October 14th, 2024 Richard Stallman (aka “RMS”) is the founder of GNU and the Free Software Foundation and present-day voting member of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) board of directors and “Chief GNUisance” of the GNU project. He is responsible for innumerable contributions to the free software movement, setting its guiding principles, organizing political action, and directly contributing to a flourishing free software ecosystem. The majority of Stallman’s political activity has been of priceless value to society at large.
Drew DeVault (sway, sourcehut, hare… creator) wrote an article on this exact topic, asking autistic people on mastodon what they think of it. The tldr is that autistic people (those who answered) hate this excuse because they rather know when they make people uneasy to try to adjust, and also that if we need to tolerate this kind of discourse to make room for a minority of autistic people, then we are not doing a good job because it makes a lot of people really uneasy.