I'm not going to go into it but you can look up most of the information about this dating back 25 years. As someone who was around at the time in that community, and was in certain locations of interest at the time, its best to avoid and use the public projects like AROS etc.
This isnt to surprising. They need money to continue their transition to their new Royal CPU baseline and frankly everyone and their dog is now in the ARM market, if they want to see growth its time to move onto something else.
Still blows my mind people still use gzip. 20 years ago I was expecting by this point in time for there to be lots of effort put into increasing compression and working towards getting that fast, instead its been a push for speed. It makes sense with how the internet has changed. These days gzip isn't even in the top 100 as far as compression goes, hell even something like RAR or 7zip are far back compared to the best.
Take something like enwik8 (100megs), gzip will get that down to 36megs, with LZMA down to ~24-25. The top of the line stuff will get it down to the ~15meg range. Thats a huge difference.