@alexl Only part of what he has been accused of was distorted. It took him years to get that there is no "but it's consensual" escape hatch to underage sex (as RMS himself writes in
https://www.stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html#14_September_2019_(Sex_between_an_adult_and_a_child_is_wrong) ).
It's part of his (apparent) approach to life of having strong opinions, strongly held: he sets up some theory, however flawed, and then it takes years for others to undo that position. RMS _always_ required a significant amount of cleaning up after him by those around him, pretty much wherever he went (and I don't mean that in a hygiene sense because I don't know about that). In this instance it simply was too much to clean up after, _even though_ some of the statements were trivial to rebuke.
Why was that? Because it was all too much in line with his public persona.
So, he was ousted for holding and expressing undesirable opinions, and some of them were distorted. The last part was unfair, I agree, but I also think that the rest was enough of a reason to get rid of him, not necessarily because of these particular opinions, but because his way of expressing and defending them made him a liability to the organization.
Let's move on to what happened more recently:
After all this happened, the FSF made a decision to appoint somebody to their BoD (who apparently aims for President) who has shown for the last 20+ years that he's an ineffective communicator, an ineffective campaigner, an absent software maintainer or developer, and a high-maintenance personality (to put it mildly).
So he's not a good match for the role. He also carries that baggage. Yet they picked him.
That doesn't look well for the FSF: Either they don't know better (in which case, wtf are they doing?) or they know better but have found no suitable alternative (in which case they could as well shut down), or - most likely - they're simply helping a buddy back to the steering wheel, which is textbook nepotism.
It also doesn't look well for RMS: Even though he should by now have learned that his presence is a liability for the FSF, he's still going back. That may be good for him personally, but he doesn't seem to care at all for "the cause".
So congrats to RMS for being back to a leadership role (because apparently he won't settle for anything less - a sign of a principled person, indeed), and congrats to the FSF for demonstrating its helplessness.
(Nothing in this piece covers the problem that some people argue that they don't feel safe around him. This is mostly because it's a) not necessary to argue that RMS is a lousy choice for any leadership position, b) something that detractors did claim in the past to be merely a political ploy and that they could bring up again to distract from that RMS is a disaster along all other dimensions as well. While I disagree with the idea that all or even most people are claiming this for political reasons, I'll stick to the bits that aren't potential minefields.)
@alexl Oh, stfu.
It's not fake news, you can easily read the documented decades of bad behaviour from RMS. We're not upset about his uncompromising attitude towards free software. We're talking about him being a constant sex pest and his decades of support for pedophilia.