As a 50 year old, GNU has been there in the background for most of my life as a computing professional. It has not grown much as an organisation or ideas base, but clung firmly to timeless principles.
That continuity and longevity is testimony to the power of an ideal, that computing belongs in the hands of the people, as a tool and not as a weapon in the hands of those who seek domination.
> The initial GNU announcement was crazy. Rewriting all of Unix? It was like Stallman had said, "I need help building a free rocket ship to Mars, and I'm getting started right after I finish this Thanksgiving dinner."
I hope to one day be known for 1 really crazy idea that somehow paid off, and not the 999 obviously bad ideas that it took to get there.
For me the greatest achievement of GNU is proving that software does not need to be proprietary. There was a time when Windows and other proprietary Unixes ruled the roost. Due to the easy availability of fundamental GNU software at the right time we saw the cambrian explosion of open computing software during the internet era.
However, GNU seems to have not changed (enough) with the times. A new breed of open source software is steadily chipping away at GNU's monopoly (e.g. LLVM, musl etc). GNU's website, tooling and codebase increasingly looks outdated, monolithic and crusty. Sure there are gems still to be found in GNU's software stable. I also like that they hold fast to certain noble software principles.
TL;DR GNU needs to reinvent and refresh itself while still preserving its core principles.
I don't think "losing their monopoly on free software" is something that the FSF or GNU are all that worried about. Their main concern is ideological/social/political - that free software is created, exists, and that the licensing rules around it are followed. If every piece of software they ever wrote got superseded by another piece of free software that was better I think they would be overjoyed.
I think no-bloat should be GNUs next philosophy.
‘No-bloat’ is kind of antithetical to GNU, where the various applications give you everything and the kitchen sink with as many compilation flags as you like to rip out features if you really don’t want them. But one person’s bloat is another person’s fully featured system; I don’t think projects should be opinionated about ‘bloat’ if they don’t want to alienate some section of potential users.
So it was all copyleft, right? Definitely can remember us look with "awe and wonder" at Lawrence Lessig when he first visited one university in one ex-soviet country to lecture about the value of sharing software to a room full of people that have never ever in their life bought any.
Pirating software doesn't help too much when you want to study/modify it.
We can't take GNU without FSF: we can't think of GNU as a corporate brand to embrace as an identity that has to "win" an arms race.
