They take care of longer term issues, such as enforcing the GPL, defending it in lawsuits, writing good free software licences, raising awareness about issues (DRM, vendor lock-in, etc.), increasing free software use around the world.
So, critical components that have issues : GPG, GNU TLS, GCC, Make, glibc, etc... are not important? If the tools that everything else is built upon are not being maintained, then a lot of infrastructure fails in spectacular ways. If these things are not important, I guess that I've been using the wrong tools and OS.
> They take care of longer term issues, such as enforcing the GPL, defending it in lawsuits, writing good free software licences, raising awareness about issues (DRM, vendor lock-in, etc.), increasing free software use around the world.
They have failed at these things for a long time. The FSF has not had any engaging campaigns in quite a long time (more than 5 years); writing a blog post and an angry letter does not usually get the job done (see HTML5 EME campaign). GPL enforcement from the FSF is a joke since they take forever to respond to anything and by the time they get to it, the device / software is no longer sold / shipped. I also don't see any new striking licenses on the horizon being drafted by the FSF.
I would not call that "not being maintained".
Similar thing for GNU tls.
I don't consider that these tools are not important, I'm just saying that the importance is small when compared to what the FSF does. Plenty of other organizations/businesses support and develop free software, few support the legal/licence/philosophy side.