Who controls glibc?

RMS clearly believes he's the King and that being King means he can enforce his will on everyone else if he chooses to do so. He can probably even point to a document saying that's so. The fact that he doesn't do it very often is irrelevant. Indeed, he's said just this, only with slightly different words.

You disagree, as do many others with you. You also have a document of sorts ("uses a consensus-based community-driven development model"), but more importantly the reality of day-to-day contemporary practice built on the culture and beliefs of the active participants.

Long leash dictatorship, or consensus governance?

That is the basis of the situation. Everything else is fluff; a distraction.

In the OSS/FS world, the inevitable conclusion of failed negotiations over political differences is the fork. Then the matter is decided by the very democratic method of the developers choosing sides once the schism has formed. I'm fine with that. That seems very much the OSS/FS way.

I am reminded of a principle in negotiation: BATNA, or Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement. This is the principle that lets apparently weak individuals crush multinationals at the negotiating table. It talks about what happens if no agreement can be reached through discussion. Talks are over, there's no deal. Then what happens?

Someone else mentioned that GNU needs glibc more than glibc needs GNU. This is true.

RMSs BATNA is the loss of a major, high-profile project when the developers fork, not to mention loss of face, influence and reputation. It would be hard to qualify the loss of glibc as anything other than a huge net negative. The problem is that I doubt RMS will see it in this light, and thus will not negotiate accordingly. He might eventually find, to his lasting discomfort, that yesterday's god is today's out of touch has-been. I also don't imagine he ever truly envisioned the freedom-guaranteeing power of the fork being used against him personally in this way or at this scale.

The dissenting developers' BATNA, assuming they can maintain cohesion, is they probably lose a minority of talented developers, waste some time coming up with a new name and laying down new infra, and otherwise coping with temporary disruption. If they were smart, they'd also formalize their new governance, incorporating lessons learned. Other than that, they lose little; life proceeds much as before. There are several high profile examples of this happening in the history of OSS/FS.

The distributions' BATNA, as outsiders, is to switch their glibc upstream. I don't imagine that would be especially problematic for them. If they did systemd, they can manage this.

I doubt the commoners, such as myself, will care at the end of the day, or indeed even know. We're just too far removed from palace intrigue for it to make a difference.

Normal politics would muddle through with some kind of kludge or lower the heat until everyone moved on; perhaps with the help of a well timed distraction. I'm not sure that'll the case here. The point of contention is too clear (you can't smudge it up, or say more time is needed to understand the problem) and RMS just doesn't strike me as the kind of person to back down at all.

I think, overall, the community zeitgeist favors the democratic approach and RMS has not built up sufficient goodwill beyond his core supporters to overcome this in the way someone like Guido or Linus might.