GNU Grep & Sed: Fallout Within The GNU FSF Camp

It seems there's some dissenting views finally being pushed into the center of the table for discussion about the GNU project and Free Software Foundation. This comes as the maintainer of GNU Grep and Sed has announced his resignation from the projects.

Paolo Bonzini had been the GNU Sed maintainer for the past eight years and GNU Grep for three years while also having commit access to Autoconf, Automake, Libtool, gnulib, libsigsegv, and Bison. However, he's stepping away from this all. This announcement comes after the GnuTLS project moved away too. While these developers support the Free Software Foundation, there's growing disagreement over some decisions being made by the FSF and Richard Stallman.

The GnuTLS project moved outside of the GNU infrastructure earlier this month and is no longer considered a GNU project or require the Free Software Foundation's copyright assignment. This came after major disagreements with the FSF decisions and practices.

Among the problems expressed with the Free Software Foundation come down to:

- For a GNU project to be the best in its field, it basically needs to ignore any recommendations from the Free Software Foundation. Among cited examples was the recent conversion of GCC's C code-base to C++ and GNOME Using JavaScript as its extension language for the GNOME Shell.

- GNU is doing too little for the Free Software Foundation and the FSF is not doing enough for GNU.

- Attaching the GNU label to a project has no attractiveness anymore.

Paolo Bonzini also criticized the Free Software Foundation's lack of support for their high-priority projects. The lack of progress among the FSF high-priority projects is also something that I have openly complained about several times in the past: FSF's High-Priority Driver Project Doesn't Move, The Sad State Of FSF's High Priority Projects, etc.

Bonzini believes this is the first move towards the irrelevance of the GNU. His statements against the FSF/GNU can be found in this mailing list message.