I can personally vouch for the fact that RMS can be very difficult. He takes social awkwardness to new heights. He’s remarkably stubborn in technical matters even when outside his domain of expertise and completely wrong. He is not a fun house guest. His manners as a dinner guest are atrocious. He was by far the most logistically problematic seminar speaker I have ever hosted. He takes umbrage at quite innocuous colloquial phrasing, and is obstinate about his own idiosyncratic interpretation of English semantics. He overshares, and has great difficulty reading others' emotions.
But he's not transphobic. That accusation is basically scurrilous. At https://libreboot.org/news/rms.html is an impassioned but well reasoned (at least in this regard) defense of RMS from a trans woman he had a big public fight with. “If you actually tell Richard your preferred pronouns, he’ll use them with you without hesitation. Several of my friends are trans and also speak to Richard, mostly via email. He respects their pronouns also.” Calling him ablist is similarly unfair. He was defending women’s right to terminate pregnancies when the fetus has a condition like trisomy 21. Whatever your views are on the underlying political question, to twist that as ablist is quite a stretch. RMS is not violent. He's weird with everyone, which do I think has, in general, a disproportionate effect on women. As does his poor personal hygiene. He had a mattress in his office at MIT because he was basically living there. That might give lots of people squicky feelings, but would have a disproportionate effect on women. He makes unwelcome sexual overtures to women, but backs off when turned down (with perhaps isolated exceptions decades ago). That's totally inappropriate behaviour. He seems unable to sense when someone finds him repellent. Basically, he’s super creepy and unpleasant. He picks his feet and eats it while delivering seminars. Nina Paley hosted him in her apartment in New York on a number of occasions, and had a similar read. I'm not sure he'd be an ideal board member, but that’s a practical rather than ethical consideration, and surely best left to the judgement of the individual organization. What’s problematic to me about this whole “Cancel RMS” business is the lack of nuance. He’s clearly not neurotypical in a way that makes him very difficult to deal with. He doesn’t make appropriate eye contact. He’s strange in ways that I think, on average, affects women more than men. But should we bully or ostracise him for that? I think we should try to develop coping strategies for both him and people who want or need to deal with him. That’s actually supporting and accommodating diversity. And it’s hard! We should seek ways to leverage his strengths, which are considerable. Of course, that assumes lack of malice, which I think is the case with RMS. He’s not malicious. He really wants to connect, but he’s utterly unable to. He’s weird and clueless. And he’s obsessed with software freedom. --Barak Pearlmutter <b...@debian.org>
