The spin from the EFF is, I suppose, to be expected but a little disappointing.

Does anyone know what actually happened where?

Ok the contrary I found it very refreshing when they say they haven’t “seen eye-to-eye” in the first paragraph

That’s been true since forever

There's nothing on his site about it, but it is interesting to browse.

http://www.toad.com/gnu/

Reads like he would be a good friend of Stallman. No record of defending friends with shady friends though.

Yes, John is a very good friend of RMS’s.

John is entirely unlike RMS if you've ever met either of them.

I am not sure I would say “entirely unlike” even though their economic philosophies are literally poles apart. And they are friends despite these differences.

I’ve known rms since 1978 (back before he stopped cutting his hair) and have started two companies with John. I know the kind sides of each of them which are unfortunately often not mentioned these days.

Does sound like you know him better than I do :)

Back in the early 2000s I was the guy helping sort out John's open email relay complaints at my ISP. A few other random things too. We hosted the EFF and Internet Archive so my life was pretty busy. I've been less of a fan of the EFF over the years as they've adopted some fights that I think they're on the wrong side of (IE: fighting for censorship) but... ohwell...

Do you have an example of eff fighting for censorship?

...not eye to eye with Gilmore? Thanks for gnu tar, liberating bsd, parts of gnu make, gbd, curating binutils and gcc with Cygnus, helping in the crypto wars, frees/wan, boots, gnu radio, one laptop per child... so it might be hard to be eye to eye me thinks...

Sounds like there's more to this