You may have read recently that Richard Stallman is back with the Free Software Foundation. Some readers may not know who he is, what the FSF is or that he was ousted from the organization last year. Most of the work Stallman has done over the years has been influential. He has helped progress the idea of software freedom, which is the basic idea that you should have access to the source code of a computer program so you know what it's actually doing.
The problem with covering a story about Stallman is that it has multiple components. Most traditional news media wants a nice and simple story where there is a clear separation between who is the good guy and who is the bad guy and the hyper-sensational headlines that go along with those narratives. The story of Richard Stallman is not such.
On the one hand you have the good things he's done regarding software overall, the various GNU Public License (GPL) that now cover the vast majority of important software that runs the infrastructure of the world we know today. Open just about any app, go to the About or Help section and view it's licenses and you're likely to find a copy of the GPL in there. There are countless other important pieces of software, such as GCC, that we just don't even have time to jump into how important there are.
On the other hand you have the bad things he's done. The most recent controversy involved comments he made on an MIT mailing list about Jeffrey Epstein. In short, his comments were taken as defending Epstein and questioning if his victims of child trafficking should be considered children or adults. His comments were strange, but this was not the first time he has publicly posted his very strange views on child exploitation before. He has once argued that child pornography should be legal. Recently, Stallman claims to have chained his views on these subjects.
Then you have the mob mentality of cancel culture that ultimately lead to his resignation at MIT and FSF. This illustrates a much bigger problem than MIT, FSF or Stallman himself. The ability for a small vocal audience that likely has nothing to do with any of these organizations banging on pots and pans loud enough to get the attention of a sympathetic media outlet and blow a situation up large enough to get enough clicks and views while also tearing apart various peoples lives and organizations.
To be clear, I'm not sad that Stallman was ousted. I think the FSF and MIT should have done it years ago. Many very intelligent people knew about his dangerous views he expressed on child exploitation and most would claim they go far beyond arguing of devil's advocate. The problem I do have is with how it happened and for the actual catalyst event being misrepresented in the media. The worst part being that there is a laundry list of abhorrent things he has certainly said that you can use to make arguments!
Fast forward to this week where he has rejoined the FSF, no longer as president but now as a board member. He claims he's not stepping down a second time, so we'll have to wait and watch this next media charade play out. It also brings up another interesting question I see about these cancel culture campaigns: What's the goal? Is the goal to punish someone for the mistakes they have made in the past? Is the goal to get people to modify their behavior? I'm sure the answer to that is different for different groups.
