I can understand a US Attorney being reckless, but I cannot believe MIT would act so cowardly. If not even hacker-friendly institutions like MIT will side with people like Aaron, it's a sad state of affairs.
I'm reminded of the time MIT threw Star Simpson under a bus when she wore a breadboard on a sweatshirt to Logan Airport and the local authorities freaked:
I think "EFF and the students involved handled it well, and MIT didn't do anything egregiously wrong." MIT didn't provide any legal assistance; that was all EFF.
Did he really leave? His office is in the Stata center at MIT. I thought he was still an unpaid "research associate" at MIT. Is that no longer correct?
Stallman stopped taking a salary from MIT so that MIT would have no claim of ownership of GNU. He continued (continues?) to keep on office on the campus, referring to himself as a "squatter".
There was a big shift in the 70s and 80s to a bigger administration and to administrators who were "professional university administrators" (BU/random liberal arts alumni with a mssters in admin), vs. students/alumni/faculty.
This was a product of a greater "in loco parentis" and services available for students, as well as bigger government grants (requiring more admins on that side)
It correlated with the downfall of MIT as an amazing place, outside bio/biotech. It would not be my first choice of CS school today (Stanford by a mile, then CMU, then maybe a few others including Waterloo), or science (Caltech). For computer security, I'd probably say Cambridge (UK), maybe Stanford, maybe Technion, and a few others.
In loco parentis wasn't the problem. There was a time when the MIT president would bail students out of jail in loco parentis. The rest of your comment is on target though.
He's being hyperbolic; MIT is still a very friendly hacker school. Aaron DID break the law, and I would not expect ANY school to stand behind him when he blatantly violated the law. It's pretty simple: don't break the law, much less using MIT resources to do so.
That said, they could have handled it with a lot more finesse, especially when it is such horrible publicity for them. I suspect this has more to do with eager lawyers than it does MIT's culture.
Keep in mind that MIT is an academic organization and is committed to, well, academics, not politics; e.g. Stallman did not belong there anyway.
> MIT is an academic organization and is committed to, well, academics, not politics
Politics is too important to be left to politicians. If you refuse to take control over your environment, you cannot expect it to remain friendly to you, for you are no longer a force shaping it. Academics is politics.
Yeah, what do academics have to say about law, government, management, or medicine, anyway? These important fields should be left to professionals, why are schools sticking their noses in?
> Yeah, what do academics have to say about law, government, management, or medicine, anyway? These important fields should be left to professionals, why are schools sticking their noses in?
You misunderstand me. Of course, you are correct, but it's not the role of the school to be political, but instead to inform their students on how to be political. When people choose a school to go to, it should be about their academics and should not be swayed by politics. (Of course, politics always creeps in, which is why I'm never going to give one of my alma maters and money.)
I can understand a US Attorney being reckless, but I cannot believe MIT would act so cowardly. If not even hacker-friendly institutions like MIT will side with people like Aaron, it's a sad state of affairs.