Aside for all his pedophile view points, he is correct about infantilizing 12-17 year olds. We have helicopter parents removing every roadblock for children, they grow up not knowing how to plan or resolve conflict.

Entirely possible but he's also a stubborn man obsessed with his own ideological consistency and absurdly precise (if not commonly understood) language. He's clearly a creep but having kept up with him over the years I think it's similarly possible that those statements aren't self-serving and are instead sincerely held dominoes 15 down the line from following the implications of some core principles.

That doesn't make them not disgusting and also does not mean he should remain the voice of our movement, of course.

Not just problematic, but consequential too:

Richard Stallman has also embarked upon a decades-long political project to normalize sexual violence. Under his ideological leadership, the free software movement is unsafe, particularly for women. Women represent just 3% of the free software community,2 compared to 23% of industry programmers generally.3 This is no accident. There is a pervasive culture of sexism and a stark lack of accountability in free software, and it begins with Stallman’s unchallenged and reprehensible behavior.

Responding mainly because I second this and feel the same way.

The ethical bar is so low and yet he still chooses to not clear it.

It kind of reminds me of ASD symptoms, not reading social cues properly, etc.

i know you mean well but, respectfully: having autism or another disorder (if Stallman even does) is probably not the reason why Richard Stallman has historically defended what amounts to pedophilia; why he continues to defend bestiality and necrophilia; and why he has extremely malformed opinions on what constitutes sexual harassment and sexual assault. and even if it is, that's an explanation and nothing more. it does not excuse or make acceptable his behavior or the consistency with which it has skeeved other people out. he deserves to be strongly rebuked, as anyone else would, for his refusal to take accountability in this situation.

I think we should listen to him on matters related to software. For other topics, I listen to other people.

Completely disagree. No matter what he might have expertise in, he has entirely invalidated his voice by taking the stances he's taken and the acts he committed. Even listening to his hard technical knowledge gives him validity.

This all comes back to the same abhorrent shit that has permeated the tech industry, and FLOSS particularly, that we should never consider soft skills or anything else about a person, that they can be the most vile, toxic person possible, but as long as they're a good developer, It's Fine. But it's not fine. It's never been fine, and we should not normalize continuing to have people like this in our midst just because they're a good dev, or that they once made some good technical points.

Your comment strikes me as particularly harmful and misguided because autistic people are often specifically targeted for abuse and even seen as deserving of abuse.

I am sort of grateful, because you've unintentionally really made it starkly clear to me. We should not platform unrepentant enablers of abuse regardless of their prior contributions, it simply causes too much harm.

Drew DeVault (sway, sourcehut, hare... creator) wrote an article on this exact topic, asking autistic people on mastodon what they think of it. The tldr is that autistic people (those who answered) hate this excuse because they rather know when they make people uneasy to try to adjust, and also that if we need to tolerate this kind of discourse to make room for a minority of autistic people, then we are not doing a good job because it makes a lot of people really uneasy.

An anonymous hit job

it's literally his own words all the way down here. if it's a "hit job" it's entirely Stallman's own fault for being a freak with morally abhorrent takes. one of the first things mentioned here is that he had to retract the position that "voluntarily pedophilia" doesn't harm children (a category of person he defines as anyone under about 13)! any reasonable person would find this abhorrent and Stallman a horrible person for ever having defended said position in the first place, because it is genuinely abhorrent to defend something like that. that's just child abuse.

It looks pretty well cited to me. The fact that it was written anonymously doesn't really take away from that.

Not so anonymous, see my other comment: https://phtn.app/post/programming.dev/20566574?thread=0.12859284#12859284