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."

Comments

May His Next Adventure Be Twice as Fruitfull

[flyneye]

EMACS the only software you need.
I remember being told this before rushing home to d/l and install it.
It gave me a hunger for linux too and though I never mastered its complexities for most things I do,It is amazing and I hope it stays maintained.
RMS is amazing,I wish him well in any venture he chooses.

Re:Stallman is still around?

[kabdib]

"... Nobel Peace Prize..."

Obviously you have never met RMS.

I can't decide whether to put a ":-)" on that or not. I'll just leave it ambiguous. He's yelled at me. I won the argument by leaving.

Re:Stallman is still around?

[tomhudson]

By the early '90s, people were routinely giving source code to their customers, rather than trusting "code escrow" services.

I wasn't only giving source - I was also giving a (legit original paid-for) CD with the compiler and tools.

I figured it was just good marketing - giving them the source was an additional incentive to deal with me instead of a competitor, and when it came time for mods, after they screwed it up, I'd get the business of making it right :-)

At that point I had not yet heard of RMS or the term "open source" - it just made good sense to help differentiate oneself in a competitive market.

"We have 3 bids, all about the same price, but one of them is also giving us the source code." - gee, which one would YOU deal with?

Re:What I sadly discovered about RMS and GNU/GPL.

[JohnFluxx]

You are of course trolling to hell and back, but I would like to make one point..

I saw RMS about 10 years ago, and found him to be a real 'hippie'. It was really quite embarrassing.

But I saw him again just 2 years ago and found that he'd changed a lot. He gave a very good speech and talked about the copyright on books. He proposed a two year copyright length on books, extended if it sells well to five years etc. He put forward his reasoning (Most books go out of print after two years), and the reaction from book writers during his research (positive), etc. It was a very reasonable argument. He brought up the philisophy of being free, but it was more of an undertone, than a dominant statement.

I think RMS has matured a lot during the years. Maybe listen to one of his recent talks and give him a fair ear. If you still don't like him, then fair enough.

Downhill since 18, mostly because of windowing

[igb]

It's been downhill since the late 17s, in fact. The moment the whole debacle with Epoch, Lucid etc sprung up, emacs became an exercise in people with great programming skills but minimal taste. Windowing support was the last straw: none of them are any good, and they clutter the editor up. Disclaimer: I am not innocent. I wrote the original code that went into the late 17s to provide support for emacs in Suntools. Partly because X11 standardisation was late arriving, emacs got cluttered with Suntools, NeWS, Apollo, X10 and X11 windowing, none of it good enough to be better than leaving the hell alone. And anyway, although I love GNU emacs to death and I've been using emacsen of various forms for twenty-five years (well, since December 1983), whisper it who dares that actually Greenberg's Multics Emacs had the benefit of being written in genuine MacLisp, including the redisplay loop, whereas GNU Emacs is actually mostly written in C. A trip into the Multics emacs source code is well worthwhile: some of the problems it's solving (redisplay onto vt100 displays down 300 baud circuits) aren't interesting per se, but the approaches most certainly are.

Re:Stallman is still around?

[alexgieg]

"The elite" refers to the church, not the nobles. If the Pope didn't like what you were doing, the threat of excommunication brought even kings back in line.

This is an oversimplification of what happened then.

If the Church (not only the Pope, but a lot of people; just the Pope disagreeing meant nothing if the others agreed) saw a problem in what you wrote, they would send someone knowledgeable on the subject to talk to you ("inquisitor" means "asker"), requesting you both to talk on the subject. This talk could proceed for as long as it was needed for one to convince the other, or for both to agree that an agreements was unreachable. Depending on what of these things happened, this was the procedure:

a) In case you were convinced by the inquisitor, nothing happened, of course. You both went back to your lives.

b) In case the inquisitor was convinced by you, what historically happened many times, he would take the subject back to the Vatican where it would enter the list of themes to be debated in the next council. Afterwards, once the council happened, one of two things could happen after some months of debate: the Church as a whole might conclude you were in fact correct, and change accordingly (what also happened historically many times), or it could conclude you and the inquisitor were wrong. What, however, didn't exclude the possibility of the theme being the subject of other councils, and the Church position change again, what also happened many times.

As for you yourself, the practical consequences while your position wasn't agreed upon by the Church were similar to the next case:

c) In case you both agreed that you couldn't reach an agreement on the subject, a document was presented to you wish you was expected to sign. This document basically said that you were aware that your arguments weren't strong enough to convince other sages as much knowledgeable on the subject as you; thus, that the Church's position on the matter could very well be the correct, that you're just unable to fully appreciate it; and thus, that since it's not a certainty, it isn't worth disclosing to less knowledgeable people as a proven fact, so to avoid social distress. You signed it, and while nothing happened to you, you could still bring the subject to discussion and investigation on Universities.

d) The last alternative was you refusing to sign the document, and then walking around preaching your ideas as if they were pure facts, trying to convince the simple people as a compensation for the fact you didn't manage to convince those at your own knowledge level, i.e., by becoming a cult leader and, as more and more non-scholars were convinced by you, a source of social unrest. This would set you as an heretical and put an excommunication decree over your head, with the consequences we know.

So, it's extremely naive, historically, to think the Church went directly to 'd'. It rarely happened, and most of the time the Church was a very reasonable entity for the time (for example, by threatening with excommunication those civil official who used more than one torture session on a suspect, as the custom was a lot of torture sessions; and by dismissing as unfounded and freeing the accused in 99 of each 100 witchcraft trials). They assumed that the unrestricted diffusion as fact of unproven and unsustainable hypotheses and theories would result in utter chaos, and history has shown they were correct in this regards as far as the immediately following centuries is concerned, as the many religious wars of the subsequent Modern Age have shown.

In fact, it took a lot of blood for societies to develop the profound concept of "Just don't care what your neighbor think, damn it!". Now we know this is possible, but at the time no one dreamed of such a possibility, and contrasting their stance of "perfect the proof, reach unanimity on it, and only then diffuse it" with the current understanding that "complete freedom of