A different take: Microsoft, Oracle, et. al. waged a war against OSS in the 90s. They went as far as using mental illness as a weapon against the community (equating participation in the commons as an equivalent to mental illness).
It’s not a coincidence the class of human that weathered the storm looks like Stallman, Linus, ESR, et. al. That’s what it took. The toxicity in these communities is a result of what was leftover. These humans grew up amongst OSS activists that also weathered the storm.
They carried the flag when no one else would. Vilifying them now, at a time where Microsoft just purchased the two largest infrastructure/tooling providers for the commons (npm, GitHub) is concerning to me. Without them, the commons wouldn’t be what it is today.
That's a fascinating take, but I don't think it's particularly related to what actually happened. I wasn't toxic because of some Microsoft FUD, I was toxic because I was a teenager with low empathy who hadn't learned things yet. I grew out of it.
Lots of people in open source were never particularly toxic, and there's no reason they should have been. Even granting the existence of the external stress (and it really was NOT that big a deal), not everyone reacts to stress by treating people badly. Furthermore, people who didn't grow up around those OSS advocates have exactly the same problems sometimes, for the same reason that people in every field of human endeavor have those problems sometimes.
>I was toxic because I was a teenager with low empathy who hadn't learned things yet. I grew out of it.
Participation in political mobs can serve as a surrogate replacement for empathy. A change in political allegiance is far easier to enact in an individual than a change in personality.
I think that this is just an attempt at explaining away toxic behavior without taking responsibility for it.
People in the OSS community can, at times, glorify toxic behavior. I know people who take it as a badge of honor to "speak the truth", "speak directly", or "have no filter". Speaking directly and speaking the truth are good ideals to have, but if you really want to PROVE that you speak the truth and don't fear social pressures, what better way to do it than to be rude or insensitive to people?
Take Mr. X, who is outraged by Microsoft's behavior and refuses to buy Microsoft's products, tells other people about his problems with Microsoft, and tells everyone to use FOSS alternatives? Now, Mr. X also thinks that it's stupid to believe in god, and is not afraid to say it to everyone he meets. He's suddenly changed from "FOSS advocate" to "toxic workplace on legs".
This is by no means exclusive to the FOSS community. Think of the product manager who styles himself a Steve Jobs type, who abuses his staff in the style of Steve Jobs. These aren't examples I'm picking out of a hat; these are real people.
That may be but there is something to the OP's point. The big 5 personality test which is the only personality test rally taken seriously in clinical psychology, has an aspect called agreeableness.
Having high or low agreeableness has a tremendous correlation with all kinds of outcomes. It's highly tied to success in corporate, church, and government settings. It's very likely that to be set enough to go against the majority in your field and build an alternative infrastructure in the face of a great deal of obstacles is going to attract a higher amount of diaageeable people. Now if you ask me, it's possible to be quite diaageeable and remain polite but I wouldn't be surprised if these sort of outsider niches often have an abrasive personality edge.
And when the elites start telling you to tilt you moral compass a certain way, you probably start bumping into some oppositional defiant disorder which correlates with low agreeableness.
A similar thing can be seen when substances are prohibited. People who normally would not do a more serious crime begin doing them because their desire for a drug already brings them outside the law.
Obviously finding ways to build alternative communities with a welcoming and conciecous spirit would be a great problem to solve. But I believe we will always bump into this.
So expressing sincerely held beliefs in a personal forum like his own website is in and of itself "toxic"? Many of RMS's beliefs are indeed well outside the mainstream, but as far as I'm aware nobody has ever accused him actually doing anything abusive to anybody.
> People in the OSS community can, at times, glorify toxic behavior.
I wouldn't go so far as to glorify toxic behaviour, but some of what is seen as toxic by some is IMO just frankness or a tactic to bring the conversation back into a realm of technical discussion.
> Take Mr. X, who is outraged by Microsoft's behavior and refuses to buy Microsoft's products, tells other people about his problems with Microsoft, and tells everyone to use FOSS alternatives? Now, Mr. X also thinks that it's stupid to believe in god, and is not afraid to say it to everyone he meets. He's suddenly changed from "FOSS advocate" to "toxic workplace on legs".
What's toxic about this? Two perfectly sensible points of view and you think Mr. X is dangerous to be around?
TBH, I has been participating in open source since the 1990s, and I never seen the actual stigma like you describe. Yes, OSS projects were laughed at, dismissed as hobbyist and unserious, insinuated to be low quality and "worth exactly how much you pay for it" - all that happened all the time. But implying OSS people are mentally ill... maybe somebody did it, but I've never seen it. And I did work with people from Microsoft, Oracle, etc. - albeit from the parts that were more OSS-friendly. But I think if it was indeed that widespread I'd hear about it. RMS certainly had a reputation to be an unusual character - even in OSS circles - but I didn't see it wielded as a weapon agains OSS - at least not until the cancel culture started.
And yes, there were plenty of assholes in OSS (as there were outside) and it was mostly young people, many of whom confused being rude with being honest and direct, but I don't think it had anything to do with either Microsoft or mental illness. It had to do with being young and unexperienced and trying to form a new culture online where none existed before.
