Joint statement on the GNU Project

A collective of GNU maintainers — October 7, 2019

We, the undersigned GNU maintainers and developers, owe a debt of gratitude to Richard Stallman for his decades of important work in the free software movement. Stallman tirelessly emphasized the importance of computer user freedom and laid the foundation for his vision to become a reality by starting the development of the GNU operating system. For that we are truly grateful.

Yet, we must also acknowledge that Stallman’s behavior over the years has undermined a core value of the GNU project: the empowerment of all computer users. GNU is not fulfilling its mission when the behavior of its leader alienates a large part of those we want to reach out to.

We believe that Richard Stallman cannot represent all of GNU. We think it is now time for GNU maintainers to collectively decide about the organization of the project. The GNU Project we want to build is one that everyone can trust to defend their freedom.

Ludovic Courtès (GNU Guix, GNU Guile) Ricardo Wurmus (GNU Guix, GNU GWL) Matt Lee (GNU Social) Andreas Enge (GNU MPC) Samuel Thibault (GNU Hurd, GNU libc) Carlos O'Donell (GNU libc) Andy Wingo (GNU Guile) Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso (GNU Octave) Mark Wielaard (GNU Classpath) Ian Lance Taylor (GCC, GNU Binutils) Werner Koch (GnuPG) Daiki Ueno (GNU gettext, GNU libiconv, GNU libunistring) Christopher Lemmer Webber (GNU MediaGoblin) Jan Nieuwenhuizen (GNU Mes, GNU LilyPond) John Wiegley (GNU Emacs) Tom Tromey (GCC, GDB) Jeff Law (GCC, Binutils — not signing on behalf of the GCC Steering Committee) Han-Wen Nienhuys (GNU LilyPond) Joshua Gay (GNU and Free Software Speaker) Ian Jackson (GNU adns, GNU userv) Tobias Geerinckx-Rice (GNU Guix) Andrej Shadura (GNU indent) Zack Weinberg (developer on GCC, GNU libc, GNU Binutils) John W. Eaton (GNU Octave) Jonathan Wakely (developer on GCC) Siddhesh Poyarekar (developer on GNU libc) Damian Rouson (developer on GFortran) David Malcolm (developer on GCC) Maciej W. Rozycki (developer on GCC, GDB, GNU Binutils, GNU libc) Martin Jambor (developer on GCC) David Thompson (developer on Guix) Thomas Rodgers (developer on GCC) Rafal Luzynski (developer on GNU libc)