I don't think he saw it as a hill worth dying on, just a random hill he happened to be shot on. It's part of a random scattering of thoughts he makes public.
Either way, I'm cancelling my FSF donations for caving into this witch hunt. It's long demise will be helmed by people that stand for nothing less they offend someone.
If you know Stallman at all, you know that he sees every single hill as a hill worth dying on. It's kinda the problem.
It's also the reason we have an Open Source movement, that being the watered down and more corporately palatable version of Stallman's idealistic vision.
Yes, he's totally uncompromising, has no sense of pragmatic tradeoffs or weighing one thing against another or deciding what is a good hill to die on. That's not the way I think is best to live my life, and it's probably best that most people don't live theirs that way either. Still, there should be a place in the world for people like him to have the freedom to be able to create and run their own organization with their own ideals.
If you ever talked with Stallman, read his texts, listened to his talks, you'd know that in certain ways Stallman's views are much weaker than what most people think they are. He doesn't have any issue with corps taking over the FOSS world as long as it compiles on trisquel and comes with a free license.
That's why I'm glad that he's going away now. Hope we can get someone who actually will stand up against the issues that the FOSS world is facing now in his seat.
The attitude you describe is much more represented by Linus Torvalds, and by the BSD folks, than by the GNU / GPL folks.
If the FSF experiences a drop in donations couldn't they interpret that as people trying to distance themselves with Stallman, and he's basically synonymous with the FSF?
But he's a freethinker, and freethinkers necessarily exist outside the mainstream. So, despite not liking him, I also don't like this turn of events.
It does seem arbitrary to me that the same sexual encounter is classified as rape in Arizona and not rape in Virginia. I suppose we have to draw that line somewhere arbitrary. But I wonder if it was a mistake to classify what is called "statutory rape" as "rape" at all. We can make it illegal without calling it rape.
That said, to me, this doesn't seem like a hill worth dying on. But then Stallman is not known for being picky about hills. People like him (or loathe him) because he's principled, and therefore no hill is too small.