I am afraid emacs is becoming irrelevant

Posted Mar 13, 2008 21:51 UTC (Thu) by skissane (subscriber, #38675)
In reply to: I am afraid emacs is becoming irrelevant by mmarkov
Parent article: Emacs chooses Bazaar

Stallman has his flaws, as do all of us, but I think you are being excessively harsh on him. I think there were multiple reasons for the GNU/XEmacs fork. Factors included technical disagreements, disagreements over project management style, and disagreements over legal issues (i.e. GNU wanted copyright assignment to the FSF, something which several XEmacs developers were unwilling or unable to do.) I think the first two could be sorted out over time (look at the history of GCC/EGCS), but it is the legal disagreements which have served to make the divorce permanent. As I understand, Stallman has previously received legal advice that the FSF's ability to enforce the GPL on GNU packages is enhanced by having the copyright wholly owned by one entity. Whether this is good advice or not (I suspect that as the courts get more exposure to the GPL it may be less of an concern), you can understand Stallman's point of view.

I think in the end the reason why GNU Emacs seems to have mostly won out has been more critical mass. XEmacs certainly pioneered a number of interesting features, and even if (due to legal concerns) its code has not been incorporated into GNU Emacs, certainly the design & implementation experience of the XEmacs project has been beneficial to GNU Emacs over time. And forks in open source projects are not a purely negative thing — sometimes it is useful to be able to try competing approaches to the same problem.

And I don't think which choice of revision control system the GNU project makes is really a big issue. Its not a case of making a technically inferior due to political concerns. When faced with a choice between several technically excellent products, its often a good idea to turn to non-technical considerations to make a decision, because if you insist on deciding purely on technical merits, you run the risk of turning into Buridan's ass.