petty squabling

Posted Jul 1, 2010 18:05 UTC (Thu) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458)
In reply to: petty squabling by mpr22
Parent article: Two GCC stories

OK, say I want to create a fork of GCC (let's call it EGCS just for kicks). If the FSF's GCC-powers-that-be aren't happy with my fork (presumably they aren't, why fork if we are in full agreement?) they could cause the EGCS project no end of grief. That sounds like a rather powerful incentive for not forking -- and as Linus explained somewhen in a rationale for git (sorry, can't find it now) one of its objectives is precisely to make forks easy, as that keeps the project alive. The egcs fork was instrumental in getting GCC development going again, much of what is GNU emacs today was first in xemacs. Without being able to fork (and survive) the current X.org wouldn't be either.

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petty squabling

Posted Jul 2, 2010 13:12 UTC (Fri) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] (2 responses)

> much of what is GNU emacs today was first in xemacs

Bit of an exaggeration there.

For one, xemacs' period of technological advancement, while it did last few years, ended long ago. The project's lists are nothing but spam nowadays and GNU Emacs is now much more advanced. In a project which dates back to 1976, the xemacs period isn't as large as one could think.

Another thing is that while the xemacs folk could borrow all progress from GNU Emacs, the GNU team got almost no code from the xemacs folk because the latter didn't document the copyright ownership of their code.

So the system was stacked against GNU Emacs, and it still won. They can't be doing too badly.

slander [was: petty squabling]

Posted Jul 2, 2010 17:38 UTC (Fri) by vladimir (guest, #14172) [Link] (1 responses)

> The project's [XEmacs] lists are nothing but spam nowadays

Entirely untrue. A quick look at the current archives of xemacs-beta, xemacs-patches and xemacs-review will show that you have no idea of what you're talking about.

> Another thing is that while the xemacs folk could borrow all progress from GNU Emacs, the GNU team got almost no code from the xemacs folk because the latter didn't document the copyright ownership of their code.

Again, untrue, and I speak from personal experience, having been involved in the discussions between RMS and the XEmacs developers. There were real technical issues in contention. The copyright stuff is a red herring used by RMS to trump any technical arguments. BTW, XEmacs either has or will shortly switch to a GPL3 license.

And, for "Striiiiike three! You're out!" XEmacs' use of anti-aliased fonts long preceded GNU Emacs' use. (The look and feel of the user interface was one of the technical issues in contention.)

For masochistic folks interested in revisiting a boring and long dead issue, you can start by reading "The XEmacs Split" section in the XEmacs Internals manual. In there are pointers to more discussion.

slander [was: petty squabling]

Posted Jul 4, 2010 5:13 UTC (Sun) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]

> The copyright stuff is a red herring used by RMS to trump any technical arguments.

Ehhhh... GNU emacs requires copyright on code contributions to be assigned to the FSF. XEmacs does not. Therefore, GNU emacs cannot simply take code from xemacs, but xemacs can take code from GNU emacs.

You might claim that GNU emacs shouldn't have the copyright assignment policy, but that doesn't change the fact that they DO have it, and that it would be difficult at this point to figure out how to get assignments for the code in xemacs.