The creator of FOSS BIOS Libreboot, Leah Rowe, wrote a book. It’s called “a mostly bloodless coup” and it’s a sort of memoir and it’s on her website. The contents are really frightening. In it she:
- Breaks a man’s nose at a gay bar because he won’t have sex with her
- Verbally abuses her girlfriend daily
- Later moves the now-ex-girlfriend back in with her because she “wanted a driver” and “wanted a maid”. Keeps her there for 4 years, verbally abusing her the entire time
- Cynically joins the “Stallman Support” campaign, despite not supporting him actually (and knowingly collaborating with white supremacists on the campaign), to distract from the coup she was doing at Libreboot. (For the record I hate Stallman too, this is just to highlight the scale of consciously manipulative stuff she’s happy to do to entire communities when it serves her interests)
- Stalks, while calling the police to snitch on, a family because they offered her heroin
- Gets kicked out of more trans support groups/IRC channels/Discord servers than I can count
- Identifies as a compulsive liar. Describes many of the lies in detail
- Wrecks seemingly every hotel room she stays in, with vomit and physical destruction from drunkenness
- Describes terrorizing everyone around her and feeling no remorse
- Describes that she is not capable of feeling remorse
- Identifies as a sociopath/ASPD, but insists that cognitive behavioral therapy and talk therapy are equivalent to conversion therapy for sociopaths, that fearing sociopaths is discriminatory, and that society should be restructured to accommodate sociopaths
- So many more things
Look I hate the FSF and Stallman, and I have a Librebooted computer that I rely on every day. I knew there was a bunch of drama around Leah but I had no idea that it was like this. In all the things above, I’m not “reinterpreting” the events, it’s her words. For example with the guy whose nose she broke, here’s what she said:
“There was one person who tried to seduce me all night, before deciding not to come home with me, which annoyed me as I was indeed quite horny. My taxi arrived. I asked the driver to wait, went back inside, hugged him, smiled, and broke his nose. I saw a blur that was his face falling backward as I calmly and quickly walked out of the bar, my whim now satisfied. His friend called me a dirty [T-slur] as I quickly entered the cab, unscathed. I did it on a whim, feeling no hatred or malice in me whatsoever. I felt great satisfaction as the driver took me home, and I worked on Libreboot all night.”
I just haven’t seen this being discussed anywhere and I don’t know how a community manages a person who has done these things.
She also created the “canoeboot” project to troll GNU Boot. She was butthurt that GNU forked libreboot after she started accepting binary blobs in the project.
I’m a little ways into the book, and it’s really good. She might be a horrible person but the memoir is a really good window into a way of thinking.
i just feel like its more “what if the worst aspects of 16 year old me tried to write the autobiographical parts of mein kampf”
Can someone breakdown why the OP mentions they dislike FSF and Stallman so much?
Because FSF and Stallman have huge beef with Leah and Libreboot, and I want to make it clear that I’m not some FSF or Stallman fangirl who’s just trying to continue the beef.
That doesn’t answer my question. I didn’t even know about any of that! I want to know why so many people hate them both
While Stallman and the FSF have done great things for FOSS software, Richard Stallman is a man who has needed to Shut The Fuck Up for well over two decades. Every time he decides to share some dipshit opinion he manages to set not just FOSS Software but all of nerdom back
He once had to have someone explain to him why he needed to immediately run back a post that was basically “but what if someone underage consents?” (To his credit, he did run it back)
He eats his own foot peelings in the middle of conference talks
He is…a parody of gross unsocialized nerds except it’s unironic
He once had to have someone explain to him why he needed to immediately run back a post that was basically “but what if someone underage consents?” (To his credit, he did run it back)
not so fun fact: aaron schwartz had some similar, really weird views about this that he posted publicly, but that all got memory holed.
Earnestly anyone else I would assume hiding ill intent, but with Stallman i earnestly think he’s just too autistic to realize when he has an exceptionally stupid opinion that might sound fine in a frictionless vacuum with spherical cows
Well the Libreboot docs read like schitzo ramblings, so this totally tracks
I hate the. FSF and Stallman
Eeehhh, did I miss something? Stallman is pretty much why we have open source software today. The guy goes a bit far personally with only free software, bit that is his choice.
So what did I miss this time that warrants new hate for Stallman?
RMS said RMS stuff, there were many gritted teeth, and general butt hurtness, he got cancelled and fired for about 30 seconds his come back annoyed many
Hating RMS is this thing edgy teens say nowadays for some reason, it allows them to signal their position while relinquishing the responsibility to think critically. Classic Reddit behavior. Typically these are high school or college age kids who don’t really know anything about him just that he’s weird and that he said some weird stuff online.
In real life your posts don’t matter. It means nothing. Your positions are not praxis. They have zero effect on the material world.
Saying you hate RMS is like saying you hate Scooby Doo – its completely meaningless. You might as well say you’re a fucking pirate. It’s a completely non sensical statement.
Your positions are not praxis. They have zero effect on the material world.
Until they do. If your take causes problems the moment you act on it, it is inherently a problem itself.
New???
People have tried to find ways to hate him since way before even Linux arrived on the scene and he got pissy because people called the OS Linux and not just the kernel.
TBF he’s correct on that one, Linux actually is just the kernel and the OS normally built around it is the project he started ~7 years before Linux was ever a thing. Given his OS project had a political/ethical message that Linux completely disregards, it’s completely understandable he might be a tad irked that his work is lumped in under the kernel guy’s.
Even if it sounds silly to us “normal users” if you put yourself in his head it makes sense.
That’s fair, I edited my comment because I read read it and decided that this is in fact nothing new. Still extremely annoying and shows a complete lack of critical analysis.
