As a direct result of Stallman's uncompromising disinterest in what values people in the broader world actually wanted to engage with -- instead attempting to dictate his own moral views as a petty tyrant -- GNU _as a project_ hasn't been relevant to computing for decades.
When was the last time you booted up the Hurd kernel? I would be surprised if more than 10% of HN readers even know what that is. (Stallman actually summarily dismissed Hurd's lead developer when he dared to criticize the GFDL in public. https://lwn.net/Articles/59147/)
Stallman's abrasive and confrontational posturing is related to but distinct from his ideological goals. His rude posturing actually _damaged_ the chances of ever reaching those goals.
Even the GNU "copyleft" license -- the project's greatest success in terms of "actually impacting the world" -- has fallen more and more into disuse in favor of less restrictive licenses such as BSD and MIT.
GNU wants to recreate a 1988 Unix. That's not necessarily a bad thing – I'm an old Unix beardy type myself as well – but it's not really how you stay at the forefront of computing, yeah. Also didn't help Stallman alienated the GNOME and GTK people so they're not longer GNU projects (and they were independent for a long time before that anyway).
There are still some important GNU projects though, GCC, GNU libc, and Grub being the most notable.
That is true today, but Linux didn’t have that much of a lead. People chose to develop for Linux instead when the future was in doubt, and that was largely due to the pragmatism of Linus.
When was the last time you booted up the Hurd kernel? I would be surprised if more than 10% of HN readers even know what that is. (Stallman actually summarily dismissed Hurd's lead developer when he dared to criticize the GFDL in public. https://lwn.net/Articles/59147/)
Stallman's abrasive and confrontational posturing is related to but distinct from his ideological goals. His rude posturing actually _damaged_ the chances of ever reaching those goals.
Even the GNU "copyleft" license -- the project's greatest success in terms of "actually impacting the world" -- has fallen more and more into disuse in favor of less restrictive licenses such as BSD and MIT.