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There's often not a clear line separating the professional and the personal, and people in a job can feel uncomfortable with a person who has expressed troubling opinions outside the job.

But this is presuming that Stallman's behavior was only personal in the first place. He has a history of poor behavior at MIT and in his roles for the FSF, which definitely bleeds into the professional.

Sorry, But I've been around the block enough times here to know that your actual goal is to label this action as "punishment."

That's a position with enormous rhetorical value to you. You can use that framing to turn a conversation about a man's actions over time into a philosophical question.

That way you can avoid any inconvenient particular facts.

What could it be other than punishment? RMS committed no crime. What he did was offend certain people by having the audacity to speak up on behalf of his dead friend. That was his 'act.' Inconvenient enough?

What, indeed?

It's not punishment. The "most plausible scenario" is that he resigned "fully willingly".