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It's the same hypocrisy that he's demonstrated for decades. The same hypocrisy that says "the GPL extends enough rights to protect developers sharing code and end users ... except for when developers want to add their code to GNU, in which case, a license under the GPL isn't enough - gimme your copyright, b*tch".

He's a control freak. Just look at the xemacs vs emacs debacle. It's the same as his reputation for being late all the time (passive-aggressive behavior), being blatantly offensive (inappropriately touching his privates, picking his nose, eating boogers, not bathing, etc - again, a pattern of forcing his offensive BO and habits on others as a way of "marking his territory").

He's well past his due date (judging by the smell, that occurred LONG ago). We don't need a "social movement" - we need stable code. The GPL promotes forks rather than getting the fix done at the source.

Remember all the complaints about forking in the Unix universe? Now, Unix is pretty much standardized, and it's GPL-based linux that has hundreds of distros with incompatabilities.

"Studies suggest that Wikipedia's reliability has improved in recent years, and it is increasingly used as a tertiary source." [1] [wikipedia.org].

Well, that's certainly a reliable source for accuracy about Wikipedia's accuracy. Studies suggest that my Slashdot comments over the years indicate that I should be elected President of the United States in 2012 http://www.xemacs.org/~steve

Comment is here, attributed to SL Baur.

SL Baur is Steve Baur, one of the developers for XEmacs, and his homepage is here.

As to whether the code still exists - you'd have to ask him. I see no reason to disbelieve him.

twitter, I don't think you realize who you're talking to.

Its there, its GPL, nothing prevents you from doing so.

Well, I asked whether it was ok, not whether it was legal. I know it is legal, but I'm not sure I am ethically ok with taking large chunks of another project and not at least mentioning that my project is derived from a different project. I suppose a better question is, would you take the linux kernel and credit Alan Cox for his contributions, but not Andrew Morton?

The kernel contributors still own the copyright to the software they've written. You're use of that software in your project modified or unmodified doesn't change that. And if they didn't want their software used in another project they would not have released it under the GPL. And by releasing your project and adhering to the GPL of the contributed code you are giving the original authors credit. In addition the name of a project has nothing to do with who owns the copyright or who is given credit. Linus is documented as giving credit to the FSF and GNU project for their contributions. That credit doesn't extend to kowtowing to RMS's ego and renaming software because he says so.

What happened with GNU and XEmacs says something completely different.

Not sure what you are referring to here. If you are referring to the debate over copyright assignment, the FSF asks all GNU projects to transfer their copyright so they are better able to prosecute GPL violations. The FSF is certainly not the only organization to do this. Easy Software Products and the CUPS project is a recent example that has received attention lately due to the buyout from Apple. The contention between XEmacs and GNU Emacs is that XEmacs occasionally wants to contribute code back to GNU Emacs, but the FSF wants the copyright transferred. It's a conflict between the two projects, yes, but I think suggesting that the FSF is trying to "take over" XEmacs is a deliberate misconstruing of the actual situation. And what does this have to do with the linux kernel? Where is the posting on LKML where RMS asks all of the kernel developers to transfer over their copyrights to the FSF?

You're starting to catch on: "the FSF asks all GNU projects to transfer their copyright". Transfer of copyright is transfer of ownership or "take over". Another take on XEmacs actually comes from the XEmacs FAQ http://www.xemacs.org/Documentation/21.5/html/xema cs-faq_2.html#SEC54 .

His attempts to rebrand Linux as GNU/Linux are effectively trying to brand Linux as a GNU package; and GNU packages belong to the FSF. So when RMS says GNU/Linux even thought he claims that's he giving credit where credit is due, he's really saying, Linux should be a GNU project. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesUsing TheGPLForAProgramMakeItGNUSoftware

Stallman's request for systems that use both the Linux kernel and GNU software to be called GNU/Linux does not sound that unreasonable to me.

It is completely unreasonable; Linux is not part of GNU and it is not owned by the FSF. Naming it GNU/Linux improperly means that its part of GNU. Should all applications that are dependednt on glibc and gcc be named GNU/Whatever?

