Re: Support RMS

[Alexandre Oliva]

Hi, Deb,

You shouldn't really expect anyone believe any of your far less
over-the-top allegations, after you cried wolf putting your name under
obviously false allegations, should you?  Didn't you think ahead that
you'd be ruining your reputation to the point that even any true
allegations you might have would be harder to believe after that?


Furthermore, what do any of the concerns you raised here have to do with
his being a member of the board of the FSF?  Do you expect that, if he
were to resign from the board, he'd stop leading the movement, or the
GNU project, or no longer be invited to speak at conferences all around
the world?

Even if someone were to take your allegations against the leader of the
FS movement as true based on nothing but the word from an OSI associate,
there's a total disconnect between them and the associated demands and
expectations.

Do you see that disconnect, and how it makes the whole thing come across
as about control over the FSF (and, for some, GNU), and not at all about
good manners in the FS movement?


Of course some people may have been misled, or not understood the
political context, but you?  You've been involved in FLOSS politics for
so long, you did great jobs in public communication, it's just too hard
to believe that you didn't perceive these blatant disconnects, the huge
gap between the allegations you bring up now and those you signed-off on
in the hate letter you helped draft, while knowing them to be false!


Now, you probably know that I've also arranged several of RMS's tours,
had him stay at my place and of several other close people several
times.  I have heard and witnessed some of his weirdnesses.  I have
watched him get angry and ask to be left alone for a bit to put himself
back together, and then getting more angry when people wouldn't leave
him alone.  I have seen him get very upset a number of times, when he
made clear what he needed, and then someone tried to fool him and hoped
he wouldn't notice.  I have seen him at conferences, wanting to be left
alone to work, and being constantly interrupted (harassed?) by a stream
of requests for pictures and autographs, to the point of his nearly
losing his temper.

I have witnessed his staring habit about 25 years ago, I heard from
friends who advised him about it and confirmed he'd succeeded in his
effort to leave it behind 15 to 20 years ago, but instead of
complimenting him for the effort and the success, you still hold on to
it after all these years.

I've witnessed him give a pleasure card to a state minister's wife, who
was lead organizer of the conference in which it happened.  He had
handed them out to others, of all genders, before and after.  Some
people find that as suspicious as having a mattress in his office.  Most
others find tender embraces and sleeping on a mattress perfectly normal,
inoffensive human behavior.


Now, you know what has never happened to me?  Get a complaint from
someone at any of the events I co-organized or attended, about his
asking someone on a date.  Not once, in 16 years of close and relatively
frequent face-to-face interactions with him, and even more with others
who had been in his presence.  It doesn't mean he hasn't asked people on
dates, just that he wasn't impolite or inappropriate at it.

I have heard complaints about other matters that are a lot less
important, such as how often he showered, his noisy chewing, how much
embarrassment he caused by explaining what an operating system was, to
the person who asked a question using the phrase "Linux operating
system", and to studends to whom the person taught operating systems.


I have also read about people who took, and some who pretended to take
offense at him after hearing or reading about misrepresentations or
inventions of things he supposedly did, and those misrepresentations and
inventions be taken completely out of proportion, and then be cited over
and over as true, as if he'd really done something horrible.

Like interrupting someone during a speech, or saying that the conference
rules that stated that a room had to be vacated for the next speech did
not apply because the room was not going to be used in the next slot.
Like taking issue at the term "emacs virgin", but not at Virgin Mary,
that inspired the joke, that's just as gendered and just as inoffensive.
Like saying he defended serial rapist Epstein when he opposed accusation
inflation against Minsky who turned out to be innocent.  Like when a
hate letter falsely labeled him sexist, paedophile, eugenist, and
transphobe, over things he wrote that required a lot of twisting and ill
intent to turn into those false narratives.  Like when a joint letter
labeled him unsuited to lead the movement he founded and brought from
the ground up.  Like when people got vindictive that the FSF still
wanted to listen to him, and started threatening to leave the GNU
project that he never stopped leading if that wouldn't be reversed.  How
does it even affect GNU?  the FSF never changed its support for GNU!)


I believe there are some people who believe the allegations against him,
and get angry at what's attributed to him, and then set out to overthrow
Stallman, rather than the ugly strawman that was painted of him.

I also believe some people have legitimate gripes with him, and the
legitimate and true ones are even smaller than the ones you painted with
the hearsay you presented, and with the twisted versions you told of a
tiny collection of true stories.


It still find myself wondering why, if your hearsay had any truth
whatsoever in it, no such thing has ever been told me by someone to whom
it happened.

One hypothesis that occurs to me is that you're just doing your current
job.  I don't like this one, and I'd like to think you wouldn't go so
low, but after you went as low as co-drafting and undersigning that hate
letter full of lies and misrepresentations, I don't know what else to
expect from you.

Another is that people may have lied to you in the presumably few
reports you got.  RMS bashing as a means to distance people from his
ideas is no news to me.  It was practiced with the determination you'd
expect of olympic athletes at the job I held for nearly two decades.

Now, considering that Mr Torvalds is always accompanied by LF
representatives at conferences, to avoid false accusations of sexual
harassment, and that he's a lot less of a threat to the business models
of the companies with the greatest capitalizations in the stock market,
mostly owned by many of the richest individual centi-billionaires (sp?)
in the world, whose ethics are knowingly on par with those of Epstein,
who was friends with several of them...  Why wouldn't RMS be a target of
even more lies?


That news about his return to the FSF gets negative coverage all over
the sold-out tech press, highlighting the hate letter but giving no
attention whatsoever to the far more popular support letter, suggests
some concerted tech media campaigning (not driven by any of us, I'm
sure; probably by some of the same corporate interests who've otherwise
supported the hate letter).  It's not just that nobody would report on a
person and an organization to highlight their supposed irrelevance.
Such reporting of irrelevance happened a lot to former president Lula
too, while he was persecuted over false accusations, and when his
persecutors were unmasked.  It's that even the ugly reports about RMS
that started around mid Sept 2019 would unanimously associate him with
Free Software, when we all know that the press, left to its own devices,
will report him as father of Open Source, even after he asks reporters
and editors promise they won't do that to him.  Would you dare claim
with a straight face that it's a coincidence?


With all of this taken together, including so many other known-false
allegations, even some undersigned by you, it's not unreasonable to
expect that RMS could also be a target of false allegations of sexual
misconduct.  He's generally not accompanied during conferences, so it's
not hard at all for someone to be paid to report something that never
happened, or to invent or exaggerate or twist a story and pass it on.
And you know what?  That's quite in line with such things never being
reported at conferences that I attend with him.  It wouldn't be just one
person's word against his: I'd be there, witnessing the attempt, and
contradicting the false report.


-- 
Alexandre Oliva, happy hacker  https://FSFLA.org/blogs/lxo/
   Free Software Activist         GNU Toolchain Engineer
        Vim, Vi, Voltei pro Emacs -- GNUlius Caesar