Is it just my feeling/bias or projects under the GNU umbrella suffer the problem of not putting the developers at the center of the project enough? One of the things you should get back from doing something like Octave, is to be recognized at least in certain parts of the software community. When an OSS project is a GNU project maybe it is less likely to get the deserved credits, that later may lead to positions, donations, or whatever, compared to having a project on Github, regularly writing to a blog, and so forth. So, without trying to ignore the fundamental problem of a lot of work important for the society that does not compensates the developers as it should, maybe OSS developers need to get smart and try to put themselves at the center of their projects in order to get the visibility that later may save their careers.
I agree that being under the GNU isn't necessarily good for projects. Look at https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=octave for example. Many of these patches have in fact been merged, but nobody really knows how to use this bug tracker. Actually editing the wiki requires asking on IRC. See here: https://octave.sourceforge.io/
Octave should have a steady stream of students who have been made to use Matlab trying to use it instead. If the barriers were lower these people might get hooked on contributing. As it is, I imagine they take one look and think "old and busted". I don't think it's necessary to use Github, but the development tools should be something people can use frictionlessly, which isn't the case now.
