Slashdot Mirror
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."
Maybe he switched to vim.
no, wait....
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
I thought emacs had become self-aware by now...
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
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.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
You could've predicted this using C-x M-c M-Butterfly while editing emacs code inside emacs...
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
A bit like Castro leaving power.
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!
Since I actually had to google "RMS" does it mean I must delete my /. account?
Yes, it's true that RMS will no longer the main Emacs maintainer, but the truth is he will still be very close to the project. RMS is merely shifting to a subset; he has dedicated himself to filling a gap that has been missing in the Emacs operating system for a long time; the lack of a robust, powerful, yet easy-to-use editor.
...you stole the thunder from Bill gates! He was gonna step down soon and now you ruined it!
C-x C-c, RMS. C-x C-c.
"... 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.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is insufficiently documented.
Does this mean he will have more time to work on HURD and get that out the door before Duke Nukem Forever?
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
He needs more time out because he is starting a new career in break dancing.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pube5Aynsls
You obviously overlook the flamewars he started...
:)
Emacs vs Vi
GPL vs BSDL
GNU/Linux vs Linux
Free vs Open Source
etc etc...
Not that I'm trying to discredit his contributions to Free/Opensource Software, but a "peace" award might be a bit off the mark
Don't quote me on this.
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.
"Took him 32 years to find the key combination for this"
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.
He's got a very clear course plotted for his ideas.
He offers precise feedback on where he disagrees with others.
He does get shrill and baffling when he ventures into the abstract, and calls others "unethical".
For me to follow his train of thought there, he would have to publish a complete philosophical model.
But so what? His flamewars have contributed far less carbon to the atmosphere than those of other Nobel laureates.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
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?
I guess the guys behind Notepad can now take a well needed vacation!
Needs more time for beard maintenance. :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
> Obviously you have never met RMS. I did. More than once. Even had dinner with him (here, in Argentina). And I agree with you. I know what you mean.
Buanzo Consulting - 15 Years of GNU/Linux experience, for you.
Can anyone explain the fascination with there needing to be one that is better? Different strokes for different folks. I don't get how this stupid 'vi VS emacs' is still continuing. I guess the world must be doing alright if this is what people find to argue about :)
Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.
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.Oh, Emacs just recently acquired bloat and feeping creaturism?
Actually, I see the problem as the exact opposite. It used to be that people would ask themselves "I got this huge powerful 20 MHz computer with 4 megabytes of RAM, how will I ever I ever use all that power", and the nerd overhearing it would answer "use Emacs", and despite advances in computers, Emacs could keep track and was always the program that could fully utilize your hardware.
However, somewhere along the way we lost out to the competition. I see kids in the Emacs fora who, with a straight face, say they prefer Emacs because it is such as lean and mean editing machine. It is so sad. People nowadays go to Microsoft, KDE or Gnome for software to fully utilize their machines. In the olden days, Emacs would have offered a superset of all of these environments!
I think it is good RMS is stepping back. We need young people to revitalize Emacs, and once again make it a leader in resource consumption. We need to get back to our roots. We need EGACS: Eight Gigabytes And Constantly Swapping.
Gutenberg caused copies to become much cheaper to produce though, that's for sure. But this has nothing to do with "taking information out of the hands of the elite". The information was always "out of their hands". To get to it you only had to do some foot work.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
My ford can flatten your emacs and leave your vi in the dust without leaving second gear...
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
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Here is a transcript:
Me: Every release since 19.34b has suffered badly from bloat and other crud.
Emacs: What would happen if 19 34b has suffered badly from bloat and other crud?
Me: MULE was probably the worst offender.
Emacs: Why do you say mule was probably the worst offender?
Me: Such a fat jackass, that MULE.
Emacs: Can you elaborate on that?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
...NetBeans, but then I've had vi or vb too many cups of absinthe.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I'd rather he step down from his GPL pulpit. There is nothing worse than a man with a religious cause. RMS fits that bill. GPL has set back free open software back hundreds of years by focusing on the rights of the "end user" rather than the rights of the "programmer". By placing too many legal and contractual restrictions on the scope of decisions that a programmer can do with GPL'd code it means that for many programmers GPL'd code is poison that must be carefully watched out for and avoided as much as proprietary code.
Now I know that some of you will step up to defend the GPL and that's fine (since I support your right to free speech) but how about listening quietly for a change and just absorbing the facts that the GPL has a dark side.
The challenge of letting your code out into the world is trusting people will make changes and contribute them back. The GPL assumes the worst of people. I guess that's why the Apache Project is such a success with it's freer license? It's trust of your fellow programmers without limiting what they can do.
