I&#x27;m curious, which products are you referring to? In most cases the GNU version predates the alternative by a large margin. E.g. screen vs tmux, squid vs varnish, wget vs curl, net-tools vs iproute2 etc.<p>Of more recent software &quot;clones&quot;, there is guix vs nix, mcron vs vixie-cron, shepherd vs systemd, gnutls vs openssl, all high-quality implementations of good ideas.<p>Sure, lsh has a way to go before it&#x27;s a viable alternative to OpenSSH, but I wouldn&#x27;t say it&#x27;s low-quality. I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve come across a GNU project which felt &quot;half-put-together&quot;, rather the opposite.<p>The GNU projects&#x27; motivation is very clear-cut and not at all different from e.g. the BSD camp or suckless. How are they questionable?