> Free and open source software movements have no shortage of problematic unempathetic leaders
True of democracy, True in the business-world, True in religion, True in philosophy... People are not code, so open source can define a licence but when people are interacting with each other, there will always be problematic people.
Laurence Lessig called it back in Code 2.0: four elements that regulate behavior online: Laws, norms, markets, and technology
- Code/architecture – the physical or technical constraints on activities (e.g. locks on doors or firewalls on the Internet)
- Market – economic forces
- Law – explicit mandates that can be enforced by the government
- Norms – social conventions that one often feels compelled to follow
My take is that licenses are only one of many factors that are important. If something is illegal but the norm is to do it anyway (speeding) or if you’re rich enough to pay any speeding fine (markets) and have monster truck shocks to ignore speed bumps (architecture) then nothing will slow you down.
It would help the author's point if he could name, say, three such leaders of high influence.
We can easily observe that closed source, proprietary software has no shortage of problematic, unempathetic managers and executives right through the CEO level.
This is tech; we have autists and Asperger's cases left and right.
But if you actually consult any random writing or speaking of either of them, go to any random spot and read or watch for 30 seconds, you will find nothing but arguments based on empathy.
So they did name examples, but the examples do not support the authors assertion.
Raymond was never an actual project leader in Open Source, unlike Stallman. He wrote some things that influenced some of the narrative, like The Cathedral and the Bazaar and the The {New,}Hacker's Dictionary.
I read ESR’s jargon files as a teenager and was very inspired. It wasn’t until a week ago that I learned about the original hacker’s dictionary via the Scheme community. Interestingly, the preserved copy comes with this preamble addressing ESR’s copy:
[This file, jargon.txt, was maintained on MIT-AI for many years, before being published by Guy Steele and others as the Hacker's Dictionary. Many years after the original book went out of print, Eric Raymond picked it up, updated it and republished it as the New Hacker's Dictionary. Unfortunately, in the process, he essentially destroyed what held it together, in various ways: first, by changing its emphasis from Lisp-based to UNIX-based (blithely ignoring the distinctly anti-UNIX aspects of the LISP culture celebrated in the original); second, by watering down what was otherwise the fairly undiluted record of a single cultural group through this kind of mixing; and third, by adding in all sorts of terms which are "jargon" only in the sense that they're technical. This page, however, is pretty much the original, snarfed from MIT-AI around 1988. -- jpd.]
Mentioning Stallman as example of empathy is quite controversial. I would say empathy is actually what he always lacked the most.
He wrote things like 14 years old girls should be free to have sex with men like him. How is that empathetic? It actually shows his absolute disconnect
I was gonna dig up the quote but found something even worse
>The Daily Beast first reported that Stallman wrote in 2003, "I think that everyone age 14 or above ought to take part in sex, though not indiscriminately. (Some people are ready earlier.)" In 2006, he wrote, "I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily [sic] pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing."
I actually think this is a perfect example of lacking empathy. Stallman is a great developer, but can’t seem to wrap his head around the way such relationships can be immensely traumatic for a person, even if they think they agree to it as a kid.
That remark is probably caused by a lack of empathy, but not in the way I assume you think.
I think those remarks were unwise, because he should understand how they will be heard by a lot of people.
Empathy is imagining yourself in someone else's position, not necessarily to hold or agree with or approve of that position, but to understand that position.
It's an example of employing the facility of empathy to understand why a killer killed for instance. Until you put yourself in their positon, you don't know if it was a murder or self defense. You actually had to empathise with a murderer simply to interpret the act and decide that it was murder.
You never had to like or agree with them, but you had to understand them.
So it requires a capacity for empathy to imagine how a lot of people will interpret statements like those, in the context he wrote them. I would say the statements themselves are not automatically wrong, but the context is that he is both a public figure with a lot of people that don't like him because his positions hurt their ability to abuse everyone else, and so everything he says anywhere will be used for all it's worth (and statements like that are worth a lot), and he is not a clinical human sexuality researcher or doctor etc just talking to other doctors in some research paper.
I think he's perfectly allowed to have those opinions internally and that he is not any sort of danger to kids or women because of it, and with him doing no harm to others there is no justification for harming him.
But he should have known where & when it's sensible to say such things.
And maybe he did. It's possible he employed a fully working empathic facility to imagine how a lot of people would hear that, and did it anyway because he just wanted to say it and accept what comes. I myself had to make that choice to write this comment.
