OS and Software > All Things Unix > Longtime GNU maintainer steps down.

I am less pleased to announce that I am resigning from maintenance of
GNU sed (after 8 years) as well as GNU grep (after 3). I have also
given up commit access to Autoconf, Automake, Libtool, gnulib,
libsigsegv and Bison.
...
I am grateful to the FSF staff for the support I have had since
I joined the GNU project in 1999. However, like him I am in major
disagreement with some decisions of the FSF and of Richard Stallman.

This boils down to these three points:

1) To put it somewhat bluntly, the only way for a GNU project to be a
leader in its field is to _ignore_ whatever recommendations come from
the FSF.
...
2) GNU is doing too little for the FSF, and the FSF is doing too
little for GNU. Due to the huge success that free software had since
the appearance of the GNU manifesto, distributing free software is
absolutely not the exclusive of GNU anymore, and that's a good thing.
...
Attaching the GNU label to one's program has absolutely no
attractiveness anymore. People expect GNU to be as slow as an elephant,
rather than as slick as a gazelle, and perhaps they are right.

Thoughts?

1) To put it somewhat bluntly, the only way for a GNU project to be a
leader in its field is to _ignore_ whatever recommendations come from
the FSF.

On the third point, I never saw the GNU label as especially valuable.