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 troublin

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.