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> We, the undersigned GNU maintainers and developers, … [18 signatures]

Does anyone happen to of know what fraction of GNU maintainers those 18 names represent? Does this represent a majority of GNU maintainers or a small fraction?

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A small fraction. But an important one. These are some of the biggest names in GNU, like Emacs, libc, gcc, gdb and gpg.

Here's [1] the list of contributors to GNU. Note that it also includes past contributors.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/people/

Not sure if that list is comprehensive. Neither Ludovic Courtes or John Wiegley are on it (and they are both signatories of the open letter).

Maybe it tells us something about the "joint" part? So mob-sad..

Wiegley has probably done more to make Emacs exciting again than anyone since the XEmacs fork.

(Which, hey, speaking of RMS driving off contributors...)

Sure, but taking part of a political games, doesn't make him a favor.

What exactly is your position? Is John Wiegly an important contributor to the GNU project or not?

He is, in my opinion, considering he’s the primary maintainer of what has been called GNU’s flagship application, emacs.

Really? He did?

Anyway, he hasn't done much in Emacs development for years now, I think. As a maintainer, his actual tenure was very brief.

Eli Zaretskii is the acting maintainer now.

> Here's [1] the list of contributors to GNU. Note that it also includes past contributors.

For the curious, this list contains roughly[0] 242 names.

The number of maintainers is surely much smaller than the number of contributors, however.

[0]: More specifically, the `#content` `div` on that page contains exactly 242 `h4` elements, all of which appear to be names of past/current contributors

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