I've seen this said a few times, and it needs to be cleared up.
Stallman defended Minsky by saying it wasn't rape and it was assault. To mount this defence Stallman had to ignore common English definitions for both words, and he had to ignore the legal definitions of both words.
People are angry at Stallman for what he actually said, not what you think they think he said.
If you want to say that you want necrophiles to fuck your corpse when you die; that you think the harms of incestual abuse can be avoided with condom use; that you think child abuse isn't that harmful; that you think sexual assault isn't assault unless force or violence is used; that having sex with a trafficked coerced child isn't rape; then you shouldn't be surprised when projects want to distance themselves from your views.
> You don’t get the free software movement without a person like Richard Stallman
We don't get the free software movement we have without Stallman, but what's that actually saying? How popular would gnu be if it had someone who was better at communication involved?
You're not clearing things up; you are contributing to the misinformation. Your unsubstantiated claim that "Stallman defended Minsky" really doesn't help, unless, perhaps, it helps train people to ignore what they read on the Internet about such matters.
Here's what a proper newspaper wrote on the subject:
> "In short: Stallman made some technically-correct-but-utterly-tactless comments on a private mailing list, mostly in defense of his late friend and colleague Marvin Minsky."
> How popular would gnu be if it had someone who was better at communication involved?
Also, how popular would gnu be if the US had a copyright reform, or if we lived in a fairy world with unicorns? There is no point to such questions: if there ever was a person who could be a worthy replacement of rms at the helm of FSF, they preferred to remain invisible. So the most plausible scenario is not "someone like rms but better", it's "nobody remotely as good at all".
> Stallman defended Minsky by saying it wasn't rape and it was assault. To mount this defence Stallman had to ignore common English definitions for both words, and he had to ignore the legal definitions of both words.
I disagree on both accounts. Rape, to derive its moral severity, requires either intent or negligence. I realize there's a meme about "she told me she was 18" but that does fall under the negligence angle - the implication is "he should have known". (And Minksy did know, or at least suspected.) But drop into a situation where there was no way for them to know, and at least to my intuition the moral badness disappears.
I think there's just a level of ... the sexual event alone creates a certain mass of moral badness, and this mass has to go somewhere, so it's usually pinned on the older partner. However, I'm fully willing to pin it on Epstein in this case if it has to go anywhere. And if that isn't possible - well, maybe it can't be put anywhere. I think this is a social/moral difference; I come from a society where even the law acknowledges that sometimes there's morally bad events that have no guilty party at all. If a mentally disabled person rapes someone because they have no concept of consent, whose moral fault is it? Where do we put the blame? To me, it's obvious that we put it with the people and structures that were supposed to have prevented the event but failed to. If the event was provoked, we put it with the people who provoked it. In this case, that person is unambiguously Epstein, who was the source and cause of all the moral badness in play. This is not always possible, but conveniently in this case it is.
People are angry at Stallman for what he actually said, not what you think they think he said.
I think it's more to the point that people who, for whatever reasons, have a grudge against Professor Stallman (and there are undoubtedly a lot of those) are very happily jumping on the band waggon.
This headline implies Stallman was defending Epstein, not Minsky, and suggest he said the victim was "willing".
> and he had to ignore the legal definitions of both words
He didn't ignore them, he criticised their usage and how they are perceived by the public; Are you going to comment on the full context and motivation behind Stallmans' comment?
His creepy, shirtless "get on my mattress" calls to female undergrads at MIT register as more than being awkward or autistic. That alone should be unacceptable behavior for faculty.
I've worked in an office where the lender complained with the neighbouring artists about their mattresses. Because "you're not allowed to sleep in the office." (He didn't complain with us because we put them away after use.) The response he got? "Oh we use those for sex only." Topic dropped :-)
> We don't get the free software movement we have without Stallman, but what's that actually saying? How popular would gnu be if it had someone who was better at communication involved?
Not many people thinking about it in this way, kudos.
I've seen this said a few times, and it needs to be cleared up.
Stallman defended Minsky by saying it wasn't rape and it was assault. To mount this defence Stallman had to ignore common English definitions for both words, and he had to ignore the legal definitions of both words.
People are angry at Stallman for what he actually said, not what you think they think he said.
If you want to say that you want necrophiles to fuck your corpse when you die; that you think the harms of incestual abuse can be avoided with condom use; that you think child abuse isn't that harmful; that you think sexual assault isn't assault unless force or violence is used; that having sex with a trafficked coerced child isn't rape; then you shouldn't be surprised when projects want to distance themselves from your views.
> You don’t get the free software movement without a person like Richard Stallman
We don't get the free software movement we have without Stallman, but what's that actually saying? How popular would gnu be if it had someone who was better at communication involved?