I got into GNU by reading about free software, then attempting to contribute code to the Hurd ca. 2002, becoming a Guile co-maintainer ca. 2007, co-organizing a GNU Hackers Meeting in 2011, starting Guix in 2012.

I made friends along the way and learned a lot in a variety of domains—technical, political, social. From my early readings of GNU essays to my technical musings, GNU shaped part of what I am.

GNU’s still here, with tons of users many of which have come to value freedom, with projects like GCC, Emacs, and Guix alive and kicking!

However, while #FreeSoftware production and use has grown by orders of magnitude in that time span, GNU has failed to attract. Chaotic, arrogant, and divisive leadership led the project to be isolated (GFDL vs. Debian anyone?), to lose its dominant position (lack of GCC plugins fueled non-copyleft LLVM), and, worse, to alienate minorities.

GNU as a project has suffered from the founder’s syndrome.

I’ve seen high-profile contributors and entire sub-projects flee over the years. Some of us sought to pursue GNU’s mission by setting up the GNU Assembly, with a vision for collective governance: https://gnu.tools.

Fatigue, lack of incentives, and lack of a shared roadmap prevented it from going very far (yet?).

What’s next?

My take: building an OS remains relevant; we can build a truly empowering OS by combining the strengths of the toolchain, Guix, Emacs, and the Hurd—the opposite of a largely non-copyleft Rust/JS/Linux-based combo that puts developers and corporate interests first despite being #FreeSoftware “de jure”. In this day and age though, I believe we should also focus on scaling down, supporting limited-capacity devices.