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Google's shocking developer decree struggles to justify the urgent threat to F-Droid
(www.neowin.net)
this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2025
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Have we ever lived in a more stallmanwasright.jpg time?
Ah. Well. About software. Stallman was right about software
that's what we generally mean. he has some ideas about things other than software we are best not to give too much attention.
Enlighten me.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/03/richard-stallman-returns-to-fsf-18-months-after-controversial-rape-comments/
I never wanted him to be wrong more than right now. Except for tomorrow, it's probably going to bé worse, tomorrow
Stallman has never been and never will be wrong.
Except when it comes to women and girls, he’s absolutely wrong
Or his views on seemingly eating toe nails right off of his feet in public.
Don't forget about his views on sex with animals!
I sometimes like to read his political posts:
https://www.stallman.org/archives/2025-jul-oct.html
And honestly? I mostly agree with them? Like this:
He has some questionable beliefs as well, though for unusual reasons. He accepts non-binary people but refuses to use they/them pronouns because he doesn't like the ambiguity of singular/plural pronouns. So he has invented the neopronouns per/pers to refer to singular non-binary persons. I genuinely think no other person on this planet could hold this opinion.
I agree with this criticism, but the entire English language is full of bullshit so you might as well consider using Esperanto
as someone who is not a native english speaker when I first encountered people people prefer they/them I also found the same problem of ambiguity, and took quite a while to get used to it
Okay that's all cool or cool-and-stubbornly-autistic. But he has some other opinions that are not, about consent and age.
So the blanket 'fuck yeah, stallman!' Doesn't really fly anymore.
Hasn't he admitted to changing his opinion after learning about the effects on children? I'm not in the loop about this.
But yeah, you definitely shouldn't treat his words as gospel. A lot of questionable-at-best stuff in there.
He did. The argument against him was half based on misquotes and incomplete sentences, but the other half was indeed once his opinion - he argued that age of consent was a dumb concept and that instead it should be based on what the child wants to do and any harm they were subjected to.
He later on said he regretted this view because it was explained to him that there's no ability to consent and this always causes harm to the child. His original arguments were, in typical Stallman fashion, quite obsessed with definitions themselves, almost as if the subject at hand didn't really matter he was just bothered about how the definition had some flaws.
But even with that in mind... I can't feel comfortable knowing he defended this point of view, and it does significantly harm my opinion about him.
Everything you said there is pretty typical with high functioning ASD, up to and including others being uncomfortable with past behavior and statements.
I can't say I disagree with him - in an ideal world. Now all we need is a world where it's easy enough to tell if someone is mature enough to make those kinds of decisions, no one uses power imbalances to allow them to achieve their desires, kids are fully aware of the impact their decisions will have on them decades in the future, and on and on. That's clearly not the world we live in, and I expect it will never be, and so we err on the side of caution, and don't condone children engaging in certain activities until they're older, and even then only with people of a similar age until such a time where trying to stop them from engaging in potentially reckless behavior is more harmful than allowing them to do so.
Eh, I'm pretty close to this opinion.
A family member came out as non-binary, and I don't like to use they/them (for the same reason as Stallman), but I also think creating my own pronouns is more offensive, so I just use their first name, unless I can't easily avoid it (like this sentence). I'm not trying to be offensive, I just don't like they/them as angular pronouns. I also don't like "you" as both singular and plural, but I'm also not ready to use "y'all", so I refer to second person groups without the pronoun (if feasible).
On a related note, I also think gender is a social construct and not actually "real." Sex exists because it's a biological thing, but it shouldn't be directly tied to your role in society. To change my mind, I need empirical evidence that there's some unique difference between men and women (brain wave patterns?) that aligns groups of non-binary people or aligns trans people with people of the opposite sex. I personally don't think this exists, and gender fluidity is more a symptom of a culture that isn't well equipped to handle people who don't nicely fit into a bucket. I think gender is a useful metaphor for what's going on, and I absolutely support people fighting for using it to get the recognition they need, but I don't think it's an actual, scientifically proven thing.
The only real difference is that I use first names to refer to non-binary people's first names more frequently than to binary people. I hope that doesn't offend anyone, I just really don't like using the same pronoun for both singular and plural.
Singular they is over 600 years old by the way: https://www.oed.com/discover/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/?tl=true
As a trans person, my gender dysphoria is not something caused entirely by social gender roles. Medical transition has greatly alleviated the majority of it. Anecdotally, within the first week of hormone therapy, my dysphoria improved dramatically while only being out of the closet to 2 people outside of my therapist and the medical professionals who prescribed my hormones. It has continued to improve, although I'm still waiting for the surgery that will resolve the remaining things that hormones can't fix.
