> There's no one in that project that is such a fanatic and well-known personality that they'd be able to lead it.

Ignorance of the fame and effectiveness of several people on that list says more about your awareness of the current state of the FSF and GNU than it does about those organizations.

Werner Koch led FSFE. Ian Jackson led Debian and SPI. Matt Lee is responsible for many of the FSF's major publicity campaigns. Joshua Gay put together Stallman's book. I don't volunteer any of them or have any knowledge of whether they want to run the project, but any of them easily could.

I don't doubt that they could lead the project from a purely administrative perspective, just like any of the other Tesla executives could in theory lead that company :)

That may well be true. Certainly, and reserving judgement on exactly what this means, nobody who could lead it quite like Stallman.

But, I find the implication hard to accept.

It would be to say that Stallman’s continuing presence is essential to the success of free software; surely a frightening responsibility for any one mortal person to carry through their remaining years!

Free software has had success as a movement. To believe otherwise is to take away more than just Stallman’s position, but his entire contribution to our modern society!

That means there are others who will, and for a fact do already, take care for the well-being of the GNU projects. Not all of these will believe in everything Stallman has said or represents, and things would certainly change without him.

A large and successful movement lives beyond its founder, and grows to challenge the new status quo. If it fails to grow, new movements fill the vacuum.

I'm not worried about GNU projects or any project, I am worried about the idea of free software, which has and has had many supporters but only one champion.

I don't think it will survive. Rich corporations like Google or Microsoft will continue to fund open source projects when it suits them, while locking out users through the cloud and hardware. Those other supporters will play along, because the corporations are paying their salaries or donating to their projects.

I'd say an interesting question could be what was the reach of Stallman's leadership. I haven't followed GNU and FSF at all in my years while I am a comp sci guy and I do wonder on each new project which license to take. Free software is something which affect pretty directly every person on the planet yet few have heard about these movements. Software piracy is an example of a similar movement to free software which has had way more publicity with regular people. I'd say this has a lot to do with the persona of Stallman and the way he interacts with the world. People learn about who made the telephone and who discovered Americas but no high school coursebook mentions who created Linux or Python. Software has in many ways been instrumental in shaping the last 20 years yet people have never been more detached with the technology they use. Everything is a black box nowdays. Even concepts like client server communication is completely unknown to a laic. This is a failure of computer and software movements which have alienated themselves and the rest of us programmers from the public.