Hmm. I think RMS’s anti-establishment push was so much earlier (mostly against Bell Labs, etc.) that “the 90s” don’t really apply.
If anything, it’s just his personality: he takes hardline positions and holds onto them. You might be right about hardliners being the only folks who have enough persistence to come through (vis a vis survivorship bias), but then you’re also just including the leaders of those companies you mentioned: Bill Gates and Larry Ellison were famously combative, competitive, and all sorts of other words.
“What was left” certainly applies. These are predominantly the personality types, and socio-economic groups, that made it through this time period in open source.
On the other hand, following that logic, in times of peace the soldiers of yesteryear are out of work.
I'm not a fan of cancel culture, but it might be just a sign that priorities have changed for people. Maybe the basic software liberties are enough for most, and it's no longer enough to fight for OSS, but instead time to consider "how" to fight for it. In a sense, it could be seen as a victory.
> The toxicity in these communities is a result of what was leftover
Toxicity relative to what? I have worked in a number of places much more toxic than Stallman's GNU project, or Linus's Linux kernel etc.
As has been said before - the difference between open source communities and closed source companies is that open source communities are open - we can see the flamewars on public mailing lists. There are plenty of toxic Jira pull request code review comment threads out there, resulting in lots of meetings with managers over turf wars or whatnot, which the world will never see because it's private.
> They went as far as using mental illness as a weapon against the community (equating participation in the commons as an equivalent to mental illness).
They went as far as fantasizing about associating those who used competing tech with mental deficiency.
Here is the quote from page 55 of the document you cited [0]
> Ideally, use of the competing technology becomes associated with mental deficiency, as in, "he believes in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and OS/2." Just keep rubbing it in, via the press, analysts, newsgroups, whatever. Make the complete failure of the competition's technology part of the mythology of the computer industry. We want to place selection pressure on [people who use the competing tech]...
Do people really need a plan to talk this way though? I remember how Linux, Mac and Windows enthusiasts used to talk about each other in the 90s, early 2000s and even today. Even right here on HN. Is it all Microsoft's fault? I don't think so. This is how people behave, especially online.
In fairness, I overstated. They used “mental deficiency” as a weapon. Equating use of a competing product, the commons, as a sign of mental deficiency. Not necessarily illness.
A different take on your different take: it might not be coincidental that said current wave of villification coincides with large technology corporations (ostensibly) embracing "open source". The causality is unclear - it could be some nefarious attempt by corporate interests to weaponize public sentiment against "obstacles" to said corporate interests, or it could simply be corporate interests becoming more 21w/illing to dip their toes in "open source" as its more fanatical figures get pushed out - but the correlation is plain as day.
What's especially concerning to me is that such an alignment with corporate interests has somehow managed to successfully brand itself as "leftist" here in the US, both among right-wingers and among people who sincerely believe themselves to be advancing leftist causes by aligning with these large corporations against people with fairly strong anticapitalist leanings. Like with the FOSS movement, I strongly suspect that the ownership class is engaging in its own form of EEE against leftism: paying lip-service to it to appear to "embrace" it, while intending to "extend" it with things outright antithetical to workers' rights (like, you know, celebrating when large corporations terminate employees as long as it's for the "right" reasons, or celebrating when workers are prevented from acquiring arms and ammunition) until it's weak and fragmented enough to "extinguish".
We're approaching a new age of wealth consolidation, be that wealth in the form of real estate, money, intellectual property, you name it. A new gilded age, with all the monopolism that entails.
Not much tinfoil: big corporations successfully coopted the Free Software movement into Open Source and finally into unpaid labor for SaaS corporations.
Then, they start banning GPLv3.
Next, the same "Linux is cancer" microsoft now "loves Linux" and buys GitHub.
Who do you think is behind cancel culture? Social justice is like the Anti-Life Equation for bigcorps and other established institutions who are incensed that somewhere nerds are having fun without their official sanction.
My eyes were opened when I heard a podcast in which a prominent cancelista put forth the idea that federated protocols were a Bad Thing because by requiring implementations to be protocol compatible, federated services caused "vendor lock-in" and stifled innovation. I thought, what in the seven hells is this? It's like something a professional propagandist for single-vendor services (think Slack, Salesforce, etc.) might say. Up there with Steve Ballmer declaring the GPL a cancer.
Then the burblings of other open-source SJ types began to make more sense. Coraline Ada Ehmke declaring that the Open Source Definition made sense when the enemy was corporations, but now that the enemy was the fascist Trump administration it needed to change. The implication being that bigcorps were no longer the enemy, even though a hallmark of fascism is a corrupt collusion between the state and industry. "We have always been at war with Eastasia" tier cognitive dissonance. Anyway, open source was intended to protect users' freedom, not to fight a particular enemy.
