On March 21, 2021, stallman announced at LibrePlanet 2021 — the free-software-foundation's annual conference — that he was rejoining the FSF board of directors. The announcement was unexpected; stallman had resigned from the FSF presidency in September 2019 following the stallman-2019-resignation controversy, and many in the free software community had assumed his institutional role was permanently ended.
The reaction was immediate and intense. Within days, an open letter calling for Stallman's removal from the FSF board and demanding broader governance reforms at the organization collected signatures from over 3,000 individuals, including prominent contributors to major free software projects, employees of technology companies, and representatives of allied organizations. Several organizations — including the GNOME Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and others — issued statements.
A counter-letter defending Stallman's return collected over 2,000 signatures, arguing that his contributions to the gnu-project and the free-software-definition were inseparable from his continued role, that the original controversy had been handled unfairly, and that removing him would damage rather than help the movement.
The FSF board declined to remove Stallman, and he remained on the board. The free-software-foundation lost some corporate sponsors and individual donors. The FSFE and other allied organizations issued statements distancing themselves from the FSF's decision while not wholly condemning the free software philosophy.
The 2021 controversy revealed that the free-vs-open-source-schism-1998-2007 was now accompanied by a second fracture: between those for whom stallman's personal conduct and public statements were disqualifying regardless of his intellectual contributions, and those who argued that the four-freedoms philosophy was larger than any individual and that the movement could not simply excise its founder without severe damage to its coherence.
The controversy intersected with gplv3-and-later-career-2006-present questions about whether the free software movement's institutional structures — the FSF, GNU project governance, the network of FSF-affiliated organizations including georg-greve's FSFE — were adequately equipped to navigate leadership succession and community governance at scale.