Bradley Kuhn

The video starts off with a factual error:

> MIT fired him from his job as a professor at the university

He had no such job - he in fact emphatically left MIT employment (as research staff, he was never a professor) before starting GNU so that MIT wouldn't have a copyright claim on his work. He had an office at MIT, nonetheless, because he had politically powerful friends.

See https://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.en.html: "In January 1984 I quit my job at MIT and began writing GNU software. Leaving MIT was necessary so that MIT would not be able to interfere with distributing GNU as free software. If I had remained on the staff, MIT could have claimed to own the work, and could have imposed their own distribution terms, or even turned the work into a proprietary software package. I had no intention of doing a large amount of work only to see it become useless for its intended purpose: creating a new software-sharing community. However, Professor Winston, then the head of the MIT AI Lab, kindly invited me to keep using the lab's facilities."

The speaker goes on to make these comments about what cancel culture teaches:

> The other thing that cancel culture teaches that there's no forgiveness about anything, right? The minute you make a mistake, you are forever shunned by everyone else, and - that's wrong, that's completely antithetical to everything the free software movement is about.

That's an excellent sign that what happened to RMS is not cancel culture - multiple…

> Here is all of the stuff, filtered through Wikipedia's editorial process that is intended to eliminate unfounded personal opinion, stuff from unidentifiable sources, nonsense, and bias. Look, it isn't a hate parade; therefore there is no hate parade as M. Shuttleworth claimed.

Actually, that Wikipedia link is not meant as evidence against Shutterworth's comments or in defense of my own. It's provided merely as context to those who are just now hearing about this situation.

No, my comment regarding the lack of a hate parade is supported only by common sense. A position easily taken once one digs a bit deeper into this subject. You should click through some of the actual references mentioned in (and outside of) that Wikipedia article:

Matthew Garrett's comments,
http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/25376.html

Bradley Kuhn's comments,
http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2011/07/07/harmony-harmful.html

Jonathan Riddell's comments,
https://blogs.kde.org/2013/06/26/kubuntu-wont-be-switching-mir-or-xmir

Aaron Seigo's comments,
https://plus.google.com/+AaronSeigo/posts/76Nd9RSTZWp

Then, tell me if these opinions or the community comments they generated actually seem hateful.

In fact, the only substantial hate generated by this debacle was really in response to Canonical's unfounded swipe at Wayland, which was later retracted, and Shutterworth branding of opponents as "The Open Source Tea Party". And even that level of grandstanding only generated a modicum of hate from the community in…

> Kallithea is partly a fork of our old, legacy version of RhodeCode without all the hard work our engineers spent over the last 12 months in turning an open source project into a real, sophisticated enterprise product.

The marketing-speak, it burns.

You turned your back on us. You lied. You and Marcin repeatedly told us that you were comitted to free software. I don't know if you lied to Marcin as well or if both of you knew that the GPL-ness of Rhodecode was going to disappear.

For a while you had an ambiguous licensing situation where you made it seem like Rhodecode was still somehow GPL'ed, but after a while you apparently tried to revoke permissions on everything. You even threatened with legal action someone who used the code under the GPL license you said you were allowing.

Oh, apparently you even went through with your legal threat:

https://github.com/moparisthebest/unlimit-code/blob/master/readme.md

And now you're talking about "engineers" and "enterprise" and "real" and "sophisticated".

bkuhn salvaged what he could without trying to get into the legalities of the GPL revoking you did (which the GPL itself forbids), but still I feel very betrayed by what you did with Rhodecode.

edit: more details of the debacle

http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2014/07/15/why-kallithea.html

>Do you have sources for the "well documented" views that pedophilia is not harmful and that children can give consent and should be allowed to engage in sexual intercourse? Because the blurb above certainly does not say any of that.

Apart from the appendix linked to in the open letter being critiqued in the OP, there is this often mentioned quote by the man himself:

“I am sceptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren’t voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing.”

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21287006

[1]https://selamjie.medium.com/remove-richard-stallman-appendix...

[2]https://medium.com/@thomas.bushnell/a-reflection-on-the-depa...

[3]http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2019/10/15/fsf-rms.html

> What about the Apache Foundation CLA? This CLA is one of the better ones, because it doesn’t transfer copyright over your work to the Apache Foundation. I have no beef with clauses 1 and 3-8. However, term 2 is too broad and I would not sign this CLA.

Term 2 of the CLA just defines inbound=outbound for Term 2 of the License (https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0).

The Apache CLA is pretty benign (for projects that are distributed under the Apache license; sometimes it is used for projects distributed under different licenses and then it gets murky), but the overhead to contributors and maintainers is significant and it is less precise than a Developer's Certificate of Origin. The "Inbound=Outbound Is All You Need" section of this post is on-point. http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2011/07/07/harmony-harmful.html

>He does not have any right to a particular job

No offense but I find this argument to be in bad faith. You would not say that for someone being fired due to being lgbt, would you? (whether it is legal or not is irrelevant here as this is about moral rights)

He was not ostracized because they found him "not competent to serve the organization in a leadership role" but rather because they were outraged at his opinions (combined with a misrepresentation of his statements along with lies and half-truths -- the pleasure cards, the mit office label, etc).

>Many people, including FSF board members, believed he was not competent to serve the organization in a leadership role.

It would be great if these people too didn't try to misrepresent what he said. Such as in http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2019/10/15/fsf-rms.html