There was another one, I forgot who, who said something like in order to be "real open source" in $CURRENT_YEAR you can't just put the code out there, You need to have a code of conduct, and a code of conduct enforcement board. He lamented the fact that open source projects did not implement the standard practices used by corporate HR departments. Which, if you need to have an HR department to be legitimate open source then that limits legitimate open source participants to corporations only. I'm counting nonprofits like the Linux Foundation as "corporations" because they require (large amounts of) money, infrastructure, a legal team, and yes, an HR department in order to function. No Linus Torvalds could come along and start a project used by billions in the environment they want to create. It would have to go through the Proper Channels and be certified as anti-racist and free of toxic masculinity by the Proper Authorities. Like many forms of regulatory compliance, it's a filter to ensure only the big players can play, but unlike regulation there isn't even a nominal accountability to the public. Scientology style "dead agenting" tactics will suffice when governments are too slow to act.
I want to believe that SJ in open source is for the greater good, but it looks far too much like a weapon to be wielded by the powerful against the users and developers open source was supposed to protect.
Amen! There doesn't even need to be an explicit motive driving the colonization, rather just an influx of people from the bigcorps who can't imagine a world without the bigcorp authoritarianism they've thrived in.
There is an overwhelming number of them due to the profitability of the surveillance industry. They're focused on source availability rather than software freedom, because that matches the business model of their employers. And their coup is couched in the language of progress, so it's easier to just go along with at first.
I don't know how to push back, except for publishing your own projects such that you can't get doxxed, avoiding middlemen like Github, developing technology that isn't interesting to authoritarians, etc. For the greater landscape, Corporate HR seems here to stay.
Personally, RMS bugs me because he seems to miss the forest for the trees on some things. But this doesn't mean I think the organization RMS founded needs a new leader, rather it means I need to do the work of convincing others where he is wrong. And I'd be lucky if I accomplish one tenth of what RMS has.
> Sarah Mei then went through the board members involved one by one, digging into each of their histories, and tweeting what she viewed as fire-worthy infractions. The crimes included: “being super involved with Wikipedia,” retweeting a “hideous” New York Times editorial, and being friendly with famed democracy activist and law professor Lawrence Lessig. Publicly calling out each board member in turn with a clear implication: associate with a thought criminal and you too could be in jeopardy.
She spends a considerable fraction of her day turning non-issues (such as the term "domain driven design" [1]) into major issues. I really empathize with her coworkers; it must be really difficult to work with a person like this.
> Last night I posted about the term “domain driven design,” frequently abbreviated “DDD” - which is a common large bra measurement in the US, & often part of dirty movie titles.
...wow.
Also, did she just call human sexuality "dirty"? I would have thought that was a cancellable offense these days.
> The fourth @fsf board member is Benjamin Mako Hill - @makoshark - seems super involved with Wikipedia, which is also known as an extremely hostile community towards women.
What a leap! Just make crazy allegations and move on to the next name on the list!
I always post online knowing someone might come digging, but I didn’t realize the bar for extortion-worthy material was this low.
Ironic that even that rant could be characterized as misogynistic in how it dispenses its ire:
One person in the list is a former chair of the Wikimedia board (and wikipedia arbitration committee member), the another is an academic whom among many other things has written some papers on Wikipedia.
Yet it's the second person-- a man-- the author uses "seems super involved with Wikipedia" as a smear against, the first -- a woman-- is ignored.
While I'm sure she welcomed dodging that harassment, it's kind of sad that even when supposedly defending women this speaker seems doesn't take them seriously.
Equality should include equality in being targeted with rediculous smears. :)
Has anyone done any investigations whether she had a profit motive doing what she did? Did she get paid by someone? Did she just do it out of spite to RMS? Or just to get plain attention?
This is how societies work when there's no rule of law (or no respect for it, or insufficient coverage or enforcement of the issue). Things get really ugly really fast.
> Luckily, another co-author on the book has spent a lot of time pondering inclusion, women’s rights, children’s rights, and free speech. Her name is Nadine Strossen and her credentials run deep. She served as the first female President of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), America’s largest and oldest civil liberties nonprofit, from 1991 to 2008. When she stepped down as President, three Supreme Court Justices participated in her farewell luncheon (Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Antonin Scalia, and David Souter). Strossen is a Professor Emeritus at New York Law School and currently an advisor to the EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center), FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), the ACLU, and Heterodox Academy. She is the author of the widely acclaimed books HATE: Why we should fight it with speech not censorship (2018) and Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights (1995). She has far too many awards, publications, and prominent appearances to name.
A credential sheet of PC accolades long enough to whip a horse shouldn't be required to publicly disagree with the ideology of Google and ACLU without being fired.
It shouldn't be, but it surely helps to not be eaten by piranhas immediately. Somebody without this kind of shield - especially somebody, say, having a misfortune of being a male and of European descent - might be. I personally have been told many times that I do not get to have opinion about cancel culture and ideology because of my identity. Having credentials that even PC zealots can't deny surely helps to make it harder to dismiss her.
> I do not get to have opinion about cancel culture and ideology because of my identity
That works both ways, you can ignore them back because they are of a different identity (as they insist) and they are biased against your own identity.
I have already begun to doubt the papers of woke scientists in the last year. If they are not inclusive they are not worth my time. For example a researcher raising scandal on racial bias had a paper where she excluded the Asians, not even a mention. She was only watching for her own and the token whites for baseline. Why should I take her seriously? She's not fighting for my good. It would have been a different story if she was including everyone's good in her agenda.
> I personally have been told many times that I do not get to have opinion about cancel culture and ideology because of my identity.