Once RMS visited the town where I live and I went to see him speak about the open source software. This was, oh, a long time ago, maybe ten years... Afterwards he took questions and he and I had an interaction regarding innovation and the X Window System. The gist of it being that stagnation was fine for him. RMS accepts no more change. X was fine. X was perfect. To him, not to me. From my view X is bloated and archaic. Worst of all X's design and code base are cryptic. What I discovered about RMS is that he likes cryptic rather than keeping it simple as possible but not simplistic. What I discovered about RMS is that he likes silly catch phrases about "beer" and cryptic nonsense like recursive acronyms such as GNU. What I discovered about RMS is that he's likely ten times as anachronistic as he seems. Now any of these aspect of his person would be fine with me except that he is also a cult leader leading the cult of GNU and GPL. Now we end up with a wild, crazy and cryptic legal nonsense of the GPL (et. al.) that has really messed up the free software license space with rules that limit rather than rules that empower those who really count: programmers. While RMS is a genius he is one genius the world would have been better off never hearing about. Since that isn't the way that things have transpired and he does exist and he did inflict upon the universe his wacky crypticisms (emacs, GPL, GNU, Hurd, etc...) we have to live with it. Above all though, the worst thing I learned about RMS is that he didn't care about improving software systems he had worked on, and to top that off, he didn't even care if anyone else did either. I discovered that RMS didn't care about innovation as much as he cared about his religious quest for GNU and GPL. That's when he lost me and when I really examined the GPL and his motives to the eye opening discovery that the GPL was a lock down of rights rather than an opening of rights.
If Microsoft is the BORG, RMS is the AntiBORG; and, much like Christ and the Anti-Christ both must be avoided like the plague otherwise one's freedom of thought is compromised as one is swallowed up into their cult of dogma. I choose to live free of religious dogma no matter where it comes from: RMS (et. al.) or the Bible (et. al.).
The reason that these discoveries about RMS were sad for me was that I expected more from someone who said that they supported free software. Unfortunately every paragraph of what he supports goes against real freedom. As a result the truly massive code base of infected code is off limits. What a waste. However, it's typical of cults that have a deceptive message in them.
May you choose what ever you want for your software license. Please just be aware that your choices can have a dark side to them especially if they are going the way of a cult group.
True freedom comes from trust. True freedom comes from letting others choose their path. The movie Born Free says it quite well; if you set it free it w
RMS is just too busy with more important things like software freedom in general and needs to delegate. BTW, it's not as if RMS has always been the _maintainer_ of Emacs--from the acknowlegements:
"Gerd Moellmann was the Emacs maintainer from the beginning of Emacs 21 development until the release of 21.1."
Yet RMS has had a decades-long involvement with Emacs. It seems he will continue to be involved, so what's the big deal? More generally, GNU has always been about freedom first, development second.
great point "What rules can we impose on everybody else so they have to pay us lots of money? I had the good fortune in the 1970s to be part of a community of programmers who shared software. And because of this I always like to look at the same issue from a different direction to ask: what kind of rules make possible a good society that is good for the people who are in it? And therefore I reach completely different answers." rms is a true American hero.
Jokes aside, after trying many free and commercial LaTeX editors, I ended up running Auctex under Emacs. Beats anything else. That's my main usage of Emacs (and I use LaTeX a lot, to typeset math staff).
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.
Right, because SHARE http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHARE_(computing) and DECUS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECUS never existed. Nor did BSD* and pcc. Nor did the MIT AI lab, SAIL, or any of the other communities that RMS has said influenced him heavily.
RMS is incredibly important to the FOSS movement, and is possibly the single most important individual in promulgating it. He did a huge amount to refine a theory of what it means for software to be free and to encourage wholesale development of large free systems. But it was already in motion before him, and certainly would've existed without him. Indeed, the OSS part of FOSS is in some ways a repudiation of a lot of his ideology; it's disheartening to me, but the original reason for the OSS moniker was to disassociate freely available software from FSF rhetoric.
Again, I do think RMS is one of the most important figures in the FOSS movement; saying that it's "quite possible - likely even - that there would be no such thing as FOSS if it were not for RMS" oversteps things rather a lot, though. The polemics would certainly differ, but the core notion of collaborative open development of freely available source (which intelligent and inquisitive people can look at, learn from, and customize) would certainly have continued to exist and grow from its pre-RMS roots.
That said, RMS is incredibly influential not only on the polemics and rhetoric but also in the development realm; a huge amount of code that is widely relied on was originally written by him, and the rhetoric and polemics got a lot of other software written and opened up in ways that tend to assure it will remain open for the future.
