> As a potential contributor, I'm scared away by their practices of turning down improvements on political grounds. As a potential contributor I suggest you to

> As a potential contributor, I'm scared away by their practices of turning down improvements on political grounds. As a potential contributor I suggest you to be present on their mailing list (filter for OSX and other keywords if you wish) to have a voice when needed. > Their technology is stagnating and becoming more and more irrelevant as alternatives are catching up or surpassing them (clang/llvm) I would say clang+LLVM is a poor example, because for C/C++ they're directly comparable in final performance (state of the art). The Clang suite is newer and I'd argue benefits from this and the lack of legacy. Then Apple has it as their compiler of choice and this entails a lot of dedicated work force. Instead I'd say GNU/FSF have stagnated in their methods of collaboration. I've looked at their GCC website. It probably looked not too different in 1999. That's not a bad thing but mailing lists... I understand the love for e-mail but not the mailing lists. I think if the wonder called Rust didn't embrace the new ways of thinking, communication and tooling, it would not have developed into what it is today and as fast as it has. Finally GNU/FSF may have served their purpose. They spawned the idea of radically free and open source software. A decade later (1990s-2000s) the thousands of neat programs were being made for Win32 and very few developers chose to open source their creations even when the software was perpetually free. "I dont want others to see my code" sometimes out of fear of being judged, remember those arguments? Think of the developer effort wasted in discontinued programs that are no longer available/working and either have no successors or their successors had to be remade from scratch. Thankfully nowadays the mentality has changed and it's rare to see a free/shareware program that still remains closed to the public.