Richard Stallman quits the Free Software Foundation and MIT immediately

Richard Stallman leaves MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and also retires as chairman and board member of the Free Software Foundation. His departure follows controversial statements about victims of Jeffrey Epstein.

Stallman is announcing his departure from MIT’s Csail on his site, reporting that this is coming after pressure on MIT and himself over a series of “misunderstandings and mischaracterizations.” He gives no further explanation. At the same time, the Free Software Foundation is announcing Stallman’s departure as chairman and board member. The foundation, founded by Stallman, will immediately start the search for a successor.

Last week, Stallman was outraged over emails related to Jeffrey Epstein, the American billionaire who was convicted of sex with underage girls and died in his cell over new charges.

Stallman defended the 2016 AI pioneer at MIT, Marvin Minsky, who has been accused of raping a 17-year-old girl. Stallman said, “It’s morally absurd to define rape in a way that depends on small details like what country she was in and whether the victim was eighteen or seventeen.” In the email conversation Vice reported on, Stallman said the most believable scenario was that she “showed herself as if she was fully willing” to cooperate. Portions of the conversation were put on Medium by Selam Gano, a robotics engineer at MIT.

MIT itself has been under fire for weeks for financial ties to Epstein. Stallman is a pioneer of the free software movement. He started the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation, among others.

Update, 08.30: Added source to Medium and added quotes from the emails.