Recientemente Thomas Bushnell, a former Linux Kernel maintainer, shared with the community his thinking about the Richard Stallman case which turned the entire GNU community on its head.
And is that It should be remembered that last Monday, September 16, Richard Matthew Stallman father of the free software movement and initiator of the GNU project, resigned from his position at CSAIL, the computer lab and artificial intelligence of the MIT, due to a series of comments I make.
On the resignation of Richard Stallman in the past week, Thomas Bushnell recalling that he has worked with RMS longer than any other developer, He noted that there were misreports and that poses a problem.
Thomas bushnell comments that he did not read the thread completely that Selam published besides that from his perspective Stallman did not defend Epstein and it did not say that the victim in this case acted voluntarily.
This was an autogoal for RMS. He had many opportunities to learn to shut up when necessary.
Bushnell says the situation was not favorable for StallmanWell, he is guilty of thinking that people will read his notes carefully, but even that is not the problem.
He thought that Marvin Minsky was wrongly accused. Minsky has been his friend for many years and I think he has a lot of love and loyalty to his memory. But Minsky is also dead and there is plenty of time left to discuss the problems that may arise from his fault.
RMS treated the issue as "making sure you don't unfairly criticize Minsky," while the issue was "how can we deal with MIT's history of institutional neglect in relation to its responsibilities to women and its apparent complicity? with Epstein's crimes. '
It is true that we should not treat Minsky unfairly, but it was not, and is not, an urgent concern, and in expressing his concern, RMS made it clear that it was much more important to him than the issue of problematic patterns of tolerance for misbehavior. within the institution.
And, I think, some of those who focus on careful analysis of RMS's words fall into the same trap as him. Your intentions matter less than your actions and their predictable effects.
Add to all this the fact that RMS championed the idea that adults have sex with minors in certain circumstances, and people's lively, visceral reaction was quite conceivable.
Minsky has long been RMS's protector. He created the AI Lab, where I believe RMS found the only happy home it has ever known. He held off the rest of the Institute and isolated RMS from attacks (as did other teachers who also sympathized with RMS).
From Bushnell's point of view, he considers that the loss of privileges granted to MIT for Stallman and FSF leadership are the appropriate responses decades of bad behavior. It doesn't matter if it's a proper single-threaded answer because it's generally the right thing to do.
I feel very sad for him. He remains an emblematic figure. She is one of the brightest people I have ever met and one who, in my opinion, desperately craves friendship and camaraderie and especially seems to have less and less. This situation she is going through is her fault, but it is still very sad. As far as I know, he thinks his whole life's work is a failure.
The end result here, while sad for him, is correct.
The free software community needs to develop good leadership and Richard Stallman has been a bad leader In many ways for a long time, because for Thomas Bushnell, Richard Stallman has had many people who have tried to help him and he does not want help.
MIT should best establish an environment where women can have a safe and equitable place to study and work. In fact, the mere presence of Richard Stallman on the scene has made it more difficult to handle other cases of misconduct by other MIT officials.
Source: https://medium.com/@thomas.bushnell/