Yeah, what's up with that? I guess people are supposed to shut up, stop thinking about this stuff and just accept whatever they say as gospel because they are right and just and can do no wrong.
Working with the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is definitely not a “PC allocade”. They are the main organization that tries, from a legal perspective, to protect people from being canceled for their speech at colleges in the US.
Nor is heterodox academy (I'd categorize it as essentially the opposite). She's certainly well credentialed, and worth listening to, but not, at all, because she's "PC".
Yup I recently donated to FIRE as they're an organization that seems more important now than ever. If anyone else is interested go to thefire.org/donate.
We have to stop feeding the trolls. I think someone like Stallman probably made the choice to resign "for the good of the FSF". He probably reasoned, like so many people in this situation, that staying on would be detrimental to the goals of the organization at this point, and he cares more about free software than he does about personally leading it. I think that's admirable, but I think it's wrong-headed.
It may be true in a narrow sense that caving was what was best for the FSF in that moment, but it was bad for the larger world of free software, because of the precedent that it set. It was bad because it fed the trolls. These mobs feed on success. When they see themselves getting people fired, that is incredibly energizing, and that energy points only in one direction: more. Who are we going to cancel today? The trolls are hungry.
Internet communities have been dealing with trolls for decades now, and it is actually a fairly well understood problem. The only way to kill the trolls is to starve them. Don't engage with them, and most of all, do not cave to them. When they see that their tactics aren't working anymore, they'll stop doing it. Unfortunately that may mean a temporary rough period for your organization, if you are the victim of something like this, but it will pass, and it will probably pass more quickly and with less harm than you think.
Now, to be clear, I am not suggesting that organizations ignore serious abuse. If something is reported and your board actually believes a real transgression occurred, it should absolutely be dealt with. But I don't believe that's what happened in the Stallman case. I don't believe for one second that the FSF board wanted him to resign. I think they felt they had no choice, due to mob pressure. And that's the situation in which I implore people to resist. Do not give in to mob pressure that you don't agree with.
My Lord. If Stallman truly is the reason that this Sarah Mei character didn't participate in Open Source for over a decade, I think the best thing we can do as a community is to make as many clones of him as possible.
I wonder if maybe we need age segregated social media sites. I wonder if twitter/facebook/reddit segmented their content so that teenagers and young adults could run amok, without it being visible to the adults on the site - if that would stop companies from taking all this bullying seriously.
Sarah Mei herself isn't a teenager, but looking at the comments that she got, a huge percentage of the people that liked/shared/upvoted are.
Teenagers and young adults amplify irrational voices on social media. We need to give them their own playground.
Well worth reading. Lucid, clear. Didnt make me like Stallman more, but articulated some of the issues well.
On the whole, I think the cancel/trigger thing has got out of hand. People need to be accountable for what they say, not what people believe they think.
Stallman clearly has issues as many have attested. But reading these specific excerpts of his now... they just read like tone-deaf pedantry. Sarah Mei's response to someone else who pointed this out in a leveled, non-confrontational manner, of
> That means you are also racist, misogynist, and a colonial apologist. Nice job
just comes off as needlessly toxic escalation intended to shut down dialogue.
I have several autistic friends and see this sort of interaction now and then. They will state some observation or make an argument rooted in logical pedantry, not pushing any political agenda (or, supporting certain politics but trying to cast it in a more logical framework). Someone takes offense at this and accuses them of being racist/misogynist/whatever. They are hurt. The conversation is not advanced. Both sides lose. Chalk it up to "normies" just... completely not understanding the autistic approach to the world I guess. I wish political activists were less reactive against those who just want to explore -- and ultimately strengthen -- ideas.
I think its because the point is not understanding - the point is gaining power, in this case - power over who leads the OSS movement. If you want to use one's words against them, you do not look for understanding, you look for maximally uncharitable and hurtful meaning possible, and declare this is the only meaning that matters. That's why political activists do it - because it gives them power.
Nadine's point was that people should not be unduly punished for making intellectual arguments for or against anything. "Being punished for what they say" is precisely what happened to Stallman.
No, I don't agree. He was partly punished for what people THOUGHT he had said, and for past transgressions, and in large part for what people were TOLD he had said. Not for what he actually said.
If Nadine means this absolutely, she opens herself up to easy counterpoints in the extreme.
Ex:
What if I work at a hospital and make an intellectual argument in favor of eugenics?
What if I have Jewish coworkers and publish statistics about the percentage of media executives that are Jewish?
In these cases, "punishment" may also just mean that you've made people unwilling to collaborate with you, or you've done something that undermines your neutrality in your work.
When working or living with others, there are still social consequences for things that are intellectually defensible.
> People need to be accountable for what they say, not what people believe they think.
I disagree. What people believe what someone thinks, even if incorrect, is a legitimate basis for someone's choice of free association.
It's entirely legitimate for someone to avoid someone else (including fire them) on the basis of false beliefs about that person, due to failing to spend enough time understanding the nuance of the situation or person.
I would never hire rms, for example, because he is a drama llama, and I find constantly creating controversy (intentionally or otherwise) to be mostly unproductive, even if all of the things he is saying are accurate and correct and true.