Building an OS from GPL software does not give the writers of the free software components the right to rename the OS. If it did it would have be part of the GPL. RMS should have put that energy into completing his kernel back in the 80s. Furthermore Linus would have had to ask permission from the FSF to actually call his operating system GNU/Linux because the FSF controls the GNU.

In addition to for Linus to actually name the system GNU/Linux the FSF probably would have asked him to turn the Copyright of his kernel over to the FSF. If you don't believe me you can ask XEmacs team http://www.xemacs.org/Documentation/21.5/html/xema cs-faq_2.html#SEC54

What worse is if Linus had signed his code over to the FSF, it would have been DOA because its "inferior" to the GNU HURD microkernel, (or whatever they were calling it back then). Inferior in the Computer Science/theoretical design perspective; not the works with a wide range of hardware and runs user-space applications.

In essence the FSF wants to reap the success of the Linux where their years of kernel development failed. So I think the Linux developers do have a right to be outraged by RMS's BS.

Once again the name of the operating system is Linux. It even though its dependent on GNU it is not part of GNU and does not belong to the FSF -- they have Debian or more correctly GNU/Debian.

Haven't you ever heard of Xemacs? http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html http://www.xemacs.org/About/XEmacsVsGNUemacs.html

I'm looking at Emacs 21.3.1 in X mode, and I can't figure out what ugly window you're talking about. It looks pretty much exactly the same as a session inside a terminal window except that the scrollbar is graphical instead of ANSI.

I am pretty sure that XEmacs does not launch at boot-time. Give it a try.

Correct link

I wonder when we'll get that on xemacs...

I know what your saying. Back in the day, I used XEmacs (here). That had some menu items with their subsequent key commands in the menu items. So, the dirst couple of times I would use the menu item while paying attention the command keys. As far as the macros are concerned, I guess that's where a book like the review would come in handy.

There are multiple mail readers written for emacs; there is a news reader; a few web browsers; an interface to IRC (and with bitlbee, AIM/Yahoo/Jabber &c.); music players; calendaring.

The programming modes are excellent; the interface to make and gdb is second to none; the integration with a developer's environment is superb.

emacs is the r0x0r:-)

"Is there a more suitable IDE that works with most popular OSS (and not so OSS) languages including XML, SQL, CSS, PHP, Perl, Java, and C/C++?"

: - )

Wake me up when I can download (for free) the Generation NEX development kit

To make NES compatible software, you just need CA65 or another 6502 assembler, a tile editor supporting NES format, and your favourite programmer's editor.

XEmacs is GNU software because it's a modified version of a GNU program. And it is GNU software because the FSF is the copyright holder for most of it (...) This is why the term "GNU XEmacs" is legitimate. (GNU XEmacs ?! Oh, like, GNU/Linux...)
But in another sense it is not GNU software [my quote], because we can't use XEmacs in the GNU system (etc)

I don't think a GUI platform can call itself complete until it's got an IDE that's worthy for programming.

I disagree... I'm not a fan of your monolithic IDEs at all. My GUI is an IDE:

• ROX-Filer, which is highly customizable and integrated with the shell
• XEmacs or vim as your preference goes, which are two highly advanced programmable editors
• bash, zsh, csh, or your other favorite shell
• autotools for building

These tools combine into an "IDE" that is my desktop. I have the best-in-class for every component. Beats a jack-of-all-trades IDE that lacks in any number of regards and takes huge resources.

You tried using Eclipse for C++ development on Linux? You do realize Eclipse is a Java IDE, right? There are a lot more choices for doing C++ than the silly CDE plugin for Eclipse.

Whose G O D ?

Sure it does.

