Been growing ever more tired of the posts about RMS and his talk at GCDS. I didn’t agree with his conclusions on the technical/legal subjects covered and the whole emacs/st.igutius thing is becoming a bore, but I suspect more than a little that the current outpouring over his alleged sexism is more about people finally finding a good meme to use to latch out against someone they don’t like and disagree strongly with, rather than a sudden realization that the St. Ignutius routine he has been doing for the last 15 years is overtly sexist. One could certainly argue that there was a few passages in there that should be altered, but I am equally sure that if it had been someone else, most people ranting currently would have been willing to write it off on the goodwill account.
On that topic I think the whole issue of sexism in the community is somewhat of a joke. It basically appeared on the stage after the following steps was taken.
Step 1: The lack of female participation was identified as a problem.
Step 2: People wanted to address the problem
Step 3: The following algorithm was used to determine the source of the problem:
If "well reasoned explanation can be found" is true:
address_problem()
else:
print "sexism"
Since then well meaning people of the community has followed in the footsteps of another well meaning fool and been tilting at the windmills.
So please continue fighting against the evils you see in the world, but be aware that crucifying RMS is probably not the solution.
And before someone starts shouting at me for not realizing that sexism do exist in the open source world, please save yourself the energy. I am sure it exist, along with racism, anti-semitism, bigotry, general intolerance, gay and lesbian hating, supremacism, communism or whatever evil you want to come up with. I just don’t buy into using them as the default fallback whenever the reason for something needs to be explained.
