Speaking to the gathered throngs at the organisation's LibrePlanet virtual event, Stallman said he was now on the Free Software Foundation Board of Directors once again.

“We were working on a video to announce this with, but that turned out to be difficult, we didn't have experience doing that sort of thing so it didn't get finished but here is the announcement. Some of you will be happy at this, and some might be disappointed, but who knows? In any case, that's how it is, and I'm not planning to resign a second time."

Stallman resigned both as president and FSF board member in September 2019, saying: "I am doing this due to pressure on the Foundation and me over a series of misunderstandings and mischaracterisations of what I have said."

Stallman got into hote water when he cast doubt upon the reports that AI pioneer Marvin Minsky had sexually assaulted one of Epstein’s victims. In an email chain sent to the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) mailing list that was published by Motherboard, Stallman said that “the most plausible scenario” was that Epstein’s victim “presented herself to [Marvin Minsky] as entirely willing”.

Stallman also described the distinction between a 17 or 18-year-old victim as a “minor” detail, and suggested that it was an “injustice” to refer to it as a “sexual assault”. The emails first came to light after MIT alum Selam Jie Gano posted about them on Medium, and she said they would have been seen by undergraduates who are themselves 17 or 18.

MIT professor Marvin Minsky, who died in 2016, was chums with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Stallman's resignation was welcomed at the time by some prominent free software advocates including GNOME executive director Neil McGovern and FSF sister organisation FSF Europe.