*I know the original BSD license is not technically free by FSF standards; in most meaningful ways, though, the culture of free, open development existed in the BSD community,mmuch as it does in the modern X.org or Apache (or other non-copyleft free software) communities.
(and oh yeah, vim >>> emacs)
rage, rage against the dying of the light
Bah, all rubbish!
1. Simplicity: [_] Notepad [X] Ed
2. Less bloat: [_] Notepad [X] Ed
3. More users: [_] Notepad [X] Ed
and, remember, it's the standard!
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
I'm not too sure I agree with you here. Prior to the printing press, as you point out, literacy was a skill set very few people possessed, and the scarcity of texts certainly helped to perpetuate this state of affairs. With the advent of the printing press, texts became far more common place, and hence there was more incentive and opportunity to learn to read.
In a similar fashion, programming is a skill set possessed by relatively few people, but I don't think scarcity of available code or a lack of opportunity to learn is the reason. Ever since the advent of home computers, every bookshop and library has carried text books, crammed with examples and information that will teach you to code. The first computer I ever owned came with a built in basic interpreter and a manual that taught you how to program it. GCC is a huge boon to anyone wanting to learn to program, but you can download a compiler for free form MS's web site and learn with that ( admittedly, their are restrictions on what you can do with programs compiled by it).
I can see why you might want to draw the comparison , but it's a fatally flawed analogy in my opinion. Stick to cars.
"I realise this is not a very popular opinion but it's the truth, and there for needs to be said" -Bill Hicks
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.
Not to really detract from your point (with which I agree), but I would just say that our modern knowledge of medieval literacy is a bit different than older theories. Not bringing up other evidence, the mere fact that within 30 years of Gutenberg's invention of the press that every city of any size in Europe from Andalusia to Hungary had a printing press (literally within 30 years--the rate of advance was staggering!) gives some clues about how many people really were literate--after all, you don't need presses if there's nobody who can read.
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/
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.
You can use printing presses to stamp out libels with cartoons on them. Even people who can't read can get the value of your cartoon if it's good enough. The political cartoon is an extremely powerful form of expression for just that reason.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Indeed he can. In 2003 I attended a free software press conference in Soissons, France at which he spoke at length in French about free software, GNU, and a few other topics. While socially awkward, he is quite capable in front of groups and spoke well and without the need for assistance.
Unfortunately for me, in 2003 I knew exactly zero French so I mostly stared blankly for an hour and a half. Oh well... :)
Elrond, Duke of URL
"This is the most fun I've had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"-Sam&Max
You can learn to write programs from books that teach the material, but to learn to write good programs requires seeing other good programs. It takes a very long time to go from your built-in BASIC interpreter and a manual to writing actually useful, well-designed programs, but having access to the source for other programs can accelerate that process.
Microsoft's compiler is very good, and if you're learning to write Hello, World! then there's no real difference between using it and using gcc. But if you want to learn how to write a compiler, gcc is a far more useful tool.
Free software provides would-be programmers with a pool of code ranging from operating system kernels to text editors to 3D games; if you want to learn the craft then that's a tremendously valuable resource.
You can't become literate just by having a stack of books; you need some kind of learning material and hopefully a teacher. But the stack of books certainly helps, not only in giving you stuff to practice reading but also giving you the desire to read; and maybe also the desire to be able to write stuff of the same quality.
Likewise, a stack of source code won't teach you to program by itself, but it can be invaluable as both an aid to your learning and as a motivator to improve your skills. Seeing what can be done isn't without merit, but seeing how it was done is much more valuable.
Then how do you know he was speaking French?
...!
1. Simplicity: [_] Ed [X] Pencil
2. Less bloat: [_] Ed [X] Pencil
3. More users: [_] Ed [X] Pencil
Ho ho ho, in effect, books were in the hands of the elite, the monasteries also being part of the elite in that time, but also some noblemen had their own libraries . The value of the books was immense, as only up to a hundred copies were available and these books would not be given in the hands of some lower-class person (if that person could read at all). In practice, if you wanted to get a copy of a book, you would have to be able to afford a servant who could read and write, and send this servant all the way to the place the book was located, pay for travelling expenses, and/or a weaponed guard if you wanted to loan the book over to your place. Also understand that copying the book would take a long long time, which means a very costly and slow way of knowledge movement. Gutenberg's invention did help bringing books out of the elitist circle, if not for my arguments above, then just for the sake of the economy of bulk products.
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
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
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.