The FSF (and GNU) have had plenty of opportunity to be encouraging to new people and ideas but instead they punish you for caring. The FSF office has historically been a revolving door where people enter bright and hopeful and leave disappointed and jaded. The union bargaining unit is mostly powerless. GNU mailing lists (the meta ones like gnu-prog-discuss), are mostly devoid of interesting discussion, preferring endless bikeshedding and resistance to trying new things. Plenty of people who contribute to GNU avoid those lists because they are so toxic. The inescapable founder's syndrome surrounding RMS and conspiratorial thinking that any change is equivalent to corporate takeover stops all change. GNU could be run collectively and democratically, but the old guard prefers to worship the man RMS used to be, when he actually was a brilliant programmer, and let him do whatever. The people who will bring free software into the modern day will come from outside the FSF bubble.
