Who controls glibc?

(Sorry for the delay in my reply; I'm traveling ATM)

I don't see what copyright problem would be here, but perhaps I am not up to date on GPL legalities.

IIRC glibc, under GNU policies, has copyright assignment as part of their process. Therefore there aren't a million little copyright holders all over the place. It doesn't seem especially messy in this regard.

GNU licenses the software (shockingly) under LGPL, so an outside party has every right to fork it.

Therefore, if a new entity is created, they can fork it under the GPL in a very tidy way and since they're bound by terms to keep licensing it the same way, there is no downstream change. I never envisioned licensing as a major issue when I first wrote my comment.

I was referring to potential logistical issues; downstream disruption. But if mostly the same people are woking on the same code, with the same license, I can't see an issue there either. I see XFree86 and maybe LibreOffice as examples of this pattern.

All in all, the barrier to action arising from disruption for the glibc developers is low.

As for systemd, I am asserting no opinion of it's quality or suitability for purpose one way or the other because it's not relevant to my point. I used systemd merely as an example of something that necessitated a lot downstream changes in order to accommodate it.

The point of whether the joke was appropriate or not, whether is was funny or not, whether someone might be offended by it or not or whether it improved the world with levity or not, isn't relevant or material to the underlying issue in any way. It could have just as easily been some arcane compiler optimization.

Whether the GNU project's politics (as in policy and governing structure, rather than philosophy) are still relevant and acceptable to the governed is a key issue to be resolved. I don't see how you can leave it unresolved now that it's come up.

This is not about reversing GNU's fundamental raison d'être. I don't see "RMS is our BDFL" being a core tenet of the Free Software ideals upon which it was founded.

If the organization is ultimately unable to evolve and mature, someone will come along to pick up the torch and run with it. Perhaps that someone, individual or group, will have a stronger commitment to democratic ideals as well.

It would be a shame if that became necessary, but at some level, isn't that part of the beauty of Free Software?