The Free Software Foundation is holding an auction to celebrate its 40th anniversary. You can bid on the original sketch of the GNU head by [Etienne Suvasa] and [Richard Stallman’s] Internet Hall of Fame medal.
There are some other awards, including the FSF’s 1999 Norbert Wiener Award. There’s even a katana that symbolizes the fight for computer user freedom.
The FSF has done a lot of important work to shape the computing world as we know it. We hope this sale isn’t a sign that they are running out of money. Maybe they are just funding their birthday party in Boston.
If you use Linux (even if it is disguised as Android, a Raspberry Pi OS, or hiding on a web server you use), you can thank the FSF. While we commonly call them “Linux systems,” Linux is just the kernel. Most of the other things you use are based on either GNU-sponsored code or builds on that GNU-sponsored code. If you want to know more about the history of the organization, you can catch [ForrestKnight’s] video below.
Without the GNU tools and the Linux kernel, you have to wonder what our computers would look like. While [Richard Stallman] is a sometimes controversial figure, you can’t argue that the FSF has had a positive impact on our computers. Maybe we’d all be on BSD. It is worth noting that the FSF even certifies hardware.
Head by Stallman? No, thanks. I’d rather do it myself.
wink wink nudge nudge
Pass. I’m not interested in affiliating myself with movement led by someone who is “skeptical” that “voluntary pedophilia” is harmful to children.
This.
Also, the GNU tools are largely a rip off of tools written by others, but erased from history.
getting serious Korwin-Mikke vibez here bro (;
i’m not familiar with JKM but if i understand the reference & sentiment then i too am saddened by Noah’s comment but not his decision to pass
“We hope this sale isn’t a sign that they are running out of money.”
Actually, “we” hope this is a sign that they are running out of money. Maybe then they will clean shop. Since their re-embrace of RMS they made themselves mostly irrelevant (look at the list of backers they lost). It’s time for the FSF to die or move on from RMS, lets not give this pedo-advocate any more airtime or lime light.
How can you say such a thing?
No computers were harmed during the entire session.
As cool as the cancel culture may be right now, we will be hard pressed to find someone else willing to do the work for the FSF that RMS has done and continues to do. If you think the Internet and software development experience is a wasteland cesspool now, just wait until he quits and no one feels like running FSF anymore.
Cancel culture, like when RMS tried to cancel Miguel de Icaza?
RMS already resigned from the FSF and nothing bad happened until he came back.
And what is RMS doing at the FSF now? Most of the backers left when he returned, and many companies are refusing to sign code copyrights to FSF any more.
“There are some other awards, including the FSF’s 1999 Norbert Wiener Award.”
Can’t find any info on that one, anyone has more infos?
PS: the logo of our local hackerspace HSBXL is Norbert Wiener, who was projected at last week fosdem party.
Finally I know! Asked multiple people about the logo but no one told me it was Wiener :)
I understand your gripes with RMS; however, it’s important to keep in mind that he’s not a pedophile, just extremely autistic. His engineering is responsible for an unreal amount of progress, let the man live.
I’m beyond tired of people using claims of autism to get away with deplorable actions or views.
Well, as such, views are just views.
It’s considered sort of a private thing in the free world, or it used to be.
Also, it’s generally good to question the strange US moral standards from time to time, maybe.
That nation is a little bit akward by international standards, I would say.
Especially with its views on violence vs nudity, public healthcare and questionable kind of Christianity. The commercialism of the latter, for example.
About the age thing.. No comment, not sure what to think about it right now.
In Iran (or Iraq?), though, kids age 14 can drive and found a family.
Or so I was told by a foreign class mate once.
A sane intelligent person should ultimately come to the same conclusions about agreeable facts no matter what point of view they take – they just take a different route to get there.
In the case of moral arguments, this principle reveals a difference in the person’s fundamental morals. In other words, an autistic person can be lacking some of the fundamental points of empathy or other moral quality, and you can’t excuse that away by saying they’re just thinking differently. E.g. if they’re ok with another person being tortured like an ant under a magnifying glass, they might be autistic and a psychopath at the same time.
The point isn’t that he’s autistic and can get away with it, it’s his constant need to be the devils advocate/express fact over consensus.
RMS doesn’t think that paedophilia is okay; rather than the trauma created from the act is based in culture—which is somewhat correct. Dutch culture views nudity in a different manner, seeing your parents nude is no big deal; when videos of children seeing their nude parents reached the USA people freaked out and viewed it as paedophilia. RMS’s suggestion was that you could push this further and suggest that acts between a minor and an adult aren’t inherently traumatizing but rather our culture is what traumatizes the child. I don’t believe that he ever suggested that our culture should be altered to make it acceptable, just the source of the trauma.
He’s autistic in the manner that he needs to express the correct argument.
