Re: removing toxic emailers

[David Malcolm <dmalcolm@redhat.com>]

On Thu, 2021-04-15 at 09:49 -0400, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> Joseph Myers <joseph@codesourcery.com>:
> > On Wed, 14 Apr 2021, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> > 
> > > I'm not judging RMS's behavior (or anyone else's) one way or
> > > another. I am simply pointing out that there is a Schelling point
> > > in
> > > possible community norms that is well expressed as "you shall judge
> > > by
> > > the code alone".  This list is not full of contention from
> > > affirming
> > > that norm, but from some peoples' attempt to repudiate it.
> > 
> > Since RMS, FSF and GNU are not contributing code to the toolchain and
> > haven't been for a very long time, the most similar basis to judge
> > them 
> > would seem to be based on their interactions with toolchain
> > development.  
> > I think those interactions generally show that FSF and GNU have been
> > bad 
> > umbrella organizations for the toolchain since at least when the GCC
> > 4.4 
> > release was delayed waiting for a slow process of developing the GCC 
> > Runtime Library Exception.
> 
> I do not have standing to argue this point.
> 
> I will, however, point out that it is a very *different* point from
> "RMS has iupset some people and should therefore be canceled".

[I'm sorry to everyone who's sick of these threads, but I feel I have
to respond to this one; sorry about writing another long email]

Eric: I don't know if you're just being glib, or you're deliberately
trying to caricature those of us who are upset by RMS's behavior.

I think the words "canceled" and "cancel culture" have effectively
become meaningless and should be avoided if we want to have a nuanced
discussion - no-one seems to have a definition of what counts as
"canceling" vs "consequences" vs "fair and measured responses".

At one time, both you and RMS were heroes of mine, and I was a true
believer (of what, I'm no longer sure); I own copies of both "The
Cathedral and the Bazaar" and "Free Software - Free Society", though
both are currently in my attic, gathering dust.

I've long felt that there was a massive hole in the GNU project and FSF
where effective technical leadership should have been - various
maintainers on gcc, gdb, etc have been implementing things, and things
were humming along, and those of us in Red Hat working on them tried to
coordinate on features we felt were important - but where was the top-
level response to, say, LLVM/clang? (to name just one of many changes
in the industry)  In many ways the last 8 years of my career have been
an attempt to get gcc to respond to the appearance of LLVM/clang (I've
added JIT-compilation, improved diagnostics, and I'm implementing a
static analysis pass) - I'm lucky that my managers inside Red Hat are
happy to pay me to hack on this stuff and make GCC better - it helps
our customers, but it also helps GCC, and the broader FLOSS communities
using both toolchains).

Where has the technical leadership from RMS been?  Instead the long-
standing opposition by RMS to exposing the compiler's IR has hobbled
GCC, and partly contributed to the pile of technical debt we have to
dig our way out of.  The only "leadership" coming out of GNU/FSF seem
to me to be dictats from on high about ChangeLog formats and coding
conventions.  The GNU project seems to me to be stuck in the 1980s. 
Perhaps a pronouncement like: "try to make everything be consumable as
libraries with APIs, as well as as standalone binaries" might have
helped (and still could; can we do that please?)

Similarly, I agree with Joseph's observations of the ways that the FSF
and GNU have been bad umbrella organizations for the toolchain.

But beyond the failure of technical leadership, and the organizational
incompetence/incoherence, is RMS's behavior, and the extent to which
it, as you put it "upset some people".

RMS's defenders seem to have fixated on his 2019 comments on Marvin
Minsky, the uproar over those, and his responses to them (then and
recently), and seem keen to assure us that everything's OK now, or, at
least on a road to improvement.

But in the time since those 2019 comments, I've been reconsidering my
views on RMS.  In particular, I have read of many alleged incidents
such as:
 - spontaneously licking a female conference member on the arm
 - appearing to hit on anyone female, even if they're underage
 - asking which female audience members at his talk were virgins

At least one of the above was from a former colleage of mine, which
when I read it was about the point that broke me.

As part of my reconsidering my views on RMS, I recalled an event
described in Sam Williams' biography of RMS in which Williams describes
RMS's then girlfriend talking about how she "admired the way Richard
built up an entire political movement to address an issue of profound
personal concern", which she identified as "crushing loneliness".

When I first read that, years ago, I felt sorry and pity for RMS, and a
vague feeling that community is an important part of FLOSS, or somesuch
sentiment (and a feeling of trying to recreate a lost utopia from the
1980s).

But in the light of the various reports of RMS's awkard behavior around
women, I decided to reread that section.  I looked online, and found
that the book is available here:
  https://www.fsf.org/faif

I noticed this passage immediately after the reference to "crushing
loneliness":

"During dinner, I let the women do the talking and spent most of the 
time trying to detect clues as to whether the last 12 months had 
softened Stallman in any significant way.  I didn’t see anything to
suggest they had.  Although more flirtatious than I remembered,
Stallman retained the same general level of prickliness.  At one point,
my wife uttered an emphatic "God forbid" only to receive a typical
Stallman rebuke."

