[Discuss] RMS in the news

[John Abreau]

I'd like to see his original email that sparked the whole mess. From what
little I've seen, it sounds like RMS condemned Epstein but defended Minsky,
as Minsky is dead and thus cannot defend himself.

The impression I got was that RMS had claimed Epstein forced the
17-year-old girl to come on to Minsky, but that Minsky was unaware that she
was being coerced.

Also, Gregory Benford, author and professor, claims to have witnessed the
incident where she came on to Minsky. He says that Minsky turned her down,
and that neither he nor Minsky had any reason to suspect that she was being
coerced. If this is the case, then all the blame belongs with Epstein.


On Wed, Sep 18, 2019 at 6:34 AM Jack Bennett <ajbennett at gmail.com> wrote:

> He came to give a public talk at Brown which was very well attended because
> he was quite well known among the CS, science, and engineering world.
>
> He gave a pretty typical rms talk - software freedom is important, open
> source is not good enough, closed systems are bad since you don't know what
> they are doing to your personal information. All the usual messages that
> he's been an uncompromising pitbull about for 35+ years.
> Almost offhandedly, he mentioned that people shouldn't procreate because
> having kids takes away from the time that you could otherwise be spending
> on REALLY important things, like working on free software and/or activism
> for software freedom. That was a new one that I hadn't heard. It kind of
> underscored his single-minded obsession to me. Here he is talking to a
> pretty diverse audience and he's saying that his "thing" is more important
> than literally any other important thing in any other person's life.
>
> Later on, one professor in the department, a member of my dissertation
> committee, was quietly leaving the talk a little bit early. rms noticed and
> called her out directly for leaving early so she retorted, "well, you know,
> I gotta pick up the KIDS".
>
> I thought it was a mildly funny exchange at the time, but I hadn't known of
> his reputation for singling out women in the audience and making them
> uncomfortable. I wonder if he would have done the same call out with a male
> professor in the same situation.
>
>
> On Wed, Sep 18, 2019 at 1:55 AM Rich Braun <richb at pioneer.ci.net> wrote:
>
> > I have a fond memory of RMS crashing one of our BLU meetings to hammer at
> > the point that our organization’s name included the word Linux and that
> we
> > should amend it to include the word Gnu. With rumors of his death not
> quite
> > entirely exaggerated—departure from FSF is tantamount to interment, it’s
> > been his whole life—I’d love to hear more RMS stories. -rich
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>
>
> --
> Jack Bennett
> ajbennett at gmail.com
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John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix
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