I think it's fair to assume most people have basic "people" skills, humility, manners etc. Unfortunately that isn't the case with Stallman. He's an obsessive fundamentalist only concerned with one topic.
It's well known within a certain rather narrow community of people. The folks who booked him may just have read his name on a list of "vaguely important people who are willing to give speeches".
If your university hired someone who only spoke Mongolian but spit in people's faces when they extended their hand for a handshake, would you be upset at the speaker or the idiot who hired him?
RMS lacks basic social graces. He preaches to the choir but somehow still manages to piss them off with pedantic shit like GNU/Linux. Why doesn't he just copyright it so he can plaster the GNU logo all over everything and be done with it.
"If your university hired someone who only spoke Mongolian but spit in people's faces when they extended their hand for a handshake, would you be upset at the speaker or the idiot who hired him?"
If their spitting was common knowledge, as RMS's eccentricities are, then yes. Of course I would be upset primary with whoever booked them...
He does, however, provide a rider before to anyone considering inviting him to speak that makes his personal obsession and his inflexibility around that obsession abundantly and explicitly clear.
I have a suspicion that whoever booked him simply didn't read it, or didn't understand it.
I mean, come on now -- other people make lots of noise about his eccentricities, and he himself basically wears a signboard explaining them, and then people are still surprised?
Yes; they are likely better candidates for commencement speakers.
I wouldn't say rms "isn't a nice person" in this context -- he's just very focused on his cause, and he doesn't take detours or "tone it down" for the sake of avoiding temporary inconvenience to others. It's rare for people to stick to their own principles so studiously (unfortunately, perhaps?), so he even goes out of his way to warn them.
