On September 16, 2019, stallman resigned from his position at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and from the presidency of the free-software-foundation, positions he had held for decades. The resignations followed the publication and rapid circulation of emails in which Stallman made comments defending Marvin Minsky — an MIT professor who had been named in legal proceedings related to Jeffrey Epstein — by disputing characterizations of whether a sexual encounter involving a trafficked minor could be described as "assault." The comments were widely condemned.
The controversy had been building through the preceding week. Vice Media published an article on September 13, 2019 reporting on the emails. The reaction within the free software and academic communities was swift and largely negative. MIT faced institutional pressure; the FSF faced calls for Stallman's removal. Stallman announced his resignation from both positions three days later.
The event intersected with fsf-board-controversy-2019, the contemporaneous broader controversy about the FSF's governance. Stallman had been FSF president since the founding-of-fsf in 1985 — the organization had effectively been inseparable from him for thirty-four years.
The free software movement found itself confronting a question it had not previously had to answer: whether the ideas of the four-freedoms, copyleft, and the free-software-definition could be institutionalized without their originator at the helm. The FSF continued operating under the board's direction, with a new executive director. GNU Project maintainers faced parallel questions about whether and how stallman's role in that project would change.
stallman's own position was that his comments had been misrepresented and taken out of context, and he maintained this characterization in subsequent public statements. The controversy produced extensive commentary across the free software community and beyond about the relationship between an ideology and the personal conduct of its founder, and about how open source and free software communities govern themselves.
The 2019 resignation set the stage for the stallman-2021-return-fsf and the community fracture that announcement produced.