[GTALUG] Surveillance Capitalism [was another thread]

[Dhaval Giani]

Russell,

My assumption here is you are here in good faith as opposed to one of
those "white men are being persecuted" crowd. If you are the latter,
please let me know, I will send all future emails from you to
/dev/null.

On Fri, Apr 2, 2021 at 2:27 PM Russell Reiter <rreiter91 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Apr 2, 2021, 4:38 PM Dhaval Giani, <dhaval.giani at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> >
>> >> are all aware of. Many women were uncomfortable around RMS and avoided
>> >> him. Many refused to participate in our community because of
>> >> interactions with him. Do you think RMS is more important than a
>> >> community of developers he is pushing away?
>> >
>> >
>> > See all the stuff you say we are all aware in this message is just rumors and innuendo to me.
>> >
>>
>> Wait, so all these women saying those words are rumours and innuendo?
>
>
> You know what, thats exactly what innuendo is, saying "all these women" without even a link to a personal quote from them, not a one.
>
>> You choose to disbelieve them? After a pattern of behaviour that
>> multiple people have confirmed and talked about?
>
>
> I can't disbelieve that which I can find no record of. What multiple people are you talking about?
>
> What I can do is check some facts, to the best of my abilities. This link I came across in my opinion has a more balanced view than yours.

"In your opinion". In the opinion of many others, an apologist. If it
was a balanced article, why is there no link to the other petition?

>
> https://sterling-archermedes.github.io/
>

https://selamjie.medium.com/remove-richard-stallman-appendix-a-a7e41e784f88
- She has listed multiple (anonymous for obvious reasons) women who
are willing to talk about the toxic environment. It doesn't even begin
to count the numbers who are not, and would just wish it could go
away.

>>
>> > What are not rumors and innuendo are the historical facts on IBM, their influence, their power and powerful friends and most importantly their big ball of money which they spend on influenceing the influencers.
>> >
>> >>
>> >> I want to explicitly state this. RMS is a major reason free software
>> >> is where it is. RMS's contributions to free software are gigantic.
>> >> However, RMS cannot be a leader of our community if he continues to
>> >> isolate a significant population of prospective developers. RMS the
>> >> contributor - YES. RMS the leader - NO.
>> >>
>> >> RMS cannot be the poster child of our community if it is going to be
>> >> relevant in the future.
>> >
>> >
>> > This is where being the willing poster child of a charitable institution, used to raise funds, diverges from the science of truth and innovation.
>> >
>> > In the legal science of truth, a person is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. However, media and the media barons in conteol, crucify persons and their personas daily, just to make a buck.
>> >
>>
>> And no one has charged RMS with a crime. All we are saying is, he is
>> not representative of a majority of us, and we don't want him to
>> represent us. Some of us are minorities who have heard racist
>> statements being made by prominent folks in the community and have
>> made us feel our contributions are not valued. It is not hard to
>> believe after that experience that other prominent folks can be
>> sexist. RMS has not stepped up and owned up to his actions and
>> apologized. I have no problem with people growing. We all make
>> mistakes. But doubling down like this, well I don't want to be a part
>> of that community. And the reality is, there are tons of "other"
>> people who will not join in and we will never know. So yes, if the
>> choice is between thousands of those people, having a diverse
>> community, growing and being relevant to the world, I would rather RMS
>> step down than us lose this community. And I would rather you leave
>> the community if you think being more welcoming to other voices is not
>> important. We don't need your contributions at the risk of alienating
>> many more people.
>
>
> Wow that last paragraph was a completely off the wall projection of negative personal attributes towards RMS without a shred of evidence. I wasnt aware that Stallman was a deemed racist by association.
>

Stop for a moment. I said, knowing enough prominent folks who have
made racist statements, it is not hard for me to believe RMS could
have made sexist statements.

> Its bad enough that someone on this list deemed him to be an incel. Just type incel into google and you can see the links to terrorisim.
>

And I believe a number of us called him out on that.

Russell, I made a good faith attempt to search for your contributions
to foss projects.  I have been unable to find anything. If you look at
https://rms-support-letter.github.io/ , that seems to fit the profile
of most signatories in there. https://rms-open-letter.github.io/ on
the other hand has prominent FOSS organizations, as well as a number
of prominent developers, many of whom I recognize.

I fail to understand why you believe that RMS is more important than
countless women we are losing.

I have been contributing to the Linux kernel for over 14 years now. I
have been through the times (and this was supposed to be better than
the time before I started) when it was absolutely expected to have a
thick skin, and flame wars were quite common. That was a terrible
environment. Many people burned out and left. A big part of my role
today is to mentor new developers (to Linux kernel) into the open
source project. One of the common questions I have to answer is why do
we need to work in this toxic environment (and this is better than the
time I started working in). These are all men. It is impossible to
hire women because they (rightly) don't want to deal with the
toxicity. It is not a made up toxicity. I have been to top
conferences, talking with women friends of mine, who are then being
hit on, right in front of me. AT A PROFESSIONAL EVENT!

I cannot speak for women, I am not one. I can however speak to
racialized events. There was one on this very mailing list not too
long ago. There have been enough times I have been spoken over by
other folks not because I was wrong, but because they believed I had
no clue of what I was talking about. Despite having written that code.
Despite having designed that code. I go to conferences, which are
supposed to be the most important ones, and I do not see very many
people who look like me or talk like me. I have been to conferences
where people have thought it is funny to joke about my accent.

One of my fears is, Linux and FOSS will soon become irrelevant. Simply
because we are too busy being assholes, and not interested in getting
more (diverse group of ) people in. People who probably have a bigger
concern about privacy and tracking (than your big corp tracking your
every move). We lose these people when we let RMS be our face.

Again, I say this again. RMS as a contributor, yes. RMS as a leader, no.

I am not going to step into your Godwin's law discussion
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law ). It is irrelevant to
the issue at hand.

Dhaval