Freedom of association does not require fairness or due process. Our time and attention is our own, to allocate unfairly, incorrectly, or on any other unscientific, inaccurate basis we feel is best.
>People need to be accountable for what they say, not what people believe they think.
This sounds like a very Orwellian way of saying people shouldn't be fired for wrong-think if they profusely apologize afterwards. Is that what you mean?
What the poster is saying is that people should be accountable for what they actually say, not what other people assume they must have meant.
It's subtle, but let me try to highlight the difference:
Take as an example, Stallman saying "...it is entirely possible Minsky could have been unaware of the coercive dynamic [between Epstein and the young womem] going on at the time. We'll call this P.
Also take,
"We should wait for the facts and evidence before jumping to conclusions". We'll call this W.
What Stallman said is just " We don't know if P or not P, therefore W".
There's nothing wrong that was said there. People read things though that were not said; i.e. that since Stallman said P, it must mean he thought that the young women must have been voluntarily doing it. (We'll call this V).
Much of the hulabaloo around the time came from people, (and journalists) adding in context that simply wasn't even there, which a quick perusal of CSAIL quickly made evident. Stallman never said it was the case that anyone involved was doing it of their own volition, merely that Minsky may not have picked up on the fact there was coercion going on, because if someone is being coerced, odds are they have been specifically instructed to hide the coersion. The fact is, one presupposes the knowing complicity of an individual by doing otherwise. Stallman cautioned that one should wait for evidence before coming to a hasty judgement.
Communication is hard. One must transmit, and another must receive, and both people be able to demonstrate they took from the exchange a shared understanding of a common arrangement of circumstance and subject, mapping to the same circumstances and subjects in the real world. The clincher though, is that there is so much low stakes communication that goes on in our lives where errors in reception or coding of meaning don't have readily tangible effects that become apparent within a short enough time for people to recognize a miscommunication happened, or that even if they recognize one happened, that it will adversely effect the outcome of the attempt at communication as a whole. As a result, there is a tendency to chronically underestimate the difficulty of communication overall.
>Progressives are right now advocating for the release of criminals, even murderers. To then have exactly the opposite attitude towards something that certainly is not committing physical violence against somebody, I don’t understand the double standard!
Any writeup of this that concentrates on external responses and ignores the strong response from many within the communities that RMS led is failing to tell the complete story. There's no shortage of people extremely familiar with his work and behaviour who felt his continued involvement was inappropriate, but instead we're exposed to story after story about how a group of people pushing a one sided narrative unjustly silenced RMS. Which is ironic, given that they're only presenting one side of the events in question.
I wonder what you are talking about? He got a ton of bad press that no one wanted to be associated with, but when it came down to the communities he leads, they were largely supportive of him. GNU is a collection of programs that publicly ascribe to ethical principles he advocates for and helps define, but when it comes to the actual work of development, they are lead by their individual maintainers, not RMS. A small minority wanted him to step down, largely because they wanted someone who would lead GNU on issues like technical direction and marketing, and they were told new leadership is welcome, there's no need to remove RMS for that, and wanting a leader doesn't make one magically appear and so it didn't go anywhere. He is a maintainer of Emacs, no one there wanted him gone, and he is a leader of a couple people who are called the GNU webmasters, and none who were active wanted him gone.
Nadine doesn't know all that, but the opinion of an outsider who doesn't have personal involvement skewing their views is extremely worthwhile.
This may well be true, but it wasn't the centerpiece of his cancellation. And if it is true, it hasn't been publicly articulated in any coherent way, as far as I can tell. I'm not saying that it isn't the case, it's well known that RMS can be abrasive. But if he was actually forced out for that reason, it seems like someone familiar with it should have written that up in some way.
I've seen a few off-hand accusations that he made women uncomfortable in non-specific ways. I can certainly believe that might be true, and may indicate some greater transgression lurking behind the scenes. But to my knowledge nobody has actually said what that is.
In 2019 I read a statement that within the MIT media labs every women actively avoided him. That is maybe not enough to "cancel" him but speaks a clear message also.
I think RMS' documented behaviour within communities over the years absolutely justified consequences of some sort.
I also think the blatant lying about him by people outside of those communities should have attracted consequences as well, and the fact that it largely didn't makes it annoyingly easier for people to make those stories look plausible.
Readit News
It’s not a coincidence the class of human that weathered the storm looks like Stallman, Linus, ESR, et. al. That’s what it took. The toxicity in these communities is a result of what was leftover. These humans grew up amongst OSS activists that also weathered the storm.
They carried the flag when no one else would. Vilifying them now, at a time where Microsoft just purchased the two largest infrastructure/tooling providers for the commons (npm, GitHub) is concerning to me. Without them, the commons wouldn’t be what it is today.
Lots of people in open source were never particularly toxic, and there's no reason they should have been. Even granting the existence of the external stress (and it really was NOT that big a deal), not everyone reacts to stress by treating people badly. Furthermore, people who didn't grow up around those OSS advocates have exactly the same problems sometimes, for the same reason that people in every field of human endeavor have those problems sometimes.
Participation in political mobs can serve as a surrogate replacement for empathy. A change in political allegiance is far easier to enact in an individual than a change in personality.