But it does seem more likely a failure of empathy to fail to predict what people will make of someone in his position (not a doctor, in that field, speaking purely clinically, only to other doctors in that same field) saying anything even remotely like that at all. It's either that or stupid and he's not stupid.
Yeah, but I think it's also a failure of .. "us" to not be savvy enough to understand, and perhaps defend, someone who was outrageously ahead of everything in thinking about software the way he did.
Others may be too young for this, but I can personally remember reading his stuff a long time ago and thinking "This Stallman guy is delusionally paranoid; it would be too FAR complex and difficult and anti-consumer for us to end up in a situation where, e.g. a company would have more control over the computer in front of us than we do, you could just delete their software, or copy your files to another computer. What a weirdo."
Probably one of the worst articles I've read on the subject.
It would be fine if the focus of the article were openly merely "what exactly do the words 'Open-Source' mean and how does it compare to other concepts like 'Free Software,'" but by going bigger, I think the author just about misses everything.
The hit-job on Stallman doesn't help either; love or hate his problematic statements, author does everyone a disservice by not noticing how profound his ideas on software are.
> AT&T licensed it free of charge to academic and government users in the seventies — until everyone was locked in.
More nuance: firstly, there is a story, which may be urban legend, that Thompson and Ritchie secretly gave source code to user groups, by leaving tapes in a predetermined outdoors location to be picked up.
That set aside, AT&T was operating under a some kind of consent decree from 1956 which prevented them from entering the computer business. Which means that Unix couldn't be sold as a product. This is why they distributed it for just cost.
When they got out of that decree, that's when they started to view Unix as a business asset.
> While he kicked off the movement, Richard Stallman himself has proven to be a controversial figure. He left the Free Software Foundation in 2019 after he made some controversial statements about the Epstein scandal that followed his own pattern of unpleasant behavior.
Am I off the mark in thinking that this really doesn't belong here and detracts from the article?
> Free and open source software movements have no shortage of problematic unempathetic leaders
True of democracy, True in the business-world, True in religion, True in philosophy... People are not code, so open source can define a licence but when people are interacting with each other, there will always be problematic people.
Laurence Lessig called it back in Code 2.0: four elements that regulate behavior online: Laws, norms, markets, and technology
- Code/architecture – the physical or technical constraints on activities (e.g. locks on doors or firewalls on the Internet)
- Market – economic forces
- Law – explicit mandates that can be enforced by the government
- Norms – social conventions that one often feels compelled to follow
My take is that licenses are only one of many factors that are important. If something is illegal but the norm is to do it anyway (speeding) or if you’re rich enough to pay any speeding fine (markets) and have monster truck shocks to ignore speed bumps (architecture) then nothing will slow you down.
It would help the author's point if he could name, say, three such leaders of high influence.
We can easily observe that closed source, proprietary software has no shortage of problematic, unempathetic managers and executives right through the CEO level.
This is tech; we have autists and Asperger's cases left and right.
They did name at leat 2, Stallman & Raymond.
But if you actually consult any random writing or speaking of either of them, go to any random spot and read or watch for 30 seconds, you will find nothing but arguments based on empathy.
So they did name examples, but the examples do not support the authors assertion.
Raymond was never an actual project leader in Open Source, unlike Stallman. He wrote some things that influenced some of the narrative, like The Cathedral and the Bazaar and the The {New,}Hacker's Dictionary.
I read ESR’s jargon files as a teenager and was very inspired. It wasn’t until a week ago that I learned about the original hacker’s dictionary via the Scheme community. Interestingly, the preserved copy comes with this preamble addressing ESR’s copy:
[This file, jargon.txt, was maintained on MIT-AI for many years, before being published by Guy Steele and others as the Hacker's Dictionary. Many years after the original book went out of print, Eric Raymond picked it up, updated it and republished it as the New Hacker's Dictionary. Unfortunately, in the process, he essentially destroyed what held it together, in various ways: first, by changing its emphasis from Lisp-based to UNIX-based (blithely ignoring the distinctly anti-UNIX aspects of the LISP culture celebrated in the original); second, by watering down what was otherwise the fairly undiluted record of a single cultural group through this kind of mixing; and third, by adding in all sorts of terms which are "jargon" only in the sense that they're technical. This page, however, is pretty much the original, snarfed from MIT-AI around 1988. -- jpd.]
https://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html
At least he assured everyone that Lisp was worth knowing for some vague enlightenment it would bring ... just, you know, not worth actually using.
