The FSF and GNU project have always been a weird mix of things: - (Especially FSF) A political organization to advance the ideals of free software, or more gen

The FSF and GNU project have always been a weird mix of things: - (Especially FSF) A political organization to advance the ideals of free software, or more generally present a more equitable vision of how software can fit into society. Here RMS is effective, but for years now as a writer and thinker and not as an organizer or administrator. Here lots of others are qualified for those roles, but RMS has spent decades driving many of them off. - (Especially GNU) A particular technical vision - probably best summarized as "a free user-programmable Unix". Here, RMS is fairly effective, but it's not clear this technical vision is good anymore. Qualitative advancement often happened via long-term, sometimes acrimonious forks (GCC, Emacs) or in parallel (Linux). A small steering committee would likely be a better approach to avoid RMS's personal technical biases and blindspots. And here again, RMS's approach has made a lot of people who could significantly contribute here uninterested in returning to try to fix this. - A particular style of project/team management. This should have been dead, or at least not so dominant, as soon as Linux took off. But RMS has a style of working which is wildly out of sync with even his own contemporaries, let alone the current generation of programmers. And the development and administration end up bound to that, discouraging and occasionally completely forbidding anyone else. - RMS's attempt to rebuild a social environment he had and lost at MIT. Especially for "core projects" - Emacs, GCC, Hurd - you had to be RMS's friend, or at least RMS would come to think you were his friend. This means technical disagreements would tend to get interpreted as personal betrayals, which is unproductive at best. As long as RMS demands the organizations fulfill all of these (and especially the last) role, the good parts will never succeed dragging the bad parts along.