(My guess is not much, other than maybe a personal preference on the empathy side?)
[1] https://www.seebs.net/log/post/2011/10/11/why-steve-jobs-did...
People in the OSS community can, at times, glorify toxic behavior. I know people who take it as a badge of honor to "speak the truth", "speak directly", or "have no filter". Speaking directly and speaking the truth are good ideals to have, but if you really want to PROVE that you speak the truth and don't fear social pressures, what better way to do it than to be rude or insensitive to people?
Take Mr. X, who is outraged by Microsoft's behavior and refuses to buy Microsoft's products, tells other people about his problems with Microsoft, and tells everyone to use FOSS alternatives? Now, Mr. X also thinks that it's stupid to believe in god, and is not afraid to say it to everyone he meets. He's suddenly changed from "FOSS advocate" to "toxic workplace on legs".
This is by no means exclusive to the FOSS community. Think of the product manager who styles himself a Steve Jobs type, who abuses his staff in the style of Steve Jobs. These aren't examples I'm picking out of a hat; these are real people.
Having high or low agreeableness has a tremendous correlation with all kinds of outcomes. It's highly tied to success in corporate, church, and government settings. It's very likely that to be set enough to go against the majority in your field and build an alternative infrastructure in the face of a great deal of obstacles is going to attract a higher amount of diaageeable people. Now if you ask me, it's possible to be quite diaageeable and remain polite but I wouldn't be surprised if these sort of outsider niches often have an abrasive personality edge.
And when the elites start telling you to tilt you moral compass a certain way, you probably start bumping into some oppositional defiant disorder which correlates with low agreeableness.
A similar thing can be seen when substances are prohibited. People who normally would not do a more serious crime begin doing them because their desire for a drug already brings them outside the law.
Obviously finding ways to build alternative communities with a welcoming and conciecous spirit would be a great problem to solve. But I believe we will always bump into this.
I wouldn't go so far as to glorify toxic behaviour, but some of what is seen as toxic by some is IMO just frankness or a tactic to bring the conversation back into a realm of technical discussion.
What's toxic about this? Two perfectly sensible points of view and you think Mr. X is dangerous to be around?
And yes, there were plenty of assholes in OSS (as there were outside) and it was mostly young people, many of whom confused being rude with being honest and direct, but I don't think it had anything to do with either Microsoft or mental illness. It had to do with being young and unexperienced and trying to form a new culture online where none existed before.
http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/Comes-3096.pdf
And some nice documentation on patent trolling to make the commons financially unviable, this destroyed lives: http://techrights.org/2007/10/22/lasuit-evolution-linux/
And examples of when they paid folks to go spread a bunch of misinformation about the commons: http://techrights.org/wiki/index.php/AstroTurfing
If anything, it’s just his personality: he takes hardline positions and holds onto them. You might be right about hardliners being the only folks who have enough persistence to come through (vis a vis survivorship bias), but then you’re also just including the leaders of those companies you mentioned: Bill Gates and Larry Ellison were famously combative, competitive, and all sorts of other words.
It isn’t easy being on the receiving end of this: http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/Comes-3096.pdf
I'm not a fan of cancel culture, but it might be just a sign that priorities have changed for people. Maybe the basic software liberties are enough for most, and it's no longer enough to fight for OSS, but instead time to consider "how" to fight for it. In a sense, it could be seen as a victory.
But I see it differently. I feel the wolves are in sheep’s skin, and are trying to convince me the sheep are wolves.
Toxicity relative to what? I have worked in a number of places much more toxic than Stallman's GNU project, or Linus's Linux kernel etc.
As has been said before - the difference between open source communities and closed source companies is that open source communities are open - we can see the flamewars on public mailing lists. There are plenty of toxic Jira pull request code review comment threads out there, resulting in lots of meetings with managers over turf wars or whatnot, which the world will never see because it's private.
They went as far as fantasizing about associating those who used competing tech with mental deficiency.
Here is the quote from page 55 of the document you cited [0]
> Ideally, use of the competing technology becomes associated with mental deficiency, as in, "he believes in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and OS/2." Just keep rubbing it in, via the press, analysts, newsgroups, whatever. Make the complete failure of the competition's technology part of the mythology of the computer industry. We want to place selection pressure on [people who use the competing tech]...
Do people really need a plan to talk this way though? I remember how Linux, Mac and Windows enthusiasts used to talk about each other in the 90s, early 2000s and even today. Even right here on HN. Is it all Microsoft's fault? I don't think so. This is how people behave, especially online.
[0] http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/Comes-3096.pdf
Source document: http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/Comes-3096.pdf
I’ve lost my edit button on the original post so putting the correction here.
What's especially concerning to me is that such an alignment with corporate interests has somehow managed to successfully brand itself as "leftist" here in the US, both among right-wingers and among people who sincerely believe themselves to be advancing leftist causes by aligning with these large corporations against people with fairly strong anticapitalist leanings. Like with the FOSS movement, I strongly suspect that the ownership class is engaging in its own form of EEE against leftism: paying lip-service to it to appear to "embrace" it, while intending to "extend" it with things outright antithetical to workers' rights (like, you know, celebrating when large corporations terminate employees as long as it's for the "right" reasons, or celebrating when workers are prevented from acquiring arms and ammunition) until it's weak and fragmented enough to "extinguish".
