Toward a "modern" Emacs [LWN.net]

Toward a "modern" Emacs

Posted Sep 28, 2020 12:30 UTC (Mon) by MrWim (subscriber, #47432)
In reply to: Toward a "modern" Emacs by marcH
Parent article: Toward a "modern" Emacs

> The world has completely changed since the copyleft was invented. It's not "perfect" because closed source still exists (always will) but open source is absolutely "everywhere you look" and a massive lot is NOT copyleft. The FSF people have won but they haven't noticed because of their idealism/dogma.

I think this misunderstands the aims of the FSF. Really it's not about software, it's about people (aka users). Does the software restrict the user in some way? Free software licences including copyleft or BSD style are a means to that end, rather than an end in itself.

So: if there's more free software out there, but people have less control then overall this is seen as a loss.

I'm not saying that I completely agree with the FSF, but I think their position is consistent with their purpose (or idealism/dogma as you put it).

There was a link posted to LWN a few years ago to this effect. Something about there being more open-source software out there, but even more proprietary software build upon it. It was by some bigshot like Eben Moglen. I'd love to link to it but I can't find it now.

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Toward a "modern" Emacs

Posted Sep 28, 2020 14:27 UTC (Mon) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (1 responses)

Perhaps you are thinking of the FOSDEM talks by Karen Sandler and Bradley Kuhn:

https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/full_softw...
https://archive.fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/open_sourc...

Toward a "modern" Emacs

Posted Sep 28, 2020 15:44 UTC (Mon) by MrWim (subscriber, #47432) [Link]

Thank you.

Toward a "modern" Emacs

Posted Sep 29, 2020 7:37 UTC (Tue) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

The thing is, RMS keeps making decisions about FSF software that restrict what users can practically do with his software that do not enable the users. So there's kind of a blindness here, where the ideological freedom and capability of the users is being used to prevent the practical utility and capability of the users.

I think the ideological freedom of the users is important, and that FSF correctly identified this way back when and still have a useful mission to share that seed idea. I just don't think that browbeating users who want to make reasonable changes that do not actually harm those ideological ideas serves that mission.