[anewhnaccount]

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.