Whipped Cream Difficulties

The story starts with Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation.

Specifically, it starts with Stallman’s “info packet” for people who want to book him to speak. The date on that post is October 20th, but it seems to have been widely linked in the past week; I’m not sure why this is suddenly getting so much attention.

I’ve avoided commenting directly on it because a) I haven’t read it all and don’t have time, and II) I’m not sure what I could say about it. There are many things (based on a quick skim) that strike me as reasonable (don’t change dates and times and expect Stallman to show up, check with him first). Kottke mentions the parrot issue: I am willing to bet that the “DON’T buy a parrot figuring that it will be a fun surprise for me.” line is in there precisely because people have done exactly that.

I think there are things in that document that can be legitimately questioned: Gruber notes his stance on cell phones as one example. But much of the criticism has gotten personal and ugly. Dave Winer and Reginald Braithwaite have both done very good blog entries about this.

There is a podcast that I’ve been listening to regularly, which features a prominent blogger. (Not Cory Doctrow, Mike.) I don’t want to name the podcast or the podcast network here for reasons I’ll get into shortly, but there are probably enough clues embedded in this piece for folks to figure out which one I’m talking about.

During the most recent episode of the podcast, the Stallman document came up as a topic. That’s fine; it is a legitimate topic of discussion for this podcast. But one of the podcast hosts went on to assert that he’d received email from people (as in, more than one person) who’d hosted Stallman in their homes, and “had to burn the sheets” afterwards. Indeed, the title of that podcast episode is a reference to the “burn the sheets” emails.

I give money to the FSF, but I have my share of issues with them and Stallman. I thought Stallman’s comments on the death of Steve Jobs were out of line, and I seriously considered resigning my FSF membership because of them. I disagree strongly with Stallman’s support for Communist governments. I don’t much care for FSF’s recent Apple bashing. I think there’s room in the world for both open and closed source software, and I think FSF’s dogmatic approach hurts the cause. I don’t believe FSF thinks enough about making it easy for the 80 year grandmother to keep in touch with her grandchildren; I think in many ways FSF would be happy with computers as a priesthood, not as a commodity.

But I believe that there is work FSF does that is worth my monetary support. And I believe that the issues I disagree with FSF and Stallman on are issues that we can discuss and debate like human beings. We don’t need to be schoolyard bullies sitting in the dark tittering over anonymous accusations that people have to burn their sheets after a guest leaves. That’s wrong.

One of the reasons I don’t want to name the people or the podcast is that both of these podcasters have young sons. I’ve made it an ethical principle of mine that I won’t drag people’s families into things, and I don’t want to do that here.

But I would like to ask both of these men, if they’re reading this: is this how you want your son to treat his classmates? Is this how you would like your son to be treated by his classmates?

Is this how decent human beings act?