The article get the Emacs fork stories wrong. The main reason for the fork is because XEmacs developers haven't bothered to go through the paperwork process to assign copyright to FSF. FSF can't enforce copyright and persue GPL violators if Emacs contains codes not owned by FSF, so the split occurs. That is clearly stated in XEmacs vs. GNU Emacs

• R, including several add-on packages (such as tseries, RODBC, coda, mcmcpack, gtkdevice, rgtk, rquantlib, qtl, dbi, rmysql), out-of-the box support for the powerful ESS modes for XEmacs as well as the Ggobi visualisation program;
• A complete teTeX, TeX, and LaTeX setup for scientific publishing, along with TeXmacs and LyX for wysiwyg editing;
• Perl and Python with loads of add-ons, plus ruby, tcl, Lua, and Scientific and Numeric Python;
• The Emacs and Vim editors, as well as Gnumeric, kate, Koffice, jed, joe, nedit and zile;
• Octave, with add-on packages octave-forge, octave-sp, octave-epstk, and matwrap;
• Computer-algebra systems Maxima, Pari/GP, GAP, GiNaC and YaCaS;
• the QuantLib quantitative finance library including its Python interface;
• GSL, the Gnu Scientific Library (GSL) including example binaries;
• The GNU compiler suite comprising gcc, g77, g++ compilers;
• the OpenDX, Plotmtv, and Mayavi data visualisation systems;
• it includes apcalc,aribas,autoclass,

COBOL, its reputation is warranted. It is actually designed for clueless suits and it will damage you, both mentally and physically.


Cobol fingers? But we are in XXI centure and do not need to type all this clueless staff in - we have text editor or two which do completion for us.

I live in text mode. Here's a selection of my preferred apps. Most of these are still in active development (though some are more active than others).

screen. Simply indispensable. It slices and dices console sessions. Pretty much everything I do, I do in screen. I've a page elsewhere that describes everything screen does for me.

zsh. My shell of choice. Think of all the good features of bash, ksh, and tcsh rolled together. (Without much of the ickiness, particularly the csh heritage.) Personally, the killer application of zsh was that fact that not only did it have context-sensitive completion but (unlike tcsh) it shipped with hordes of completion definitions right out of the box. Type 'dpkg -L fo<tab>' and zsh will autocomplete on the Debian packages currently installed on your system. With an ssh-agent running, type 'scp otherhost:fo<tab>' and zsh will ssh to the other system and autocomplete on the files available on that host.

irssi. The best IRC client I've come across, certainly beating out IrcII, BitchX, and even epic. Multiple windows, extensible, tons of plugins available.

bitlbee. This is actually an IRC-to-Instant-Messaging gateway. It allows me to use irssi and the IRC environment with which I am so familiar to also deal with those of my friends and family who insist on using the various IM services.

snownews. curses-based RSS aggregator. I shopped around a bit before finding an aggregator that I liked. snownews does everything I need.

mutt. Possibly the best mail client around, GUI or not. While pine is okay (and simpler to use), mutt is much more customizable and scales better to large volumes of email.

procmail. Again, not exactly command line, but essential to my email usage.

Emacs. My text-mode editor of choice. Feel free to substitute XEmacs or vi (preferably vim) at your own preference. I prefer emacs to vi, though I know a decent amount of vi, as any sysadmin should. I actually like XEmacs a little better than GNU Emacs, but GNU Emacs has better UTF-8 support.

w3m. There's also links; I'm not tremendously familiar with it because w3m fills all of my needs and it used to be the case that w3m had better HTML support than links, but I don't believe this is any longer the case. Of note is the fact that w3m can do tabbed browsing, though it's not multithreaded, so you can't read one tab while another is loading. Also, if you run w3m with a valid $DISPLAY, it can even show images in the pages it displays.

moosic. This is a music jukebox. The features that distinguish it from other such programs are twofold. First, it runs as a standalone server; you interact with it via a command line client. (In theory, a curses or GUI client could be written, but to my knowledge none yet has.) Second, it's customizable with regards to how it plays music. It has a config file where you tell it what programs to use to play various music formats (it does come with reasonable defaults). Someone elsewhere in this article pointed out mpd; I'll have to look at that, but it at least doesn't appear to support the various MOD formats.

mplayer. It does more or less require some graphical output (X, framebuffer, whatever), but it's run and displays it status in text mod

There is one big well known fork: The GNU Emacs vs. XEmacs fork.

I hope that instead of a save button, some programs will constantly save work and provide a timeline-like feature to go through all changes in the document if neccessary.

I use vim and RCS for this purpose.