Mentioning Stallman as example of empathy is quite controversial. I would say empathy is actually what he always lacked the most.
He wrote things like 14 years old girls should be free to have sex with men like him. How is that empathetic? It actually shows his absolute disconnect
No, the word in the article is "unempathetic".
They are responding to me not the article. Their comment is logical. (I don't agree with it, but they did read and comprehend everything correctly)
Practically every word of every speech and article by either of the two highlighted examples Stallman or Raymond are based on empathy.
Author appears to have their own problematic relationship with empathy.
Wait the one about epstein?
What about it?
I was gonna dig up the quote but found something even worse
>The Daily Beast first reported that Stallman wrote in 2003, "I think that everyone age 14 or above ought to take part in sex, though not indiscriminately. (Some people are ready earlier.)" In 2006, he wrote, "I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily [sic] pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing."
I actually think this is a perfect example of lacking empathy. Stallman is a great developer, but can’t seem to wrap his head around the way such relationships can be immensely traumatic for a person, even if they think they agree to it as a kid.
That remark is probably caused by a lack of empathy, but not in the way I assume you think.
I think those remarks were unwise, because he should understand how they will be heard by a lot of people.
Empathy is imagining yourself in someone else's position, not necessarily to hold or agree with or approve of that position, but to understand that position.
It's an example of employing the facility of empathy to understand why a killer killed for instance. Until you put yourself in their positon, you don't know if it was a murder or self defense. You actually had to empathise with a murderer simply to interpret the act and decide that it was murder.
You never had to like or agree with them, but you had to understand them.
So it requires a capacity for empathy to imagine how a lot of people will interpret statements like those, in the context he wrote them. I would say the statements themselves are not automatically wrong, but the context is that he is both a public figure with a lot of people that don't like him because his positions hurt their ability to abuse everyone else, and so everything he says anywhere will be used for all it's worth (and statements like that are worth a lot), and he is not a clinical human sexuality researcher or doctor etc just talking to other doctors in some research paper.
I think he's perfectly allowed to have those opinions internally and that he is not any sort of danger to kids or women because of it, and with him doing no harm to others there is no justification for harming him.
But he should have known where & when it's sensible to say such things.
And maybe he did. It's possible he employed a fully working empathic facility to imagine how a lot of people would hear that, and did it anyway because he just wanted to say it and accept what comes. I myself had to make that choice to write this comment.
But it does seem more likely a failure of empathy to fail to predict what people will make of someone in his position (not a doctor, in that field, speaking purely clinically, only to other doctors in that same field) saying anything even remotely like that at all. It's either that or stupid and he's not stupid.
Yeah, but I think it's also a failure of .. "us" to not be savvy enough to understand, and perhaps defend, someone who was outrageously ahead of everything in thinking about software the way he did.
Others may be too young for this, but I can personally remember reading his stuff a long time ago and thinking "This Stallman guy is delusionally paranoid; it would be too FAR complex and difficult and anti-consumer for us to end up in a situation where, e.g. a company would have more control over the computer in front of us than we do, you could just delete their software, or copy your files to another computer. What a weirdo."
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Probably one of the worst articles I've read on the subject.
It would be fine if the focus of the article were openly merely "what exactly do the words 'Open-Source' mean and how does it compare to other concepts like 'Free Software,'" but by going bigger, I think the author just about misses everything.
The hit-job on Stallman doesn't help either; love or hate his problematic statements, author does everyone a disservice by not noticing how profound his ideas on software are.
> AT&T licensed it free of charge to academic and government users in the seventies — until everyone was locked in.
More nuance: firstly, there is a story, which may be urban legend, that Thompson and Ritchie secretly gave source code to user groups, by leaving tapes in a predetermined outdoors location to be picked up.
That set aside, AT&T was operating under a some kind of consent decree from 1956 which prevented them from entering the computer business. Which means that Unix couldn't be sold as a product. This is why they distributed it for just cost.
When they got out of that decree, that's when they started to view Unix as a business asset.
> While he kicked off the movement, Richard Stallman himself has proven to be a controversial figure. He left the Free Software Foundation in 2019 after he made some controversial statements about the Epstein scandal that followed his own pattern of unpleasant behavior.
Am I off the mark in thinking that this really doesn't belong here and detracts from the article?
You're 100% correct; but it's lately been really fashionable to pile on Stallman on this.
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