RMS has expressed an intention to hand off the Emacs maintainership after 22 was released; he would like to hand over maintenance to one person or a small team. ESR doesn't want the job but has offered to put in the full-time effort required to clean up the tools situation in 2008. Some hackers are talking about git...
Source: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/

"Richard Stallman was reading computer books before he'd ever seen a computer. When the Sixties Revolution was running out of steam, he was liberating MIT computers from behind locked doors and helping set off the next great Boomer movement. Though he disdained hippies and radicals in his youth, today, as the leader of the Free Software Movement, he's a long-haired rebel coder-writer with a cause, and an idealistic thorn in the side of the cyber world's killer-app capitalists..."

"...GNOME is a desktop environment, but it is not just a desktop
environment. It is also based on a philosophy of free software and
freedom. That philosophy sometimes yields specific ethical reasons
for making specific technical choices. To someone who thinks only in terms of technology, these might seem like "favoritism", but favoring the ethical (or what leads to it) over the unethical is right and proper..."

"When Richard Stallman announced the GNU Project back in 1983, he launched a movement that would, in time, transform the software industry. The Free Software Foundation, also created by Stallman and now sponsor of the GNU Project, has become a driving force behind the adoption of the widely used GNU GPL software license.

We discussed some of the more recent developments with Richard Stallman, whose passion for freedom in computing remains intense. The following Q & A explores the goals of free software, progress that has been made, and ways to maintain or instill freedom in software that we use..."

"A Canadian study found that P2P music sharing leads people to buy more CDs — just the opposite of what the advocates of DRM claim..."

"Transcript of Richard Stallman's Speech, 28 Oct 2002, at the International Lisp Conference"

"Names convey meanings; our choice of names determines the meaning of what we say. An inappropriate name gives people the wrong idea. A rose by any name would smell as sweet—but if you call it a pen, people will be rather disappointed when they try to write with it. And if you call pens “roses”, people may not realize what they are good for. If you call our operating system “Linux”, that conveys a mistaken idea of the system's origin, history, and purpose. If you call it GNU/Linux, that conveys (though not in detail) an accurate idea..."