(This post was originally going to be a comment, then I made it really long)

TLDR: Richard Stallman / RMS has been pretty well known as an important FOSS advocate and responsible for a lot of good things. He's also been hella creepy for decades, has been okay with pedophilia of various forms, and has pushed lotsa women out of tech with his creepiness. Recently this has boiled over with some leaked comments about Epstein and a mutual associate, Minsky.

Providing some context to the recent Stallman stuff the best I understand it:

If I understand correctly, he recently resigned from MIT and the FSF due to the unfolding scandal regarding MIT and its relationship with Epstein. Specifically, he resigned after a series of emails were released where he defended Marvin Minsky, a colleague who was on Epstein's island and was approached for sex with an underage girl. (See this post.) Stallman argued that it's likely Minsky thought she was consenting. He's got a pretty bad track record of not caring about the "underage" part.

Some people on Epstein's side are defending him by linking to the email thread saying "well, he retracted those statements supporting pedophilia", both of which are Pretty Damning Things imo. Like, at best, Stallman comes out of this as 1. Arguing the semantics of pedophilia and rape (when the events in question are pretty far from any ambiguous areas that need semantic clarification), 2. Having had believed for years that pedophilia (among other things) is not necessarily harmful, and 3. Not really understanding what problems there might be when there are sexual relations between a 70-something year old and a 17 year old.

So... Yeah. He is a hugely prominent figure in free software and adjacent communities. He's had a lot of important and generally good FOSS philosophies. I didn't know much else about him, but with these events I'm learning that he has had a history of creepy and shitty behavior. There are some pertinent twitter threads here, here, here.

A lot of people have had conversations recently about CaNcEl CuLtUrE and how HaRmFuL iT iS, and proposing that we give people the chance to apologize, learn, and grow. My understanding is he's had all these chances over decades and hasn't changed. By that, I mean I read this one short article by someone who worked for him. Here's another article talking about what gross things Stallman has done to negatively impacted marginalized groups in tech.