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RMS Steps Down As Emacs Maintainer
sigzero writes "Short but sweet: RMS is stepping down as Emacs Maintainer: 'From: Richard Stallman, Subject: Re: Looking for a new Emacs maintainer or team, Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2008 17:57:22 -0500 Stefan and Yidong offered to take over, so I am willing to hand over Emacs development to them."
Disagree. He championed the important idea that sharing source code is a Good Thing, and did it with a degree of consistency over time that is remarkable.
Yeah, I lose track of his ideas after a point (ethics), but I'm a firm believer in "credit where due".
Certainly more deserving of something like a Nobel Peace Prize than some of the nitwits that have besmirched the concept in recent history.
Anyone know how to nominate someone for http://www.medaloffreedom.com/
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I love emacs and RMS' work over the years.. but... The last great emacs release was 19.34b. Every release since then has suffered badly from bloat and other crud. Unfortunately 19.34b doesn't compile on any modern platform (though in 1998 it could be compiled in under 10 seconds on an Origin 2000 with 8 CPUs).
Bring back 19.34b!
Yes
I've had some extended discussions with him over email.
Hence the fact that I taper off from agreement when the discussion gets abstract: his philosophical basis leaves me unmoved.
However, when you consider the impact of the GPL, GCC, and the FSF world-wide, and into the future, the Nobel Peace Prize makes sense, even if the fellow himself has some cantankerous moments.
In any case, I submit that the man's overall historical impact may rank with Gutenberg, and for the same reason: taking information out of the hands of the elite and offering a level playing field. Gutenberg did it for literacy, Stallman for programming.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Really? You don't use gcc, which he helped create, or other GPL licensed code, for which he helped create the GPL?
A lot of us use Emacs extensively for code writing. It's a helpful tool.
You Sir (or Madam), are an ignoramus (first class), and the irrelevance is all yours: Emacs, as Neal Stephenson once said; "outshines all other editors as the noonday sun does the stars" - and it still does. Of course if you don't know why it does so, you'd probably be better off using a tool designed for less smart people anyway :) More importantly, it is quite possible - likely even - that there would be no such thing as FOSS if it were not for RMS, and the world would be a much worse place for intelligent and inquisitive tech./sci./math minded people.
I'm not sure what you think you're proving. I mean...
- Simplicity: [_] vi [X] Notepad
- Less bloat: [_] vi [X] Notepad
- More users: [_] vi [X] Notepad
But I really don't think Notepad is a better editor than vi, and I say this as a dedicated emacs user.I'm drawing a parallel between the effect of movable type upon literacy, which was subsequently no longer a skill confined to a few based upon scarcity of printed works, and the advocacy of source code availability resulting from the GPL, and making the prediction that the GPL will have similar long-term effects.
You can certainly attack the comparison on technical grounds.
It's like a car, see...
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I'm not sure why this was ever supposed to be funny. Emacs has always been unapologetically a meta-editor. It's got lots of great editors. I've found c-mode (more of a supermode, actually) and python-mode (with a couple extensions) to be great. And SLIME is so good it's practically mandatory for anybody writing Common Lisp. I haven't seen anything equal to SLIME, on any platform or for any language. It makes Intellisense look like Notepad -- it's just insanely productive.
By the early '60s, people were routinely giving source code to their customers.
Mr. Stallman explains in his historical writings and speeches how he first saw free software ethics in action in the early behavior of both academic and commercial software developers. When vendors moved, in a very large way, away from free source, he recognized the danger, and opposed the trend with his proselytizing for free software. The whole context in which you worked in the early 90's was shaped by that.
You don't mention what sort of software you provide to your customers. Unless it includes an operating system kernel, then they depend either on binary-only code from MS or Apple, or on free code that depends one way or another on Mr. Stallman's free software movement (yes, even if it's not licensed under GPL).
I started studying computing in 1969, and devoted my career to it. I contributed to the world as much as I could figure out and accomplish. Mr. Stallman's contributions are so many orders of magnitude greater than mine, I am filled with awe. All of my software development, research, or teaching today depends on things that he supported in various ways. I have no interest in carping about his personal affect, nor the things that he didn't do in addition to all that he did, nor the things that could conceivably have been done better if someone else who didn't do them had done them. Nor in the supposition that those ignorant of his work were therefore not aided by it.
Mike O'Donnell http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~odonnell/