« From my position of privilege, I find it intellectually stimulating to reason dispassionately about the suffering of others »
~~ every fossbro ever, when confronted to a social justice issue
@mathieu computer enthusiasts were selected by the industry for low emotional intelligence (mostly to kick out women from the field); unsurprisingly, the FOSS world then started self-selecting the worst excesses of the industry, in a show of performative toxic masculinity. In short: you want a ton of Linus and Stallman clones? Because this is how you get lots of Linus and Stallman clones
@ebassi @mathieu I consider Linus and Stallman heroes fit for their time; they lived and fought in an environment dominated by men. I say we still need them, but at the same time I don't think they're fit for today's world. Society has changed, much faster than we anticipated. In short, we need new heroes, BUT at the same time we must be careful not to throw away the accomplishments of the Free Software movement. We must learn to separate the man from the - 1/2
@rick_777 they weren't "fit for their time", they were abusive assholes.
The world has changed? It probably could have changed faster with somebody else: for example, they both are a big part of the reason their is still so much sexism in free software, and that hasn't changed much from their time.
@rick_777 also, Linus never "fought for our freedom". He's very much in the open source camp, not the free software one.
He started Linux for the fun of it, not because he wanted to offer a free operating system to humanity.
And he has repeatedly stated he regrets choosing the GPL back then, because he'd prefer allowing proprietarization of Linux.
He offered us a kernel, which we needed. He gave us a product, the freedom we got from it was accidental.
@mathieu @ebassi My point is that we shouldn't expect people of past times to be perfect; they too were the product of their time. It's very easy, IMO, to judge people from the comfort of your home and say "oh, I would have done things SO MUCH better", when you were NOT there and weren't fighting WITH them. Maybe Linus didn't fight to make Linux free, but he worked hard to keep it in good quality. Stallman may not have championed women's or trans rights, but - 1/2