There is a war going on in the world of free software. And the first to pay for it is its inventor, Richard Stallman. It all started again with a letter published on Github calling for his resignation from all positions, including those in the Free Software Foundation, for being “misogynist, enabler and transphobic” and for other behaviors and ideas defined as “repugnant”. The letter was signed by about 50 organizations involved in the development and maintenance of both free and open source software. To understand this, that’s what lies behind Linux, the Android operating system, the Libre Office package, and much of the technology that the digital world is sitting on creating thousands of jobs and billions of dollars of value through companies like Red Hat and MuleSoft.
All the men (and women) of Tim Berners Lee
by ARTURO DI CORINTO
Thus, this man has suddenly become a plague even for those who have joined his “church”, the church of Emacs and Saint Ignucius. The saint, “iGNUcius” derives a linguistic game of the guru to ironically celebrate the devotion to the Gnu system he conceived and from which the whole history of alternative software to the Microsoft monopoly has passed, that is free software and open source code, freely reusable by anyone to innovate, do business, encourage collaboration between programmers. Let’s talk about Gnu / Linux thanks to the merger of the Gnu operating system with the Linux kernel of Linus Torvalds, dell’Open Source Definition, born from his epic confrontation with Eric Raymond e Bruce Perens, of the General Public License elaborated with Just cheating, of the license adopted by Jimmy Wales for the Wikipedia of the origins.
How could that happen? The globetrotter who 34 years ago created the Free Software Foundation and the free software movement around the world, tireless and stubborn in telling the ethical and legal limits of proprietary software and companies such as Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and company, is become the object, some say, of a real lynching by those who previously drank from its source. A clash that divides innocentists and guilty ones, with VIPs who fear to defend him publicly so as not to be associated with his faults, real or alleged, and thousands of fans who defend him online, with sword drawn. And who have also launched a petition in his favor in 32 languages.
Stallman is not an easy person, those who have known him know it well. Like many men convinced of the uniqueness of their mission, Richard Stallman – like Linus Torvalds, like Bruce Perens, like Julian Assange -, has often manifested social behaviors of type borderline and that in Stallman’s case they expressed themselves with the amazement and candor of children who say the right things at the wrong time, who ask questions that shouldn’t be asked, who make explicit the taboos that make us blush. Behaviors that the mother has, Alice Lippman, a New York Jew, a democratic activist, he understood that he was autistic even when he was a child. And that have not changed over the years. Disastrous in interpersonal relationships, irascible, clumsy with women, refractory to compromise, Stallman now pays for his social inability with an ostracism that to many appears disproportionate in the accusations but in line with the dictates of the so-called cancel culture.
Epstein case, free software guru Richard Stallman leaves MIT
When the crusade against Stallman begins
In the autumn of 2019 he had already resigned from both the MIT and the Free Software Foundation due to the unauthorized disclosure of some of his emails where he had made clarifications regarding the behavior of the deceased friend and teacher Marvin Minsky, pioneer of AI and associate of the billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, who died in prison where he was accused of an endless series of sexual abuse. Stallman had spoken on the MIT mailing list of inflated allegations against Minsky which, misinterpreted, seemed to justify his meeting with a young 17-year-old invited by Epstein to have sex with him – a fact not yet proven – which he never wrote, but previously he had expressed himself in a calibrated manner on the relationships between adults and minors (above a certain age completely legal in many countries, including Italy) and that was enough to cause the uproar. Stallman later clarified his positions further, which meanwhile had attracted fierce criticism, threats and antipathies. His defense was worth little by claiming that Epstein was a “serial rapist” with no excuses and that relationships with minors can cause great suffering.
To make amends, after much pressure, he resigned from his leadership roles in the Free Software Foundation (FSF) until the surprise announcement, a few days ago, that he was back on the FSF board of directors, infuriating some organizations around the world. free and open source which, dissociating from him, try to curb the buriana. In fact, the FSF itself has not yet officially announced the news, even though its site lists RMS as a member of the FSF’s board of directors. From the comments of the board members, it appears that RMS was elected only by the directors and not by the other voting members.
For and against Richard Stallman
While waiting for the dynamics and timing of this decision to be clarified, many realities that would not exist without his first pioneering and then leadership role have turned their backs on him. The Tor project, the Mozilla Foundation, RedHat and even the Electronic Frontier Foundation Europe have taken a stand against Stallman. On the contrary, many women who have often dismissed her clumsy ways and her unclear language with a smile, they, individual intellectuals, feminists and fans of free software have come to her defense.
