Richard Stallman is the reason I didn’t start contributing to open source (then called “free software”) in the 90s. I’m not the only one. He and his followers pushed out a whole generation of female developers, just at that critical time when open source adoption was widening.https://twitter.com/alicegoldfuss/status/993677847280562178 …
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What stopped you from doing your own open source project back then? A fork or something new. That was the point of the movement.
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Because his conduct casts doubt on his ideology.
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Not on his technology.
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Irrelevant. By creating an unwelcoming/oppressive climate, he deterred others from pitching in. If you don't see how this works, I don't know how to get through to you.
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That is true. Nonetheless, my question was why didn't they fork his code or made a new project but within a more inclusive environment. I'm not being confrontative, I would really like to know.
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The idea of doing that, that very use of the word "fork," these things all emerged after FOSS established itself. There was no reason for them to participate, if the price of participation was abuse. And, in this exclusion, Stallman (and other early FOSS developers) rode their
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ideas down into a dead end. The underlying social theories of FOSS were all about inclusion, while the actual FOSS communities were exclusive and misogynistic. The exclusionary beliefs ended up making FOSS marginal, successful largely in highly technical areas of computing.
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They didn't have to participate, so they didn't. They didn't want to fork because of ideology, so they didn't. The project was still "successful largely in highly technical areas of computing". That's a great definition of success for a tech project.
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