Also, there are studies around brain structure differences between men and women, and transgender people tended to have brain structures in line with their gender, not their assigned sex at birth: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_gender_incongruence#Brain_structure
Perhaps you should believe people when they tell you who they are, and get past your discomfort drawing arbitrary lines in grammar regarding pronouns, when singular they predates the fall of the Byzantine Empire by 75 years.
Sure, and "you" used to be exclusively plural. Language changes, and now you is exclusively singular in some parts of the world (e.g. the US "South" where "y'all" is the plural).
I want separate singular and plural pronouns. Some languages do this properly and don't even have gendered pronouns, such as Tagalog:
Sure, but sample sizes are small and many times they don't seem to control for hormone therapy.
That said, this one looks interesting:
And this one:
And this review of other studies:
This suggests there may be developmental differences between trans and cis individuals, and there seems to be a correlation between trans people and the sex associated with the gender they identify as.
The body of available science certainly indicates more researchis needed and could lead to answers that show exactly what differences exist between cis and trans people. I sincerely hope that happens. But as it stands,the research isn't conclusive.
Let's be extremely clear here, my support for policy will not be impacted whatsoever by the scientific research, regardless of the outcome. If you feel like hormone therapy or gender reassignment surgery or whatever other treatments will help you, you should be able to get them. Full stop. If you want to be treated as a man or a woman, I'll do that. If you want to be called by different pronouns, I'll do my best to do it, I just don't like pronouns that are both singular and plural because they can lead to confusion. That's it.
If there was a generally accepted gender-neutral set of pronouns (like in my example), I'd use them nearly exclusively. If the scientific evidence was clear cut, I'd admit as much. Neither is the case, so I'm left to find a happy medium that works for my and others in my life.
Ok, let's say he's right only when he talks about software.
That should do it. I hope.
EDIT: well and hardware too I guess.
EDIT2: oh and paid public toilets.
I criticized singular they/them for increasing language ambiguity and suggested replacing it with something new like xe/xer multiple times. The reply is usually a shitstorm and downvote tornado. I've given up on that front.
Probably because singular "they" predates singular "you" grammatically. Should we go back to using thou and thee instead of the singular you as well?
Doesn't feel like you want to have an honest argument when you ask how far we should go back on a proposal about going forward and don't address the single motivator ambiguity.
Correct, because there is no argument to be had. Intentionally refusing to use someone's pronouns is unacceptable, every time, with 0 exceptions. If there's a dire need to be explicitly clear you're talking about a single person, you could just use their name in that instance.
I always found this argument funny because how would you use pronouns for someone whose gender you do not know? They. It's they. E.g. you are given the sentence: Jordan went to the store to buy apples. And you want to ask a followup question regarding how many, you reply: How many apples did they buy? It's not that complicated. They has been used for gender ambiguity in everyone's lives since grammar school. People just have an inherent bias towards trans folks and it's incredibly depressing and sad.
And that's not how English was taught to me or 99℅ of the population (including English as a second or third language) 20+ years ago. Singular they was only used for situations where the gender (read as superficially visible sex) was factually unknown. You see a forgotten umbrella and never saw who forgot it: "Somebody forgot their umbrella." As soon as you only got a glimpse on the person forgetting it you would make a guess about he/she.
If you're younger than ~30 and from Great Britain, maybe. GB were the first to formalize and teach it like that less than 2 decades ago (if I recall correctly).
That's bullshit projection.
I, a non-native speaker, complain about increased ambiguity of the language because of singular they as a personal pronoun and make a proposal about new pronouns for the purpose.
You: Ah, must be transphobe. Let's ignore everything he said (which doesn't relate to transphobia at all).
It's so frustrating not to be able to have a discussion about stuff making a language harder than it needs to be without people invoking transphobia, like, instantly.
But hey, I called it: can't have a discussion about it and I've given up on it.
edit: tiny add-on. I was still taught gender-neutral he and only heard about they later while being discouraged to use it in writing.
You're contradicting yourself here. You're saying you were taught to use singular they when gender is unknown, yet claim that "How may apples did they buy" is wrong based on how you were taught English.
Does it matter whether gender is unknown or just unresolved? Not really, singular they is clearly intended to be a gender neutral pronoun and works in any situation where gender is ambiguous. It's not wrong for people to adopt it as a pronoun to refer to themselves any more than it is for a trans man to adopt "he/his" or a trans woman to adopt "she/hers."
At best your refusal to use it makes you sound like one of those people who gets offended at the word "literally" gaining a colloquial meaning that differs from its original definition. At worst, it presents as transphobia to claim "language purity" as the reason to be so adamantly against something that the trans community has largely adopted.
Unless he's championing paedophilia and bestiality, which he has done on a number of occasions. Or being an absolute creep with women, which he's also done.
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