RCS allows me to check in and out revisions, and each revision has a change log. I can roll back changes, check differences, and even make my own branch of a file.

Subversion, CVS, Arch and many others also can fill the same role. Heck, you can even make a directory named backup and rename a copy of the file to 'myfile_date'. The reason why I settled on RCS is that its relatively simple to use and its cross platform (Linux, BSD, Windows-via-Cygwin, etc). I've been tempted to adopt one of the larger revision control systems for additional features, but haven't gotten around to it.

As for Vim, its cross platform, rather full featured, and if the power goes out, I still can recover the file. Plus its easy to use with RCS through a few simple aliases and/or keymaps. There is also Gnu Emacs or XEmacs and a host of other good text editors.

Sure, there could be one program that would do both, but that wouldn't be as useful. The unix philosophy of "do one thing, and do it well" is less of a pain in the long run. This way, I can reuse my $editor_of_choice in many other unix applications - slrn, mutt, etc. If I had one integrated program, sooner or later I'd become fed up with one part of it or another, and I would be forced to continue using it.

Just my $.02.

YMMV.

Again, that's something you have to compile into (see this message for an example). So, even if I have XRender, i will not have antialiasing unless my apps support it. This isn't the case for modern windowing systems like Windows / Mac, etc.

Since when is Sun a friend of open source?

Sun pays for NFS v4 port to Linux.
Sun supports Xemacs.
Sun donates internationalization code to X.org.
Sun buys StarOffice and donates the code to OpenOffice.

Sun support development and porting of TCL.
Sun donates elliptic curve technology to openssl.org.

Etc., etc., etc.

Sun established open standards, such as: NIS, NFS, etc., etc.,...

Sun is a much bigger friend to "open source" and *nix than just about any other corporation.

So, are you trolling, or uninformed? Maybe just abusing a friend to open source?

Another poster has answered this below..

Is this true? (Hopefully using the right term...I mean itemized lists with roman numerials, numbers, letters for each part)

If you mean "itemized" or "enumerated" lists then yes there is a limit it appears you can go 5 deep.

The following will give a "Too deeply nested" error. Due to the "sub sub sub sub sub sub item"

N.B. It it not very pretty due to having to get past the "comment compression filter"...

\documentclass{article} \begin{document} \begin{itemize} \item Item \begin{itemize} \item Sub item \begin{itemize} \item Sub sub item \begin{itemize} \item sub sub sub item \begin{itemize} \item sub sub sub sub item \begin{itemize} \item sub sub sub sub sub item \end{itemize} \end{itemize} \end{itemize} \end{itemize} \end{itemize} \end{itemize} \end{document}

As with many aspects of LaTeX however if you find it doesn't do something it probably means it's not prudent (from a structural perspective) to do it anyway. For example if you really need that level of deep reference you may well be better off with part,chapter,section, subsection, ... . . .,itemize etc... Ironically I tried posting this reply with some deep nesting, slashdot posts are limited to three levels deep! ;-) Of course if you wish to you can always override the builtins with your own "super list" or something.

Also, can ya'll post some good links to a newbie learning LaTex..and some good reference sites that have all the tags layed out with good explanations?

Sure, below are a list places I would reccomend starting, you havn't said if you use Windows, *nix or Mac so i've added both (sorry if you are a Mac man you'll have to Google yourself).

• Editing:
• • *nix If you are a *nix user I would reccomend the following editing combination.
  • XEmacs
  • AucTeX. A sophisticated editing mode for LaTeX
  • preview-latex. Places the rendered equations and images directly in the editor window making "equation tuning" and other tasks a snip.
• Windows
• • WinEdt. A very sophisticated text editor for Windows. Its forte is LaTeX. It is not free, but well worth the money.

• Learning resources:
• • Getting started
  • Good overview
  • A list of symbols
  • The not so short introduction to LaTeX2e
  • Tips and tricks
  • BibTeX help.

• Other random stuff
• • dvipdfm. For converting the output of LaTeX into PDF (highly recommended)
  • Prof. Knuth's home page(The author of TeX).
  • CTANThe Comprehensive TeX Archive Network. Here you will be able to download packages, utilities and tools that do not come by default in your LaTeX distribution.

