Imaging where the world would be if Firefox, when it came out, went deep on the Iraq war? Or if RMS got involved in, I don't know, the Lewinsky affair in the 1990s, and made it a core part of the FSF?
We'd all be using WinXP SE and IE6.
"The personal is political" is a truly toxic idea that's been corroding nice things since it's inception.
the reason we have linux is because a bunch of geeks took a stand. i understand that you can't fight every battle, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't fight any battles.
you're making a rationalization because taking a stand is usually inconvenient, and you don't want to be inconvenienced by anything.
Supposing you know someone's motivation as if you have access to their psyche is a very unproductive way to participate in a discussion.
The reason we have a Linux is because a bunch of geeks took a stand on an issue they cared about and _focused on_. We wouldn't have Linux if the project also took on matters like teenage pregnancy, surveillance, and gerrymandering.
Yet those same Linux geeks have now decided not to take a "stand" against AI, but rather embrace it. Twenty years ago when the Afghanistan and Iraqi wars raged on, did they oppose working with the military contractors at Red Hat or the NSA? No, they focused on the mission.
RMS headed a political organization, and kept his political campaigning to things directly related to the politics that his organization represented.
The people who were angry at RMS's "politics" were always actually mad at the concept of Free Software in general, and the fact that RMS thinks that software that is not Free is bad software (and does not think you are an exception.) He wasn't banging on about trans rights or Muslamic invasions, but people being enslaved by machines run by the powerful.
Doesn't mean that he didn't have opinions, he just knew why people cared what he thought. When he ventured a bad (but common) opinion about sleeping with teenagers, it opened a hole that his enemies drove a truck through. It's also notable that he did this to defend his friend Minsky; people often compromise their professionalism over personal relationships and interests.
Strong agree. He has millions of opinions, all nicely catalogued on his personal website. He even has an RSS feed: https://stallman.org/rss/rss.xml if you're keen to know what he thinks about this or that US politics issue.
But he didn't abuse his control of the FSF to pursue his own politics, he kept the organisation strictly focused on software freedom. It's at risk of being completely irrelevant if tries to expand beyond its niche of software freedom.
The ethics of AI, code generation, and hosted software would be within the FSF's remit, though I think the policies of any specific code hosting site wouldn't be.
The point is that he did not even try to link his view about sex and age of consent into anything to do with open source.
I have not read much of what he said about it, but he recently said that it is absurd that variations in the age of consent means something can be rape in one country but completely legal in another (e.g. US vs UK vs Italy).
He also earlier claimed that that minors could consent to sex and not be harmed. While I loathe that claim, it does not seem right that many other people who made the same claim (a number of British politicians and civil rights activists have endorsed, as have similar people in other countries) it seems odd that the latter get away with it and Stallman does not. I think its the people in positions of power (e.g. politicians) who most need to resign (permanently!) for having held those views.
The politicians and other people with power to make things worse are those who correspond to Hitler in your analogy. Stallman is more like a random ex-Nazi (he no longer holds those views) so like a huge chunk of the postwar German population.
No, I mean that voicing opinions in specialist spaces is rarely seen as bothersome when they uphold the status quo, but the minute they don't they're "making it political"
There's nothing to prove when you posit your responsibility is limitless.
Codeberg is in Germany yet I don't see them taking a stance in the Russian war in Ukraine, which they helped finance by building their economy on cheap Russian oil and gas. I guess by ops logic that means codeberg is in favor of Russian aggression.
Again, Codeberg is not involved in anything related to Russian war in Ukraine, and is not responsible for Germany building their economy on cheap Russian oil and gas, so they could not possibly be assumed to be in favor of Russian agression unless they made a statement towards this.
Yet,
> I don't see them taking a stance in the Russian war in Ukraine
that's because you didn't bother to check, you just assumed they didn't.
But do people look at installing a formulae in brew and wonder "what's their position on Uyghur oppression in Western China?" Like, wow, jxl is pretty neat, but they don't have a position on Palestine so I don't know if I should leverage the JPEG XL format?
Well if I had to install something and knew their authors were in favor of genocides, I would look elsewhere.
> they don't have a position on Palestine so I don't know if I should leverage the JPEG XL format?
This is a strawman. You go from "they are in favor of something horrible, should I use them?" to "they haven't expressed a position on stuff, should I use them?".
We'd all be using WinXP SE and IE6.
"The personal is political" is a truly toxic idea that's been corroding nice things since it's inception.