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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.
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 can actually use it right now:
http://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
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.
"Took him 32 years to find the key combination for this"
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.
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).
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/