Something about the reference to "flirtatious" caught me eye in the
light of the stories I've read about RMS's behavior around women.  It
turns out that the original text is available on Project Gutenberg
here:
  http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5768
where that passage reads:

"During dinner, I let the women do the talking and spent most of the
time trying to detect clues as to whether the last 12 months had
softened Stallman in any significant way. I didn't see anything to
suggest they had. Although more flirtatious than I remembered - a
flirtatiousness spoiled somewhat by the number of times Stallman's eyes
seemed to fixate on my wife's chest - Stallman retained the same
general level of prickliness. At one point, my wife uttered an emphatic
"God forbid" only to receive a typical Stallman rebuke."

Spot the difference?

https://www.fsf.org/faif says:
  "It is a rare kind of biography, where the reader has the benefit of
both the biographer's original words and the subject's response."

which is certainly one way of describing it.  It's unclear to me
whether Williams removed that sentence, or RMS did.  It may be unfair
to Williams and his wife to draw attention to this in this email, and
I'm sorry if it is - I mention it here as it's something that no-one
else seemed to have noticed.  I don't want biography to become
hagiography - it's unhealthy to put people up on a pedestal - for them
and us.

I don't know if your retort about "upset[ing] some people" was
referring to the Minsky comments, or to the behaviors RMS seems to be
prone to around women, which although I'm not a woman, appear to me to
be very alienating.  If the latter, you might want to consider that
women and girls are roughly half the population of the world at large
(if not this project), and referring to them as "some people" might be
seen as patronizing.

I don't want FLOSS to be a boy's club, but also, merely, from the
existing narrow perspective of the political mission of the FSF, I
think having more women involved would help keep software freedom
relevant to today's tech enviroment.  For example, I think this article
has an excellent take on the power relationship between smartphones and
their users, comparing a smartphone to an abusive partner:
  https://conversationalist.org/2019/09/13/feminism-explains-our-toxic-relationships-with-our-smartphones/
and it makes many points that I think are very relevant to the FSF's
political mission (if not on-topic to the nuts and bolts of GCC
development; I'm just posting it here by way of example).

Most of the above issues involve gender, but not all of them.

For example, the staff of the FSF appear to have had to unionize
specifically as a response to having to constantly deal with
unreasonable behavior from RMS (and the management apparently wanted to
join the union too, but couldn't due to laws on such matters).

Reading that made me regret if any harsh words I've had for the
organization of the FSF have hurt the staffers there; it seems to have
been a very difficult place to work.

To try to sum up, it's not just RMS's remarks about Minsky that
bothered me.  I think there are technical, governance, *and* social
issues here.  To be fair, I'm not sure how much of my own visceral
reaction to RMS's recent return to the FSF board is due to the amount
of code I've had to write to deal with technical decisions he's imposed
on the project, versus a feeling of "ick" having now read the stories
from women who've felt deeply uncomfortable around him.  Maybe I'm just
bitter about having to fix the code.  To what extent should we accept
eccentric and/or antisocial behavior in FLOSS communities, or does
doing so make us "enablers"?  I'm not sure what the boundaries here
should be.

I think that the idea that some have that list moderation is always
wrong closely relates to "Geek Social Fallacy #1: Ostracizers Are
Evil":
  https://plausiblydeniable.com/five-geek-social-fallacies/
and is equally invalid.

I still admire much of what RMS has written, and have spent much of my
career trying to implement part of a vision inspired by him.  I'm sad
about the way things have turned out.  Twitter seems to turn everything
into a pitched battle between two camps.  I hope there's room for a
nuanced view of him - the good and the less good.  I don't know what
role he should have, but I think it should not be a leadership one, and
I think the FSF and GNU need to greatly change to stay relevant,
including on governance and on succession plans.  None of us are
getting any younger, and the vision of the FSF and GNU seems to me to
be stuck in the 1990s (or earlier).

I don't have the emotional bandwidth to contribute more meaningfully to
the future of GNU/FSF beyond my contributions to GCC, and this email. 
I've posted the following link to Luis Villa's blog before, which in my
view has many good ideas on ways to save the FSF from itself, so I'll
repost it again in case anyone hasn't seen it yet who might find
benefit in it:
  https://lu.is/blog/2021/04/07/values-centered-npos-with-kmaher/

I reject the idea that a FLOSS community should be judged purely on the
code it generates - I want to work in a "professional" environment, for
some definition of "professional", with basic standards of behavior,
or, to quote the late Anthony Bourdain:

"It is truly a privilege to live by what I call the "no asshole" rule.
I don't do business with assholes. I don't care how much money they are
offering me, or what project. Life is too short. Quality of life is
important. I'm fortunate to collaborate with a lot of people who I
respect and like, and I’d like to keep it that way."

In general, my experiences with the GCC community is that it is full of
people I respect and like, but with dysfunction when it comes to
anything to do with GNU/FSF/RMS. (and thank you to the Steering
Committee for helping shelter us from that dysfunction).

This may have turned into a rant, for which I'm sorry, but I hope it's
constructive.  I've used "I and "me" a lot - the views here are my own,
although I'm paid to care about GCC (which I do), and these are not the
opinions of Red Hat, or of my colleagues.

Sorry again about prolonging this thread; I will try to get back to
coding now.

Dave