authors behind this.

If this was being released 10-20 years ago, I'd suspect the involvement of Microsoft and their allies. These days, who knows. The Free Software movement has been attacked from many angles over the years, from those who want to destroy it completely to those who want to control and usurp it. There certainly are a long list of suspects for who may have authored this screed.

It would be interesting to see if a stylometric analysis could unmask those responsible. Perhaps we'd find dark skeletons in their closets, as is so often the case for those who point accusatory fingers at others using spurious evidence.

You haven't read it and you should, maybe it would cut down the paranoia. This is not an attack on the free software movement and this is clearly from people who do care about the free software movement values.

I've skimmed through it and see nothing much to actually be concerned about. We all know Stallman is a rather strange, socially awkward man with some oddball views that go against the grain.

A document berating him for being a weirdo, while shrilly exaggerating all the "evidence" in an effort to destroy him and everything he's built over his lifetime, is not particularly useful or necessary.

The purpose of this is clear, and it's very telling that it's being fired at Stallman from the shadows by the unknown and unaccountable.

Strange, socially awkward people who make other people uncomfortable to the point of triggering their threat responses tend not to keep their jobs for long in the real world. We even have a name for them: creeps.

There's a reason why codes of conduct, especially the Contributor Covenant, are de rigueur in the open source world. They help keep the creeps and the fash out, and make the work environment more harmonious.

RMS is a creep who's been grandfathered in because he came from a time when creeps were much more tolerated. Times have changed, and so have values. We are far less tolerant of creeps, no matter how talented they may otherwise be because they disrupt the working environment unacceptably. It's time for that grandfather clause to end.

It would be great if we could get rid of all the neurodivergent people in tech, they’ve been far too comfortable in digital spaces.

Neurodivergent people can be taught appropriate standards of conduct and basic human respect. Sometimes you gotta spell it out for 'em, that's what the CoC is for. But you don't just give people a pass for making others uncomfortable or afraid "because muh neurodivergence". Especially in a position of leadership. Leading is a skill. If your disability really prevents you from exercising that skill, you don't get that position. Sorry.