In practice, GNU is almost nothing. Years ago there was more cohesion, and there are some guidelines that GNU maintainers nominally follow, but in practice each GNU package mostly does its own thing. A lot of decisions are made in a don't-tell-mom kind of way, i.e. we just try to make sure that rms doesn't notice when we do something he doesn't like, such as calling it win32/win64 instead of w32/w64 like he prefers.

One of the things I hope will happen with this statement is that we will regain cohesion and we will be able to stand together again like we once did. There's lots of good people in GNU, and I think we need someone like GNU. Principled, uncompromising, and now hopefully friendlier and more helpful than we have been.