I think you are doing incredible mental gymnastics here, or maybe you have some kinds of RMS mind reading ability to know things that stallman hasn’t said publicly? Because I do not see anything like that in his blog, and he is pretty open about what he writes there.
I appreciate what stallman started decades ago. But now he is just having a negative impact on open source and the FSF. He did the right things in stepping aside originally, he should have stayed “stepped aside” rather than jumping back in to run FSF in to the ground.
Another opinion is that RMS is a toxic asshole that hides behind an autism diagnoses. I know many people impacted by autism people (some much more impacted than RMS is), who manage to not obsess about why sex with 12 year old children should be legal. Also, RMS’s behavior is damaging to people with autism – we definitely should not be saying “it’s ok, he’s autistic”….
We can do better as a community. Sure he played a big role in pioneering open source early on, but has also had a negative effect on the open source community (e.g. attacks on Miguel de Icaza, and others), and doesn’t have a role in its future (other than killing FSF for his ego).
I don’t think he “obsesses” over it. Some reporter asked him about it and he had a taboo take on it that goes against normative values. He spoke his mind and it is people who are shocked at what he said that obsess over it.
Agreed. Only people obsessing over this are the ppl who want attention, but don’t have any decent sw skills to contribute. So instead they strive to be offended in order to be vocal about it and get scraps of attention from various comment sections and C-tier message boards.
How about we just call it “pattern” instead?
I didn’t know about the reporter incident. But there are many others, like his defense of Minsky and indirectly Epstein (the reason he resigned from MIT and FSF), other statements that 13year olds are not children, victim blaming, etc.. All in his blog…
Technically speaking, if he was “extremely autistic” he would have an IQ below 70 and probably wouldn’t talk. Autism isn’t the reason these kind of people behave like dicks.
Bring me the head of Stallman on a platter.
I’m sure everyone here never did anything wrong in their life.
Without RMS GNU would not exist, Linux would probably be a footnote in history, and Microsoft and Apple would be charging everyone $500 per OS install.
Luckily, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are saints, and never flew near the island whose name we aren’t allowed to say.
Yeah, I don’t really care about the personal opinions of software developers, so long as the software is good. Not a fan of cancel culture worming its way into everything. Awful people shouldn’t be prohibited from contributing to society.
True. But on other hand, everyone is free to decline a work if they find the creator or the events to the creation of the work to be unethical.
That’s also why, for example, medical researches from those nazi doctors in ww2 aren’t being used today.
The way the research was done, the horrible things that had been done to patients, do matter.
If the research material would been used today without spending a second thought, we would kind of legimate the cruelties in retrospect and we would be partners in crime.
These are ethical considerations. And no matter if right/wrong, it’s good that people to hesitate using things and rather discuss things beforehand.
I just completely disagree. All data is valid and rejecting it because of its origins is just virtue signalling. In the case of medicine, being a good person is ultimately less important than saving lives. “Legitimizing” isn’t a real thing. Things make themselves legitimate by existing; nobody can change that, no matter how much they cry about it.
Before you speak so boldly, take a few minutes and actually familiarize yourself with Nazi human experimentation to see what these guys actually did. Tissue transplantation, drowning, blood coagulation, mustard gas poisoning. The one that was news to me were the experiments with X Rays as a method of sterilization, after which the victims were surgically mutilated without anesthesia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_human_experimentation?wprov=sfla1
Now, how much of the data was useful? Almost none of it. There is a myth (that I believed until a few minutes ago) that none of it has ever been used, but there have been a handful of papers over the years controversially citing a few studies. But nothing groundbreaking or worth the cost of a single human life.
The simple fact is that the Nazis were crappy scientists. There were no controls, the data collection was sloppy, and the goal was to find data to prove a preconceived (usually horrifying) theory.
I get that you, like those few researchers who cited Nazi studies, may want to remove yourself from the messy ethical concerns of mass murder and mutilation. That the claim “well the data’s just lying there – it’d be a shame to waste it” rings clear in your conscience.
But when you do that, just remember that you’re “virtue signalling” to others with your actions as well. And don’t be surprised if you’re judged by others because of it.
@Kevin N. Haw
I’d gladly be judged by “scientists” who throw away useful data, especially when it came at the expense of someone’s life. I know if I died horribly, I’d certainly want people to gain whatever they could from the experience. Anything less is just cowardice.
That is still begging the question. For instance, how useful is the data when the experiment cannot be replicated? That’s just bunk science.
If they didn’t want his honest opinion, why did they ask? Should he be cancelled from his life’s work simply for having an unsavory opinion?
I can imagine that such questions are being asked in order have a controversial story that can be exploited.
But unfortunately, that’s not my area of expertise. 🤷♂️
I agree with this sentiment. It seems like people these days struggle to separate important figures from their actions.
