Basically, he made some poor decisions on various things. Not only sexual harassment, but also defending others who are accused of some not very nice things and has a history of misogynistic comments and behaviors. Here's an article giving more detail on a few of the issues surrounding the resignation so you can draw your own conclusions:
Once someone has been condemned by the crowd (in this case, Minsky), you must cry with the pack (even in private or semi-public conversations) or share their fate. You have absolutely no right to ponder, ask for more evidence or whatever. Obey the Party Line or be sentenced.
Then they basically admit in the article that truth or justice carry no weight whatsoever, but that "good PR" and social media trends are what count.
RMS has been doing things that people in the open source community disagreed with for a long time. His latest offence also had the effect of bringing all/many_of those previous slights to the attention of the "crowd" (because social media) and that amplified the message of criticism against him.
I think that his "latest offences" were of a particularly laden political tone (or could be painted as such), while eating stuff from his toenails publicly and other eccentricities passed as innocuous, though actually annoying the hell out of corporate types and other people interested in power, money, shiny PR and other matters that RMS always more or less considered with relative contempt.
It's significant that you talk of "the open source community". I'm not of "the open source community" (less than ever, in fact), I'm firmly in the "Free software community" and an FSF member for 20 years. I don't remember ever having a disagreement with RMS on any important matter.
I'm afraid your opinion of RMS is not universally shared, as evidenced by FSF's latest membership drive.
Despite his numerous and off-putting shortcomings, many people (incl. myself) still believe RMS to be the best person for leading the free software community. His unyielding stance on how software should be used and shared is exactly what the FSF needs in its leadership. All the issues you and others list to justify RMS' dismissal are orthogonal to this task. Yes, this also includes the toe thing.
I have personally stopped supporting the FSF because of this incident after about a decade of support, and I no longer include the "or-later" clause in my GPL software.
> All the issues you and others list to justify RMS' dismissal are orthogonal to this task.
Where did you get the impression that wazoox considered RMS's dismissal in any way justified or justifiable? The comment you're responding to literally says:
> > I don't remember ever having a disagreement with RMS on any important matter.
Also:
> and I no longer include the "or-later" clause in my GPL software.
I'm embarrassed to admit that this problem didn't occur to me until you pointed it out; thank you; I need to go fix that for my own software.
Doing things? Do you have any examples? My impression at the time that he resigned was that it was because the crowd didn't like the things he was saying, not that he'd actually done anything himself.
I intentionally left examples out because writing something that would be fair towards RMS is hard (and I don't want to spend the time to do it). It's also been some time since I read about this and I haven't saved the location of those sources.
That's not true, it was more of a "straw breaking the camel's back" situation, and he has in the past personally acted in inappropriate ways for many many years.
All these are just allegations. If his alleged misbehavior is as frequent as it is being famed, then it should be relatively easy to provide some evidence. The man was filmed eating stuff off his toes ffs!
I saw some tweets from some women AI researchers at MIT shortly after RMS was ousted. They all had vivid tellings of instances where RMS would make lewd comments about their bodies or look at them weird, and how a lot of the women researchers would actively avoid him.
Tbh I think some of the memes about him and his sexuality might be valid. If that's the case, then frankly he should have been cut loose a long time ago.
The problem is that judgment of the crowd will throw anyone under the train at any time and for any reason. We know of many a proud SJW that made a misstep at some point and was hunted down all the same by their previous friends, because you can be perfect only to a point; first you'd laugh and feel some schadenfreude, but...
There are actual reasons why we instituted things such as a judicial system, principles like "you'll be deemed innocent until proven guilty", etc.
That article you linked is garbage. The article title says "RMS resigns... after defending Jeffrey Epstein behavior", which is an outright lie since RMS never -- not even once -- defended Epstein. You're free to dislike the man, but please stop posting slanderous nonsense. If you want a facts-only take of things, see this: https://itsfoss.com/richard-stallman-controversy/
This whole thing smells like a power game to me. I don't know exactly who or what the real power behind this stuff is, but I sure get the feeling that if you present a threat to their worldview, they'll destroy you by trying to associate you with any bad stuff and painting anything you ever said in the worst possible light. Toe the line, and your every misdeed will be ignored.
I'm not entirely a fan of how far RMS goes on some tech issues, but this all just feels dirty and wrong.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/richard-m-stallman-resigns-fro...