-ed

There has been a lot of conflict around just this fork for some time. More information on XEmacs homepage with some mailinglists messages.

Phffff. Linux doesn't need a BBedit clone - there are too damn many editors already for *NIX.

Contrarily, MacOSX needs to ship with a copy of XEmacs (which is the One True Editor) that runs right away when the user gives even the slightest hint to edit text. (And for that matter, so does Windows =)

• Jumbo shrimp
  
• Millitary intelligencse
  
• BASIC
  
• Utah Jazz
  
• Writing Secure Code from Microsoft
  

Years of developing software brought me to XEmacs, which is just a subtle variant from FSF's/Richard Stallman's GNU Emacs. Functionally they're, for most practical purposes, identical. Like Emacs, XEmacs has got a learning curve like an Olympic ski jump and it takes a good long while (months) before you're very productive with it. But I can do just about everything with it that I do on a computer: email, programming, Usenet, personal information management (including scheduling and a contact database), screenplay formatting, XML, even ASCII drawing with Emacs' picture-mode.

In short, it's legendary, and probably most everyone here has heard of it. But for those who haven't, and who have a penchant for twiddling and fiddling with software that has about ten thousand options and endless opportunities for customization (gotta learn elisp, a lisp variant, to do it), then I highly, highly recommend XEmacs or, if you want to be a free software purist, go with GNU Emacs, but you'll have to download the source for the moment because last I checked the GNU ftp servers were still recovering from an exploit and trying to gather checksums for potentially compromised software. Yikes!

As far as my writing habits go, it's been enormously convenient for me to apply the quick navigational keystrokes I've learned for Emacs to my writing projects. Everything just becomes so much faster and intuitive. And doing most everything from one customizable editor allows me to create an environment that I understand from my own personal viewpoint without having to learn a slew of special features and keystrokes from other software packages.

Emacs isn't for everyone, I will say that. And since learning many software packages for special purposes -- one for HTML editing, one for XML (like XMLSpy), one for screenplay formatting (like Movie Magic Screenwriter) -- isn't exactly a trial given that it seems like most people's brains seem to adjust to whatever "mode" of work they're currently engaged in, many will choose that route. But again, if you feel so inclined, give Emacs a try, you might grow to love it. But be prepared to give it time.

Oh, and there's always Vim. It's an excellent, ultra-powerful editor that's basically for people that wished they could grok Emacs but, for some sad reason, simply can't.

And the key phrase is "Other People's Software".

His contribution to nethack is a badly written out-of-date manual and, by his own admission "blindfolds" (woop-de-doo) -- all about 10 years ago.

vc-mode for emacs, (that he calls his "biggest hack till fetchmail") is nice (I use it often) but amounts to about 5 (count 'em) shortish lisp files, and that includes many contributions from the present maintainer and others. And it was so brilliantly and artfully designed, that it contained a Y2K bug, and again was 10 years ago. (Nice engineering, Eric.)

His development on NCurses came long after the bulk of the work was done (version 1.8.1 and onwards).

He's not a bad programmer, but his gift for self-promotion far outweighs anything else he may have contributed... Except, perhaps, the unintentional laugh-fest that is Sex Tips For Geeks

Here's a copy of disclaim.future from XEmacs

Here's a copy of disclaim.future from XEmacs

And as usual, both groups think the other is giving open source a bad name. (not trolling, just my observation).

This is why experienced Python programmers store their programs as XML.

Huh? I consider myself an experienced Pythom programmer, and I've never heard of programs being stored in XML.

BTW, once you realize that you should use The Editor, whatever the platform, you will realize that all this whitespace whining is worthless. And other editors, on win32 and Unix alike, can be trivially configured to write tabs as spaces.

