Mob Mentality Threatens the Free Software Movement [video]
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> MIT fired him from his job as a professor at the university
He had no such job - he in fact emphatically left MIT employment (as research staff, he was never a professor) before starting GNU so that MIT wouldn't have a copyright claim on his work. He had an office at MIT, nonetheless, because he had politically powerful friends.
See https://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.en.html: "In January 1984 I quit my job at MIT and began writing GNU software. Leaving MIT was necessary so that MIT would not be able to interfere with distributing GNU as free software. If I had remained on the staff, MIT could have claimed to own the work, and could have imposed their own distribution terms, or even turned the work into a proprietary software package. I had no intention of doing a large amount of work only to see it become useless for its intended purpose: creating a new software-sharing community. However, Professor Winston, then the head of the MIT AI Lab, kindly invited me to keep using the lab's facilities."
The speaker goes on to make these comments about what cancel culture teaches:
> The other thing that cancel culture teaches that there's no forgiveness about anything, right? The minute you make a mistake, you are forever shunned by everyone else, and - that's wrong, that's completely antithetical to everything the free software movement is about.
That's an excellent sign that what happened to RMS is not cancel culture - multiple FSF board members spent a long time working with him and trying to help him understand his mistakes (see e.g. http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2019/10/15/fsf-rms.html and https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/52587.html), because they don't believe in cancel culture.
I do agree with the guy's conclusion, though - the FSF should be transparent about this and take a stand and make it clear why they believe RMS is an asset to the board, and also make it clear whether they believe that signers of the petition are part of the free software community. The announcement shouldn't have come as a shock. (All the people who keynoted the FSF-run conference where RMS announced his return were coauthors of the letter. The guy seems to focus on Ehmke a lot, but she's just a signatory.)