Renata Avila, a scholar, feminist and founder of an association for “inclusive algorithms”, argues that the campaign against Stallman manifests the bad conscience of those who attack him: “What Richard shows with his lifestyle and speaks out loud – unfiltered – are the compromises that others are making, using, nurturing and promoting a technology that is actually harmful to basic human rights and the dignity of people. “
In an interview with Hannah Wolfman-Jones, the teacher Nadine Strossen, former director of the American Association for Civil Liberties said, “Now, let’s assume for the sake of argument that Stallman had an attitude that has been objectively described as discriminatory on the basis of race and gender (and by the way I have not seen anything that indicates it), that he is an unrepentant misogynist, who truly believes that women are inferior. It is not possible to correct these ideas, make him reject them and decide to treat women as equals through a punitive approach! it could work is the educational one! Engaging in discourse, dialogue, discussion and bringing him to re-examine his own ideas “.
The academic, addressing the liberals and progressives of the cancel culture indirectly, said that “People use the term sexual assault / sexual harassment to refer to any comments on gender or sexuality issues with which they disagree” but believes they do so. is “really denying and downplaying the real suffering endured by people who are victims of sexual assault. It trivializes the serious crimes committed by people like Jeffrey Epstein e Harvey Weinstein. So that’s a point that he (Stallman, ed) raised and which I consider very important and with which I strongly agree “.
According to the Italian lawyer Marco Ciurcina: “In the letter against RMS, the facts are presented in such a way as to induce a percentage of readers to believe that RMS has done things that it has not done and by offering a distorted, partial and unjust image: this constitutes a violation of the dignity of RMS as a person and damages their personal identity, reputation and image “.
But beyond the damage is insult: Microsoft’s Github platform must be used to sign Stallman’s resignation request, and many organizations that have taken a stand against him receive funding from Google and other “data predators” like them. defines Renata Avila.
The machismo of nerds, #MeToo and Cancel Culture
But a shadow remains. An Italian professor, 40 years ago visiting MIT as a student, said in recent days that “she was groped by him in the elevator”. According to the Pisan professor Giuseppe Attardi who at the time was a visiting professor at MIT, “there was a rumor that he ‘tried’ with the girls in the laboratory who avoided going alone in the lift with him, but nothing more”. However, these facts are not part of the current crusade against Stallman and, as Marco Ciurcina says, “quoting phrases and narrating facts that are perhaps very old without providing a context, one can go very far from the truth”.
In the 80s the #MeToo was not born and sexual liberation was breathed even in academic environments where the problem was rather represented by male chauvinism in professional relationships as argued by a report on sexism in the laboratory that some graduate students and researchers of the Computer Science & Artificial MIT’s Intelligence Lab compiled in February 1983.
The one against Stallman is not the first major campaign of attack against a consummate person via the Internet worldwide. Before it was touched to other prominent exponents of the world of free knowledge, such as Joi Ito (former director of the MIT Media Lab), Lawrence Lessig (founder of Creative Commons) and Julian Assange. but yet Maria Rosaria Lo Muzio, secretary of the Italian Pirate Party, considers it a marginal affair if it did not have to do with the novelty of a technology, the network, which makes it possible to destroy people’s reputations with great speed and ease. “The problem – says Lo Muzio – is the relationship between men and women, a conflictual relationship where women are too often subordinated. The thing that embitters me is that a campaign is set up on the net to defend or attack Stallman without ever raising the issue of women’s rights which, even in the digital world, is made up of continuous violence “.
“Stallman’s sexist and transphobic statements are despicable, but they are nothing new in a ‘nerdy’ environment of programmers and coders that is traditionally male-dominated, predominantly white and Western,” he says. Donatella Della Ratta, teacher of communication at the John Cabot University From Rome. Stallman has always been an ambiguous and rather autistic character, irreverent and egocentric “. And he continues:” His Wikipedia page recalls that he is ‘an atheist of Jewish origin’ ‘and’ anti-natalist “,” but this must not make us forget the fundamental contribution that Stallman gave. He was among the first to see digital rights as human rights, to say that software production must be viewed as a matter of free expression, not ownership. Removing RMS does not eliminate the chauvinism and westernism of the coders community – which should make a serious reflection as a community rather than aiming at the media pillory of individuals – but ruthlessly destroys the last remnants of the uncomfortable culture of free software, crushed by corporate giants GAFAM and the blind hatred of cancel culture “.
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