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Richard Stallman's Possibly Sexist Remarks at GCDS

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 9th Jul 2009 12:09 UTC

During the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, Richard M. Stallman of the Free Software Foundation (and the Superfluous Introduction Award goes to...) gave a keynote speech. Said keynote speech raised a few eyebrows in the Free software community because of a number of questionable remarks regarding women in technology. David "Lefty" Schlesinger, member of the GNOME Advisory Board and active in the mobile open source community, took issue with RMS' remarks and decided to call him out on it. The response he got was... Less than satisfying.

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RE: Summary is a tad biased towards David's perspective

by ralph on Thu 9th Jul 2009 14:09 UTC in reply to "Summary is a tad biased towards David's perspective"

Member since:
2005-07-10

I'm no fan of Stallman for starters. I tend to ignore him even when he's not being controversial. But from my understanding his comments were taken from a context of a religious parody: the Church of Emacs.

I'm also no religious scholar, but I've read quite a bit of each of the holy texts of the three Abrahamic religions, and in case you haven't noticed, there's a slight obsession about virgin women. I dare say Stallman was trying to satirize this.

He even says so himself in the email-exchange:

The cult of the Virgin of Emacs is simply intended as a joke about the cult of the Virgin Mary. I assure anyone who perceived derogatory meanings in it that I did not intend them.

Not that you would know it from Thom's summary of course...

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