Actually it seems a friend of his/her was fired not the maintainer. Now, how do we know the facts? I don't think blind support is a good thing.
Without full disclosure I hope GNU will just fork the libreboot project and take further measures to protect itself from such situations.
Don't see what good forking would do since AFAIK Leah Rowe is by far the biggest contributor to libreboot. I think the contribution of the GNU project was more in project infrastructure than actual code. I only see 3 - 4 people appear in the libreboot commit logs, and as long as they all agree with Leah's direction, a fork doesn't mean anything and is still born.
Also, there is no reason for the GNU project to fork libreboot since they can still use it as before. The beauty of free software.
As additional information has appeared recently, I add it here. Allegedly, some contributions from others have been committed in Rowe's name, and at least one contributor published his opinion of Rowe's leadership:
