Unfortunately, at times I look at GNU and see that it's a project whose success is in spite of RMS. He gave a good basis in the original manifest, gave generally good inspiration, but that's what it is - inspiration. Said inspiration made people work on the projects that over time somehow managed to end up under GNU umbrella. But a lot of RMS-managed, top-down GNU projects? Never got anywhere.

See also the discussion mentioned by Ulrich Drepper back in 2001, regarding RMS' behaviour back when Ulrich started to port glibc to linux.