We're approaching a new age of wealth consolidation, be that wealth in the form of real estate, money, intellectual property, you name it. A new gilded age, with all the monopolism that entails.
</tinfoil>
Then, they start banning GPLv3.
Next, the same "Linux is cancer" microsoft now "loves Linux" and buys GitHub.
The EEE process is going strong.
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My eyes were opened when I heard a podcast in which a prominent cancelista put forth the idea that federated protocols were a Bad Thing because by requiring implementations to be protocol compatible, federated services caused "vendor lock-in" and stifled innovation. I thought, what in the seven hells is this? It's like something a professional propagandist for single-vendor services (think Slack, Salesforce, etc.) might say. Up there with Steve Ballmer declaring the GPL a cancer.
Then the burblings of other open-source SJ types began to make more sense. Coraline Ada Ehmke declaring that the Open Source Definition made sense when the enemy was corporations, but now that the enemy was the fascist Trump administration it needed to change. The implication being that bigcorps were no longer the enemy, even though a hallmark of fascism is a corrupt collusion between the state and industry. "We have always been at war with Eastasia" tier cognitive dissonance. Anyway, open source was intended to protect users' freedom, not to fight a particular enemy.
There was another one, I forgot who, who said something like in order to be "real open source" in $CURRENT_YEAR you can't just put the code out there, You need to have a code of conduct, and a code of conduct enforcement board. He lamented the fact that open source projects did not implement the standard practices used by corporate HR departments. Which, if you need to have an HR department to be legitimate open source then that limits legitimate open source participants to corporations only. I'm counting nonprofits like the Linux Foundation as "corporations" because they require (large amounts of) money, infrastructure, a legal team, and yes, an HR department in order to function. No Linus Torvalds could come along and start a project used by billions in the environment they want to create. It would have to go through the Proper Channels and be certified as anti-racist and free of toxic masculinity by the Proper Authorities. Like many forms of regulatory compliance, it's a filter to ensure only the big players can play, but unlike regulation there isn't even a nominal accountability to the public. Scientology style "dead agenting" tactics will suffice when governments are too slow to act.
I want to believe that SJ in open source is for the greater good, but it looks far too much like a weapon to be wielded by the powerful against the users and developers open source was supposed to protect.
There is an overwhelming number of them due to the profitability of the surveillance industry. They're focused on source availability rather than software freedom, because that matches the business model of their employers. And their coup is couched in the language of progress, so it's easier to just go along with at first.
I don't know how to push back, except for publishing your own projects such that you can't get doxxed, avoiding middlemen like Github, developing technology that isn't interesting to authoritarians, etc. For the greater landscape, Corporate HR seems here to stay.
Personally, RMS bugs me because he seems to miss the forest for the trees on some things. But this doesn't mean I think the organization RMS founded needs a new leader, rather it means I need to do the work of convincing others where he is wrong. And I'd be lucky if I accomplish one tenth of what RMS has.
Did she really do that? wow
[1]: https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/1073234104311734273
...wow.
Also, did she just call human sexuality "dirty"? I would have thought that was a cancellable offense these days.
> The fourth @fsf board member is Benjamin Mako Hill - @makoshark - seems super involved with Wikipedia, which is also known as an extremely hostile community towards women.
What a leap! Just make crazy allegations and move on to the next name on the list!
I always post online knowing someone might come digging, but I didn’t realize the bar for extortion-worthy material was this low.
One person in the list is a former chair of the Wikimedia board (and wikipedia arbitration committee member), the another is an academic whom among many other things has written some papers on Wikipedia.
Yet it's the second person-- a man-- the author uses "seems super involved with Wikipedia" as a smear against, the first -- a woman-- is ignored.
While I'm sure she welcomed dodging that harassment, it's kind of sad that even when supposedly defending women this speaker seems doesn't take them seriously.
Equality should include equality in being targeted with rediculous smears. :)
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A credential sheet of PC accolades long enough to whip a horse shouldn't be required to publicly disagree with the ideology of Google and ACLU without being fired.
That works both ways, you can ignore them back because they are of a different identity (as they insist) and they are biased against your own identity.
I have already begun to doubt the papers of woke scientists in the last year. If they are not inclusive they are not worth my time. For example a researcher raising scandal on racial bias had a paper where she excluded the Asians, not even a mention. She was only watching for her own and the token whites for baseline. Why should I take her seriously? She's not fighting for my good. It would have been a different story if she was including everyone's good in her agenda.
Yeah, what's up with that? I guess people are supposed to shut up, stop thinking about this stuff and just accept whatever they say as gospel because they are right and just and can do no wrong.
It may be true in a narrow sense that caving was what was best for the FSF in that moment, but it was bad for the larger world of free software, because of the precedent that it set. It was bad because it fed the trolls. These mobs feed on success. When they see themselves getting people fired, that is incredibly energizing, and that energy points only in one direction: more. Who are we going to cancel today? The trolls are hungry.
