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RMS Steps Down As Emacs Maintainer

Posted by CmdrTaco on Sat Feb 23, 2008 10:51 AM
from the evangelism-is-time-consuming dept.
GNU is Not Unix
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."
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Submission: RMS steps down as Emacs maintainer by sigzero (914876)
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  • Maybe... (Score:5, Funny)

    by imageboard (1038004) on Saturday February 23 2008, @10:54AM (#22526998)
    Maybe he switched to vim.

  • As expected. (Score:5, Funny)

    by ozmanjusri (601766) <(aussie_bob) (at) (hotmail.com)> on Saturday February 23 2008, @10:55AM (#22527004) Journal
    Concise, elegant and minimalistic, just like Emacs.

    no, wait....

  • Are maintainers even necessary? (Score:5, Funny)

    by InterruptDescriptorT (531083) on Saturday February 23 2008, @10:56AM (#22527024) Homepage
    I thought emacs had become self-aware by now...
  • 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.

    • EMACS the only software you need.
      For certain values of "need".
      For example, to make picture-mode work for photographs, you'd need a canvas about the size of an aircraft carrier flight deck to express the pixels as text, more RAM than Dodge's truck division to hold the image, and a great deal of patience to scroll it on a typical LCD.
      Really, it's OK to pick the proper tool for the job.

  • Butterfly effect? (Score:5, Funny)

    by griffjon (14945) <GriffJon.Hotmail@com> on Saturday February 23 2008, @10:59AM (#22527042) Homepage Journal
    You could've predicted this using C-x M-c M-Butterfly [xkcd.org] while editing emacs code inside emacs...

  • Wow (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 23 2008, @11:14AM (#22527132)
    A bit like Castro leaving power.

      • Re:Wow (Score:5, Funny)

        by maroberts (15852) on Saturday February 23 2008, @12:14PM (#22527558) Homepage Journal
        Castro has been a murderous dictator for decades, and it's rather unfortunate that you'd choose to compare Stallman to him.
        Of course, being Slashdot, comparing Bill Gates to him is Official Policy....

      • Re:Wow (Score:5, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 23 2008, @12:15PM (#22527578)
        Of course any comparisons between the two men are absurd. One's a bearded, long-winded Communist dictator who tolerates no dissent; the other one speaks Spanish.

        I kid, I kid... all the best wishes for RMS and Emacs both.

  • Emacs bloat (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 23 2008, @11:20AM (#22527198)
    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!

    • Re:Emacs bloat (Score:4, Funny)

      by dventimi (107266) on Saturday February 23 2008, @11:40AM (#22527336) Homepage
      You wrote, "Every release since then has suffered badly from bloat and other crud."

      Please explain.

    • I love you (Score:5, Funny)

      by Per Abrahamsen (1397) on Saturday February 23 2008, @01:01PM (#22527882) Homepage
      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.

  • hmm (Score:5, Funny)

    by ImTheDarkcyde (759406) <ImTheDarkcyde@hotmail.com> on Saturday February 23 2008, @11:22AM (#22527204) Journal
    Since I actually had to google "RMS" does it mean I must delete my /. account?

  • The article is EXTREMELY misleading (Score:5, Funny)

    by The Breeze (140484) on Saturday February 23 2008, @11:23AM (#22527216) Homepage
    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.

  • Damnit RMS .... (Score:5, Funny)

    by superash (1045796) on Saturday February 23 2008, @11:24AM (#22527228)
    ...you stole the thunder from Bill gates! He was gonna step down soon and now you ruined it!

    • Re:Damnit RMS .... (Score:5, Funny)

      by frdmfghtr (603968) on Saturday February 23 2008, @11:43AM (#22527352)

      ...you stole the thunder from Bill gates! He was gonna step down soon and now you ruined it!
      Maybe they're both stepping down, going on a togetherness retreat, and announcing that Windows 7 is really GNU/Windows on their return.

      (Had to say it)

  • Goodbye (Score:5, Funny)

    by digitalderbs (718388) on Saturday February 23 2008, @11:24AM (#22527234)
    C-x C-c, RMS. C-x C-c.

  • More time to work on HURD? (Score:4, Funny)

    by LingNoi (1066278) on Saturday February 23 2008, @11:38AM (#22527316)
    Does this mean he will have more time to work on HURD and get that out the door before Duke Nukem Forever?

  • The reason he is leaving.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by LingNoi (1066278) on Saturday February 23 2008, @11:50AM (#22527388)
    He needs more time out because he is starting a new career in break dancing.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pube5Aynsls [youtube.com]

  • Favorite from reddit: (Score:5, Funny)

    by bdjacobson (1094909) on Saturday February 23 2008, @11:59AM (#22527444)
    "Took him 32 years to find the key combination for this"

  • Good news for MS coders! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Threni (635302) on Saturday February 23 2008, @12:29PM (#22527674)
    I guess the guys behind Notepad can now take a well needed vacation!

  • Real reason? (Score:5, Funny)

    by fahrbot-bot (874524) on Saturday February 23 2008, @12:30PM (#22527682)
    Needs more time for beard maintenance. :-)

  • editing LaTeX under Emacs (Score:5, Informative)

    by porky_pig_jr (129948) on Saturday February 23 2008, @03:37PM (#22529008)
    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).

    • Re:Stallman is still around? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by smitty_one_each (243267) * on Saturday February 23 2008, @11:17AM (#22527164) Homepage Journal
      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/ [medaloffreedom.com]

      • Re:Stallman is still around? (Score:5, Funny)

        by sydneyfong (410107) on Saturday February 23 2008, @11:57AM (#22527430) Homepage Journal
        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 :)

        • Re:Stallman is still around? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by smitty_one_each (243267) * on Saturday February 23 2008, @11:47AM (#22527380) Homepage Journal
          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.

          • 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 vote for the RMS peace prize (Score:4, Insightful)

              by ODBOL (197239) on Saturday February 23 2008, @06:08PM (#22530064) Homepage

              By the early '90s, people were routinely giving source code to their customers, rather than trusting "code escrow" services.


              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.

            • Re:Stallman is still around? (Score:4, Insightful)

              by smitty_one_each (243267) * on Saturday February 23 2008, @01:47PM (#22528242) Homepage Journal
              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...

    • Re:What I sadly discovered about RMS and GNU/GPL. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by JohnFluxx (413620) on Saturday February 23 2008, @04:50PM (#22529540)
      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.

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