It sounds like Stallman had quite the impact on you. Is it really so foreign to you that putting someone in a leadership position that can broaden that reach to people who are unlike you might be worth doing?
I only saw him once and I immediately understood how he could lead such a revolution.
It is not about being "like him", he was just some fat old man with a big beard and I remember thinking he probably smells pretty bad. What was broad and inspiring was his vision and leadership as an human.
I am also very fond of Stallman, but we need to recognise that he had as many lovers as he had haters. He may have pushed many outside of the free software movement in fact because of his character.
I still think that the FSF needs a strong character with a clear vision, man or woman, but maybe with less orthodoxy than RMS.
Stallman has historically done pretty poorly at getting people involved in the free software movement. Before someone goes "surely you are talking about women and other underrepresented groups" no I am not talking about them, although that is also important of course. I'm talking about the people who are not hackers, the people who are stuck using Microsoft Office at their job but want to know about better options, the people who want their computer to not suddenly update and sell them ads but couldn't name a single programming language. Stallman has really dropped the ball for those people. I used to think he was quirky and principled too and I value his contributions but when I zoom out I've stopped finding that he's able to campaign for change effectively. Maybe he was qualified in 1980 but in a world where everyone has a phone in their pocket that is not only proprietary but that they can only really interact with as an appliance, perhaps he is not the most qualified person anymore.
Even if Stallman had only given given us Emacs and we ignored everything else he has ever done, he'd still have given us more and brought more people involved in free software than this new crop of MBA/communications degree CEOs that has taken over ever will.
Not really. Without Stallman, there would be no Torvalds.
After Stallman launched the GNU project, the emergence of GNU licensed kernel for x86 architecture was inevitable. It just happened that Linux became that kernel. Had it not, the GNU project folks led by rms would have inevitably made their own.
> After Stallman launched the GNU project, the emergence of GNU licensed kernel for x86 architecture was inevitable. It just happened that Linux became that kernel. Had it not, the GNU project folks led by rms would have inevitably made their own.
I'm not sure this is guaranteed. GNU and the FSF have absolutely provided an enormous amount to the concepts and implementation of OS software. No doubt about it. Without it Linux would not exist, but it doesn't mean that'd have resulted in a widely used GNU alternative.
BUT, GNU/FSF also has a long history of losing focus on coding and spending a lot of time on political and philosophical arguments. I think it more likely BSD may have headed to where linux ended up than GNU. Linux was successful because they moved forwards and arguments were settled relatively quickly (for better and worse), whereas Hurd got stuck in development hell as people argued over how pure the microkernel architecture should be, pushing away people who just wanted things to work - including volunteers. During the crucial period over the 1990s, open source software needed to get things done (kind of like a startup). There are videos out there of people speaking at conferences about their work on Linux, and RMS being in the audience interjecting that it's "GNU/Linux" every time Linux was uttered. Who wants to work in an environment like that?
Even today, people are looking at more and more alternatives to important GNU software because of stagnation or other technical merits. GCC has lately seen alternatives become more common, as an example.
This also ignores the hostility the FSF historically has/had towards the commercial industry. Torvalds largely accepted patches from anybody if the code worked as intended.
Maybe something could have come out, but my gut tells me that people would have gravitated to something else that worked.
But how does this relate to gender? Even if you assume only two genders, why would being a feminine person play any role in their qualifications? That's what the comment was about.
I would imagine because women are under-represented in this field, so naturally we have to weight gender over qualifications. It's just the way things are. I wish it wasn't and qualifications/ability played a 100% part in these decisions.
There are studies about this. A lot. Many of them garbage, because their reference points were garbage (like 2008), or flat out lied, but it's quite clear that even if it matters on C-level jobs, it's miniscule. It was studied a lot because of Norway, and the following countries in Europe. Either it was pure sexism to have a distorted sex distribution, or C-level jobs don't really matter for companies outlook. I don't think that it's the latter. Btw, these studies also show that "experience", and "qualification" were distorted for no good reason.
I don't know what you're trying to say but we weren't talking about companies or countries. We were talking about leadership of a political movement. It's a revolutionary ideology, not a business.
Yes, but that shows that there is no real lack of qualifications by sex, just lack of opportunity. And that’s the best data which you can get today.
Do you have any data which shows that the type of leadership must be so different which affects this? Because if not, then you can infer only one thing from that data, and not what you did.
Nobody said otherwise. Even sexists say the same thing because they can hide behind “sex blindness”, just like with racists and color blindness.
Are you saying that women with that qualification have the same opportunities as men without external intervention? Then why did you even bring up sex, and why I need to show you how to express it?
I value effectiveness in manifesting change in the world. This takes many forms. I think one of the most depressing and myopic views that hackers have is that code rules everything, when in fact social movements live and die upon their accessibility and impact. If you think that laboring in a cave and writing the next Free text editor is going to bring about free software, the reality is that three proprietary editors have already eaten its lunch, the latter two of which are VC backed and soon to require cloud registration, and the last which was written using AI trained on your code that you very carefully structured to be unusable to build non-free software on top of.
You are right, it is not about writing a code. That's the common problem when discussing free software among geeks.
Of course it is about political action, putting pressure, being loud etc.
But now look at the current state of affairs and tell me - how successful were all those orgs, with more professional management, PR people and proper gender representation? We don't need another man or lady in suit, giving generic word-salad speeches, full of currently fashionable words. Those on the other side of the fence have easily can have much more of those.
Women are more than seductresses. This is an apalling line of reasoning. There are a lot of issues to hate in our industry, and you lose all credibility by attempting to tie these issues to women.
If by impact you mean “turn off people from the movement” then sure. I happen to know multiple people who either met or even hosted him, and not a single one of them was impressed. Stallman was a horrible promoter.
> every time one of those foundations announce a "non coding" woman as their new leader, if you read between the lines, it is because they need to be more "ESG"
That might explain why the Scala Center (which oversees the Scala language) has a young political sciences grad as its executive director. She has zero commercial or academic experience in Scala.
