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RMS headed a political organization, and kept his political campaigning to things directly related to the politics that his organization represented.

The people who were angry at RMS's "politics" were always actually mad at the concept of Free Software in general, and the fact that RMS thinks that software that is not Free is bad software (and does not think you are an exception.) He wasn't banging on about trans rights or Muslamic invasions, but people being enslaved by machines run by the powerful.

Doesn't mean that he didn't have opinions, he just knew why people cared what he thought. When he ventured a bad (but common) opinion about sleeping with teenagers, it opened a hole that his enemies drove a truck through. It's also notable that he did this to defend his friend Minsky; people often compromise their professionalism over personal relationships and interests.

3 comments

> Doesn't mean that he didn't have opinions

Strong agree. He has millions of opinions, all nicely catalogued on his personal website. He even has an RSS feed: https://stallman.org/rss/rss.xml if you're keen to know what he thinks about this or that US politics issue.

But he didn't abuse his control of the FSF to pursue his own politics, he kept the organisation strictly focused on software freedom. It's at risk of being completely irrelevant if tries to expand beyond its niche of software freedom.

The ethics of AI, code generation, and hosted software would be within the FSF's remit, though I think the policies of any specific code hosting site wouldn't be.

Taking a stand against LLMs certainly seems pretty related to the politics of the FOSS movement.

Wasn't it because he said it was okay to breed 16 year old girls or something?

The point is that he did not even try to link his view about sex and age of consent into anything to do with open source.

I have not read much of what he said about it, but he recently said that it is absurd that variations in the age of consent means something can be rape in one country but completely legal in another (e.g. US vs UK vs Italy).

He also earlier claimed that that minors could consent to sex and not be harmed. While I loathe that claim, it does not seem right that many other people who made the same claim (a number of British politicians and civil rights activists have endorsed, as have similar people in other countries) it seems odd that the latter get away with it and Stallman does not. I think its the people in positions of power (e.g. politicians) who most need to resign (permanently!) for having held those views.