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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."
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.
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. . . .
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.
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
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 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.
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/
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.
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.