Dude. RMS has a history going way back. No doubt people have been telling him (both in informal and formal settings) to curb his behavior in private for years. This was, as has been said before, the last straw.

You don’t have privy to his HR record at MIT and neither do I. But I’ll bet it looks closer in size and volume to Bart Simpson’s file than it does Lisa Simpson.

It is hard to fire people in academia. They found a legit, lawsuit-proof excuse to can him and took it.