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> He has/had arguable/unacceptable behavior,

Can you explain what you mean?




In that comment, just like in this one, you avoid mentioning anything specific. It appears that you are doing that because you can't defend any implied claims; that doing X, Y, and Z is unacceptable. It's a whispering game where the claims are prefixed with "according to some" or "perceived by many" because it's all smoke and mirrors and no substance. E.g you don't even specify whether it is some behaviour or opinions that are what are unacceptable.


I don't find any opinion of RMS unacceptable. I actually happen to find him very reasonable on most things.

I've read he has had inappropriate behavior with women. I can't know for sure to which extent it is true or false. I find this plausible but have no proof and it could be wrong. The best I can find is this tweet from 2018 I cited in another comment about women at MIT trying to avoid him by putting plants in their offices. I find this quite bad but would agree it's weak.

I also had in mind his harsh email answering this guy announcing his baby on some mailing list, or the numerous times he harshly dismissed questions at his presentations that were not perfectly phrased (that I actually saw it first hand).

There's also this great talk from Keith Packard [1] were he states they didn't use the GPL for X (mostly) because RMS was so annoying.

But the unacceptable status of any of these things is arguable and I fundamentally don't want to witch hunt him. In the end I still admire him and spending time on this is just annoying.

So let's just say that I indeed have no strong evidence of him having unacceptable behavior, so let me clean things up and retract this claim until some strong evidence shows up.

Thanks for keeping me in check.

[1] A political history of X https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yqDJv4W7m8




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