> Say what you want about the Stalleman type he was very inspiring and had real leadership. So a lot of hackers followed him in his crazy vision and that gave us a lot.
With this:
> It is very feminine and obviously doesn't work that well.
It's a super sexist comment. A comment born in the 60s, or I guess in our geek land, still in 2025.
It sounds like Stallman had quite the impact on you. Is it really so foreign to you that putting someone in a leadership position that can broaden that reach to people who are unlike you might be worth doing?
I only saw him once and I immediately understood how he could lead such a revolution.
It is not about being "like him", he was just some fat old man with a big beard and I remember thinking he probably smells pretty bad. What was broad and inspiring was his vision and leadership as an human.
Women are more than seductresses. This is an apalling line of reasoning. There are a lot of issues to hate in our industry, and you lose all credibility by attempting to tie these issues to women.
If by impact you mean “turn off people from the movement” then sure. I happen to know multiple people who either met or even hosted him, and not a single one of them was impressed. Stallman was a horrible promoter.
> every time one of those foundations announce a "non coding" woman as their new leader, if you read between the lines, it is because they need to be more "ESG"
That might explain why the Scala Center (which oversees the Scala language) has a young political sciences grad as its executive director. She has zero commercial or academic experience in Scala.
[flagged]
LOL.
Compare and contrast this:
> Say what you want about the Stalleman type he was very inspiring and had real leadership. So a lot of hackers followed him in his crazy vision and that gave us a lot.
With this:
> It is very feminine and obviously doesn't work that well.
It's a super sexist comment. A comment born in the 60s, or I guess in our geek land, still in 2025.
>It's a super sexist comment.
Is it?
To answer this, just reverse the genders in the statement and see if it's still sexist.
"It's very masculine and obviously doesn't work that well"
7 replies →
[flagged]
Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[flagged]
1 reply →
[flagged]
It sounds like Stallman had quite the impact on you. Is it really so foreign to you that putting someone in a leadership position that can broaden that reach to people who are unlike you might be worth doing?
I only saw him once and I immediately understood how he could lead such a revolution.
It is not about being "like him", he was just some fat old man with a big beard and I remember thinking he probably smells pretty bad. What was broad and inspiring was his vision and leadership as an human.
6 replies →
Their point is obviously that they can't if they aren't qualified.
I don't know if that's actually true but it's clear what they're arguing here anyway.
15 replies →
How would you quantify reach? The PR or number of projects delivered?
2 replies →
Women are more than seductresses. This is an apalling line of reasoning. There are a lot of issues to hate in our industry, and you lose all credibility by attempting to tie these issues to women.
If by impact you mean “turn off people from the movement” then sure. I happen to know multiple people who either met or even hosted him, and not a single one of them was impressed. Stallman was a horrible promoter.
> every time one of those foundations announce a "non coding" woman as their new leader, if you read between the lines, it is because they need to be more "ESG"
That might explain why the Scala Center (which oversees the Scala language) has a young political sciences grad as its executive director. She has zero commercial or academic experience in Scala.
And this is how she behaves at conferences:
https://x.com/jdegoes/status/1633888998434193411
Leftwing political activism, cancel culture and #metoo-style witchhunts (example: https://pretty.direct/statement )
This is what the Scala "community" has become. It's tragic, given how good the language is.
Causation does not imply correlation.
That there are non-technical leaders who lose the thread does not mean that leaders lose the thread because they're non-technical.
There are plenty of technical leaders who have also gone off on personal tangents and vendettas!
Maybe a more accurate appraisal would be 'some people suck at a job, and it's unfortunately difficult to dislodge a bad leader anywhere'.