A programmer explains why he's willing to quit rather than work with industry legend Richard Stallman, who resigned from MIT after controversial remarks on Jeffrey Epstein

Julie Bort Oct 10, 2019, 4:28 PM

Yet another shoe has dropped for one of the world's most famous computer scientists, Richard Stallman — the architect of the free and open source software movement (FOSS), who found himself pushed out of his longstanding roles at MIT and the Free Software Foundation last month after wading into the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.

On Monday, a group of 20 programmers who work on one of his most famous projects, the GNU operating system, signed a letter condemning Stallman's behavior. They want the GNU project to distance itself from Stallman, its founder and leader.

In the letter, they wrote:

"We, the undersigned GNU maintainers and developers, owe a debt of gratitude to Richard Stallman for his decades of important work in the free software movement...Yet, we must also acknowledge that Stallman's behavior over the years has undermined a core value of the GNU project: the empowerment of all computer users...We believe that Richard Stallman cannot represent all of GNU. We think it is now time for GNU maintainers to collectively decide about the organization of the project."

Stallman, the founder of the influential Free Software Foundation, is an icon of the programming world. He pioneered the concept of free and open source software (FOSS), whereby any programmer can create, contribute to, and give away software for free — offering viable alternatives to corporate-owned and created software.

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He jumped into the Epstein fray with an email defending the late Marvin Minsky, an MIT professor and legend of AI who was accused of assaulting Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein's alleged victims.

That email, sent to the large MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) mailing list, saw him argue that even if Minsky did take advantage of Epstein's alleged victim Giuffre, that the act should not be characterized as assault or rape because "the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing."

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