Internet communities have been dealing with trolls for decades now, and it is actually a fairly well understood problem. The only way to kill the trolls is to starve them. Don't engage with them, and most of all, do not cave to them. When they see that their tactics aren't working anymore, they'll stop doing it. Unfortunately that may mean a temporary rough period for your organization, if you are the victim of something like this, but it will pass, and it will probably pass more quickly and with less harm than you think.
Now, to be clear, I am not suggesting that organizations ignore serious abuse. If something is reported and your board actually believes a real transgression occurred, it should absolutely be dealt with. But I don't believe that's what happened in the Stallman case. I don't believe for one second that the FSF board wanted him to resign. I think they felt they had no choice, due to mob pressure. And that's the situation in which I implore people to resist. Do not give in to mob pressure that you don't agree with.
Sarah Mei herself isn't a teenager, but looking at the comments that she got, a huge percentage of the people that liked/shared/upvoted are.
Teenagers and young adults amplify irrational voices on social media. We need to give them their own playground.
On the whole, I think the cancel/trigger thing has got out of hand. People need to be accountable for what they say, not what people believe they think.
> That means you are also racist, misogynist, and a colonial apologist. Nice job
just comes off as needlessly toxic escalation intended to shut down dialogue.
I have several autistic friends and see this sort of interaction now and then. They will state some observation or make an argument rooted in logical pedantry, not pushing any political agenda (or, supporting certain politics but trying to cast it in a more logical framework). Someone takes offense at this and accuses them of being racist/misogynist/whatever. They are hurt. The conversation is not advanced. Both sides lose. Chalk it up to "normies" just... completely not understanding the autistic approach to the world I guess. I wish political activists were less reactive against those who just want to explore -- and ultimately strengthen -- ideas.
Ex:
What if I work at a hospital and make an intellectual argument in favor of eugenics?
What if I have Jewish coworkers and publish statistics about the percentage of media executives that are Jewish?
In these cases, "punishment" may also just mean that you've made people unwilling to collaborate with you, or you've done something that undermines your neutrality in your work.
When working or living with others, there are still social consequences for things that are intellectually defensible.
I disagree. What people believe what someone thinks, even if incorrect, is a legitimate basis for someone's choice of free association.
It's entirely legitimate for someone to avoid someone else (including fire them) on the basis of false beliefs about that person, due to failing to spend enough time understanding the nuance of the situation or person.
I would never hire rms, for example, because he is a drama llama, and I find constantly creating controversy (intentionally or otherwise) to be mostly unproductive, even if all of the things he is saying are accurate and correct and true.
Freedom of association does not require fairness or due process. Our time and attention is our own, to allocate unfairly, incorrectly, or on any other unscientific, inaccurate basis we feel is best.
This sounds like a very Orwellian way of saying people shouldn't be fired for wrong-think if they profusely apologize afterwards. Is that what you mean?
What the poster is saying is that people should be accountable for what they actually say, not what other people assume they must have meant.
It's subtle, but let me try to highlight the difference:
Take as an example, Stallman saying "...it is entirely possible Minsky could have been unaware of the coercive dynamic [between Epstein and the young womem] going on at the time. We'll call this P.
Also take,
"We should wait for the facts and evidence before jumping to conclusions". We'll call this W.
What Stallman said is just " We don't know if P or not P, therefore W".
There's nothing wrong that was said there. People read things though that were not said; i.e. that since Stallman said P, it must mean he thought that the young women must have been voluntarily doing it. (We'll call this V).
Much of the hulabaloo around the time came from people, (and journalists) adding in context that simply wasn't even there, which a quick perusal of CSAIL quickly made evident. Stallman never said it was the case that anyone involved was doing it of their own volition, merely that Minsky may not have picked up on the fact there was coercion going on, because if someone is being coerced, odds are they have been specifically instructed to hide the coersion. The fact is, one presupposes the knowing complicity of an individual by doing otherwise. Stallman cautioned that one should wait for evidence before coming to a hasty judgement.
Communication is hard. One must transmit, and another must receive, and both people be able to demonstrate they took from the exchange a shared understanding of a common arrangement of circumstance and subject, mapping to the same circumstances and subjects in the real world. The clincher though, is that there is so much low stakes communication that goes on in our lives where errors in reception or coding of meaning don't have readily tangible effects that become apparent within a short enough time for people to recognize a miscommunication happened, or that even if they recognize one happened, that it will adversely effect the outcome of the attempt at communication as a whole. As a result, there is a tendency to chronically underestimate the difficulty of communication overall.
EDITS: wording, punctuation, sentence flow.
I think your wrong-think is a very big stretch from what I said. Can you show me the chain of thinking which took you there please?
Barabbas understood.
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Nadine doesn't know all that, but the opinion of an outsider who doesn't have personal involvement skewing their views is extremely worthwhile.
I've seen a few off-hand accusations that he made women uncomfortable in non-specific ways. I can certainly believe that might be true, and may indicate some greater transgression lurking behind the scenes. But to my knowledge nobody has actually said what that is.
I also think the blatant lying about him by people outside of those communities should have attracted consequences as well, and the fact that it largely didn't makes it annoyingly easier for people to make those stories look plausible.