Key features of the Network Audio System include:

• Device-independent audio over the network
• Lots of audio file and data formats
• Can store sounds in server for rapid replay
• Extensive mixing, separating, and manipulation of audio data
• Simultaneous use of audio devices by multiple applications
• Use by a growing number of ISVs
• Small size
• Free! No obnoxious licensing terms

• Festival - The Festival Speech Synthesis System.
• mpg123 - a command line MP3 player
• GAIM - a free AOL IM client
• OpenOffice (StarOffice) - the (now opensourced) StarOffice Suite has built-in NAS support for the Solaris and Linux Platforms.
• The Qt Library - from Trolltech supports NAS natively. You will need to pass the '-system-nas-sound' to './configure' before building.
• libSDL - SDL, the Simple DirectMedia Layer library, now has native NAS support thanks to Erik Inge Bols\x{00F8}
• XAnim - the X Animation viewer
• XBoing - a blockout type X game
• XPilot - a multiplayer client/server space warfare game
• Xemacs - the best cross-plaform, cross-language IDE
• Alsaplayer - A NAS Output plugin written by Erik Inge Bols\x{00F8} is now supplied with the Alsaplayer distribution.
• X MultiMedia System (XMMS). A NAS Output plugin written by Willem Monsuwe is available at ftp://ftp.stack.nl/pub/users/willem/
• Wine. A NAS plugin written by Nicolas Escuder is now available with the WINE distrubution.

Yeah...hehe...we gave everyone at our wedding a copy of Loaf

is that really true of the GNU project? I doubt it. I know that there is a practice of giving your copyright over to GNU but that's voluntary. I read so on their website. If i recall it's so that they can pursue violations for you etc.

Yes it is true, see this or just read about why Xemacs was forked.

Did you just imply there is a better text editor than vi?

Yes.

It's called "Vi IMproved".

Or, if you want to build an operating environment around an editor, you can always go for XEmacs.

Emacs is released under the GPL. (...) The restrictions placed on developers by the GPL make it impossible for a commercial concern to use either of these programs, or components of them, as part of an IDE.

Actually, it has been done -- Energize, a C++ IDE made by Lucid Inc (it came out something around 1991-1992), used GNU Emacs as an editor (then forked* GNU Emacs to Lucid Emacs, which finally became XEmacs).

(*It was, as far as I know, the most controversial as well as the most significant fork in the free software community. See The Lemacs/FSFmacs Schism by Jamie Zawinski and A History of Emacs from the XEmacs Internals Manual for some informations about Lucid Energize (and for lots of GNU Emacs vs. Lucid/XEmacs flame wars). There's also a short explaination on GNU Emacs FAQ, question 8.6.)

So, the point is that Emacs can be used and has been used as a text editor in proprietary IDE, while still being released under the GPL. It was even being sold for well over $4000 per seat, back then.

That said, I totally agree with GusherJizmac's point: "The point is, why don't they use those editors as their basis for their integrated editor? Why re-invent the wheel so many times?" I, for one, won't touch any IDE with a text editor using which I'm much less productive than using Emacs, which is an ideal "IDE" for me -- but then again, I'm not a big fan of traditional IDEs, so what do I know (also, I don't use any proprietary software, so even if Komodo was in my opinion better than Emacs (or if it included Emacs for that matter), I still wouldn't use it, anyway -- I say it just to make things clear: Komodo may be great for a proprietary IDE).

OK, back to the topic -- Emacs can be legally used in proprietary IDEs and I suppose ActiveState could successfully use Emacs as an editor in Komodo and still be able to sell it. They didn't do that probably because they thought their customers would prefer ActiveState's editor over Emacs -- which I believe is true -- not because it's legally impossible with the GPL.

Analysts at MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, who have been busy translating, rotating and dropping, have demonstrated what the rest of us suspected: Tetris is hard. Technically, it's 'NP-hard,'

- Derwen

For the bigger project stuff it's either JEdit or XEmacs. Both are stable, cross platform and loaded with features. I'm still trying to decide which one I like best. ;-)

As an emacs user, I feel obliged to point out that xemacs is available for windows, and works quite well. It runs natively under windows, so you don't need to deal with cygwin or any of that (unless you want to, they do have a cygwin version available). And if you're a vi person, you can always run emacs in vi mode.

Want to know what happens projects fork due to politics?

XEmacs Vs GNU Emacs

In particular I find Richard Stallman's point of view quite enlightening on the GNU System and FSF.