RMS is a freak but we are all indebted to him for giving us the GPL.
So wait, it’s considered “edgy” to not like people that argue FOR PEDOPHILIA? That’s wild.
Someone check this user’s hard drive immediately
Look man, I know your brain is probably pickled from the internet, but I’ll engage on good faith against my better judgement.
I’m not defending RMS, I’m saying that it’s weird to preface anything that has to do with him with “first off, I hate RMS and the FSF”. It’s textbook virtue signaling and its cringe. RMS is not a pedophile. He said some problematic shit on the internet. Saying problematic shit on the internet is not real life.
Even of he was a pedophile, RMS is not your responsibility. You don’t need to preface any post that references FSF with some qualifier to signal to people you’re on their side. No one fucking cares what you think of him.
Furthermore, RMS has actually made something important in material reality by making the GPL and coreutils among other things. This has had a measurable impact on the world. What you are doing does not. Your opinion of him is about as relevant as your opinion on Scooby Doo.
Maybe you can search for some emails where he does indeed argue in defense of pedophilia… Draw your own conclusions. It’s not new btw. We don’t talk as much about it because we separate “art from the artist” or whatever.
I’m not going to relitigate this since it’s been argued to death but no one on the internet is responsible for RMS’ weird emails. You are not responsible for him, and posters don’t need to preface all of their posts by professing their hatred for him. You can think he’s creepy and weird and not make it your personality.
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I was wondering the same too, so far I’ve found a series of blog posts from an MIT student that led to his removal in 2019. This is the main post and this is a later appendix that added further accusations.
it’s not new; are you saying that you didn’t read this and look at the sources or are you saying that you just don’t care he did (and does) these things?
(i strongly suspect it’s the second, and i doubt you have any interest in having a good faith conversation, so i am unlikely to reply to whatever deflection you responded with - but to anyone else reading this comment, please just take a couple minutes and read through the report if your only awareness of stallmen is gnu)
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There’s two kinds of projects in FOSS: those made because someone hates something and wants to replace it, and those made by people who love something.
The first is often made by assholes and sociopaths. I try to fill my life with the second kind.
I think you should avoid things created out of hate.
I think you should avoid things created out of hate.
Hey, it’s not my fault my parents decided having a baby would be a great way to spite each other!
You are not a thing.
If you go that deep you better just end it because there is little to live for in this world if you cut out anything for which you dont like the creator.
I generally don’t care who created what as long as we’re not talking Hitler levels of asshole. If need be, fork the project witga new group of people or something
I didn’t say anything about the creator but more the reason the thing exists. Reactionary projects tend to just suck and be full of drama. I’m never surprised when it’s discovered its creators are jerks.
Honestly, you’d be surprised how easy it is to avoid distasteful things and people.
Other firmwares exist, even libreboot is a fork of coreboot. The availability of the code is not an automatic invite to start judging it’s authors. The four freedoms are there so exercise them.
Does she know society is already structured to accommodate socio and psychopaths and thats why we are where we are now?
I assume (you know the saying…) that she doesn’t feel like it has probably because it’s not her in power. Despite everything that has happened and is happening.
society should be restructured to accommodate sociopaths
JFC it has been. So much easier to get ahead in an authoritarian capitalist society, or even open source projects, if you have no empathy or guilt.
History seems like one great pendulum where the socio/psychopaths go so far being assholes that those with empathy overcome their desire to not harm to undo the evil and swing it back. Then become complacent until the next rise of the paths. Seems like it’s been two steps back, three steps forward for a few centuries. Time for another swing, and this time it’d be really nice if we kept the paths out of power systemically.
Shitty people can do good work. She sounds like a straight cunt.
Is it truly that hard to be a halfway decent human being in these times?
It is quite easy to be a completely decent human being in any time.
I feel like it’s the chaotic types that have the most impact on the world (for better or worse) because they are the loudest, while the majority are decent people, they just tend to not be as loud and are not as noticed.
You tend to learn more about the many bad people from the internet, but everyone I meet in my daily life is just trying to get by in life, one day at a time.
I believe our social systems are designed to empower the worst people and push down the ones who have a shot at helping others. But I’ve also known a number of sociologists.
If I’m misrepresenting your discipline, any sociologist out there are more than welcome to correct me.
why was this account created 6 hours ago and has only made this post?
Because I’m literally afraid of Leah. In the book she describes ruining people’s lives for slighting her.
If Leah reads this, please ruin my life. You cannot. You suck. :-)
I guess thats true. I was worried it was gonna be another unfounded smear job of a trans woman but im reading the thing and… yeah…
Bad people can be trans. Trans people can do bad things. OP respected their pronouns and didn’t make the post about them being trans.
Its mostly my experiences from the tumblr/discord/twitter/bluesky circle of hell where anyone whos trans get pedo accusations for breathing and a 50 page google doc that ends up boiling down to “they were mean sometimes to people that wanted to hunt them down” or “they drew a ship I don’t like”
i fucking hate you. go away forever
Why?
i was hungry
Hungry fella.
I’m not willing to claim that she hasn’t done any of these things and generally if a stranger tells you that they’re terrible, you can trust it insofar that you likely aren’t missing out if they’re lying, but has anyone corroborated her claims so that we know she’s not just self-destructing her public image?
- Identifies as a compulsive liar. Describes many of the lies in detail
But all the rest of this is totally true, I promise.
I’m in the openbsd mailing list, she’s a hard worker.
Why she have meth face though
Good question! It’s the meth.
Has meth behaviour as well
I didn’t like her before. Now I like her less.
