GNU's Former Kernel Maintainer Shares 'A Reflection on the Departure of Richard Stallman'

'Thomas Bushnell, BSG, founded GNU's official kernel project, GNU
Hurd, and maintained it from 1990 through 2003. This week on Medium he
posted "a reflection on the departure of RMS."

There has been some bad reporting, and that's a problem. While I have
not waded through the entire email thread Selam G. has posted, my
reaction was that RMS did not defend Epstein, and did not say that the
victim in this case was acting voluntarily. But it's not the most
important problem. It's not remotely close to being the most important
problem.

This was an own-goal for RMS. He has had plenty of opportunities to
learn how to stfu when that's necessary. He's responsible for relying
too much on people's careful reading of his note, but even that's not
the problem.

He thought that Marvin Minsky was being unfairly accused. Minsky was
his friend for many many years, and I think he carries a lot of
affection and loyalty for his memory. But Minsky is also dead, and
there's plenty of time to discuss at leisure whatever questions there
may be about his culpability. RMS treated the problem as being "let's
make sure we don't criticize Minsky unfairly", when the problem was
actually, "how can we come to terms with a history of MIT's
institutional neglect of its responsibilities toward women and its
apparent complicity with Epstein's crimes". While it is true we should
not treat Minsky unfairly, it was not -- and is not -- a pressing
concern, and by making it his concern, RMS signaled clearly that it
was much more important to him than the question of the institution's
patterns of problematic coddling of bad behavior. And, I think, some
of those focusing themselves on careful parsing of RMS's words are
falling into the same pitfall as he....

Minsky was RMS's protector for a long long time. He created the AI
Lab, where I think RMS found the only happy home he ever knew. He kept
the rest of the Institute at bay and insulated RMS from attack (as did
other faculty that also had befriended RMS). I was around for most of
the 90s, and I can confirm the unfortunate reality that RMS's behavior
was a concern at the time, and that this protection was itself part of
the problem...

Bushnell also calls Stallman "a tragic figure. He is one of the most
brilliant people I've met, who I have always thought desperately
craved friendship and camaraderie, and seems to have less and less of
it all the time. This is all his doing; nobody does it to him. But
it's still very sad. As far as I can tell, he believes his entire
life's work is a failure..."

But Bushnell concludes that "It is time for the free software
community to leave adolescence and move to adulthood, and this
requires leaving childish tantrums, abusive language, and toxic
environments behind."'

-- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/09/21/0253227

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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