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Thomas Bushnell, former maintainer of GNU Hurd until his dismissal by Richard Stallman, has opined in a biased blog post that the forced resignation of Stallman from MIT and the Free Software Foundation is deserved.
https://medium.com/@thomas.bushnell/a-reflection-on-the-departure-of-rms-18e6a835fd84
So Richard Stallman has resigned from his guest position at MIT and as President of the Free Software Foundation. You can easily find out all you need to know about the background from a web search and some news articles. I recommend in particular Selam G's original articles on this topic for background, and for an excellent institutional version, the statement from the Software Freedom Conservancy.
But I'll give you a personal take. By my reckoning, I worked for RMS longer than any other programmer.
[...]4) RMS's loss of MIT privileges and leadership of the FSF are the appropriate responses to a pattern of decades of poor behavior. It does not matter if they are appropriate responses to a single email thread, because they are the right thing in the total situation.
5) I feel very sad for him. He's a tragic figure. He is one of the most brilliant people I've met, who I have always thought desperately craved friendship and camaraderie, and seems to have less and less of it all the time. This is all his doing; nobody does it to him. But it's still very sad. As far as I can tell, he believes his entire life's work is a failure.
6) The end result here, while sad for him, is correct.
The free software community needs to develop good leadership, and RMS has been a bad leader in many ways for a long time now. He has had plenty of people who have tried to help him, and he does not want help.
MIT needs to establish as best it can that paramount are the interests of women to have a safe and fair place to study and work. It must make clear that this is more important than the coddling of a whiny child who has never reached the emotional maturity to treat people decently.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday September 23 2019, @10:41PM
I'm not too worried. You can get a pretty good idea of who is likely to take over based on who is making the decision, and you can read the board's resumes [fsf.org] for yourself and draw your own conclusions. For example, I doubt that Bradley Kuhn, who started helping out at FSF in 1992 and is now running the Software Freedom Conservancy, is likely to choose a corporate-friendly anti-copyleft person to be in charge of the FSF.
One of the things I've learned over the years in various forms of organizational leadership is that there's no such thing as an irreplaceable person in a well-established organization. For example, one local non-profit group I was part of had our vice-president suddenly drop dead one afternoon, and while it was a bit rough in the aftermath somebody else stepped up to do his job and the work of the group continued much the way it had while he had been around. I've seen businesses fire people that thought they were untouchable, and again there was some adjusting but ultimately there was nothing major that changed. Smart organizations make contingency plans and distribute knowledge and responsibility as much as they can specifically so that they can handle these kinds of upheavals.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.