Plenty of great things are done, but there are very few (if any) ‘great’ people – without exception they become less savory the more you know about them.
We can appreciate the positive impacts people have without trying to make them into saints or moral exemplars.
“It’s my estimation that every man ever got a statue made of him was one kind of sommbitch or another” – Capt. Malcom Reynolds
Yea let’s take the guys 35+ years of thankless hard work that literally transformed the world with the GPL and throw it all away over 1 or 2 tabooish comments posted on a mailing list years ago, which he then reevaluated and apologized for.
Willing to bet when RMS goes, FSF will go and these people will get their wish. Then these FOS projects can get picked up and properly patented by some corporation. Maybe they’ll keep it free and open for these people?
“Luckily, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are saints, and never flew near the island whose name we aren’t allowed to say.”
They didn’t create their popular software or hardware all alone, though.
There had been development teams, with lots of good/not so good guys.
Linux on other hand was being created and maintained by a single person who’s a ruler or leader figure.
That doesn’t really win sympathy points, maybe.
“I’m sure everyone here never did anything wrong in their life.”
Surely. But I dare to ask if any of us have ever behaved as badly towards others in real life as these VIPs have, over and over again.
I for one can’t remember ever treating my fellow human beings like some of them do on those mailing lists or on public events.
Not even on the internet. But I’m not an anti-social nerd, either.
Maybe it’s sort of a character trait that those types of developers share, not sure.
Perhaps it’s also sort of a requirement in order to develop interest in such things.
I wonder if there are any research studies available on the topic.
I’ve always wondered why personalities like Steve, Bill or Linus did behave like dictators at times.
Anti-social nerds write the best software. Comes with the territory.
“Without the GNU tools and the Linux kernel, you have to wonder what our computers would look like.”
Hm. I’d miss GnuChess, maybe? Can’t think of anything else that would be missed if things had went different.
In a world without Linux, there would still have been Minix, various DOS versions, OS/2, QNX, Amiga OS etc since they all did predate GNU/Linux already.
And there wouldn’t have been Linux-based Android, which would have been great now that I think of it.
If Linux hadn’t exist, then maybe *nix as a platform wouldn’t have been considered for desktop use and BeOS would have been more popular.
Or, commercial and polished Unixes like HPUX or Solaris had made it onto ordinary PCs, maybe.
Real Unixes, without broken hobbyist software with super long names and a few dozen parameters.
Ok, I do better stop now. The more I think of an alternate history without Linux, the sadder I become.
Because it looks like such a bright timeline that never came to be.
Oh, and without GNU/FOSS public domain, freeware and shareware would still exist.
In the 90s, I had seen a lot of public domain and freeware software on those shovelware CDs that shipped with source code.
Some authors also made the source code available for a little fee, via mail order.
It had been mentioned in the supplied readme.txt files of the time.
Also, computer magazines often had published source code in the form of listings or as files on cover disks.
– Way back in the days of Apple II or C64, already.
So even without open source software, users already had access to work of others.
While I do appreciate the open source software concept, it’s not something that was/is unique to GNU/GPL.
Sure, but from a legal and practical point those times were a huge mess. The lack of solid licenses made possible big corporations steal code from small developers and created barriers to other small developers to improve previous code. GNU licenses aren´t perfect but showed the need of that kind of legal protection and paved the way to other improved models. Also, commercial software can have some advantages, but not everyone in the world can afford it. I think is better to have a computer running GNU/Linux OS and software, than a ‘warez’ version of MS Windows full of malware, like was usual in the past, in many parts of the world.
I think Android doesn’t really contain much GNU software anymore. The utilities are mostly toy-box.
Please fix the “Cetifies hardware” link at end of article
Alpine Linux doesn’t use GNU tools or GNU libraries. Neither does BSD.
GNU was just a reimplementation of existing tools, existing libraries, in a method that allowed them to avoid AT&T licenses. For that I applaud the FSF, but they didn’t create anything original for many years. Only when things like GNOME, the GIMP, and other user tools showed up did they do anything borderline original, and even the GIMP (which I use) is a somewhat creaky hack of Photoshop (Adobe be damned).
Don’t get me wrong, I applaud much of what the FSF does, I have contributed patches to OSS projects, including the NetBSD kernel, but I was there working with Unix before the FSF was founded. Not as a Unix developer, for me it was a tool to develop embedded systems that would run inside the core network, running on proprietary RTOS. My first exposure to using a Unix derived platform wouldn’t come until 2001, on QNX Neutrino, which had POSIX elements to it, but more akin to Plan9. Then in 2004 I would spend the next four years delivering a NetBSD based platform to the field. After that it was back to proprietary RTOS land on DSPs until 2018, where I started working with Alpine Linux.