Look, that's the reason he's gone. So you said it yourself. That was his decision.
It's a pretty sad state of affairs. Warn him to take the discussion elsewhere and then wait for the outrage storm to blow over. People have such short attention spans in these social media days anyway.
They were. A casual look at Stallman's history will show you that his views (and behaviors), as well as his discussion of them in a public forum, are not by any means new or unknown within the community. They _have_ been ignored for a very long time by the university, the FSF, etc, right until he chose to take this particular moment in time to repeat his views, specifically in connection with a recent scandal.
I think that this _is_ sad in the sense that had folks been stricter with him earlier on, perhaps he would have understood why it was not a good idea to continue doing that, and avoided making these specific public comments at this specific time. It's really hard for me to believe that no one has ever _tried_ to tell him to (essentially) "take the discussion elsewhere" about this stuff, so I have to assume that people did, but he did not think that he had to follow their advice: he relied on being able to say what he liked, wherever he liked, with no real consequences.
And until now, he was correct. But today, people no longer believe that it's ok to be heralded as a pillar of the community (which as both the president of the FSF and the holder of an honorary position at MIT, he is) and be able to say whatever you'd like in a public forum. And enough people believe this today to make these institutions be unable to just ignore his behavior indefinitely.
Yes, and that's basically why there is a "CSAIL minus RMS" mailing list.
Firing people for political views, especially expressed in coherent not aggressive way is certainly violation of free speech and thought. It's also currently legal in US.
