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."

Re:Stallman is still around?

[smittyoneeach]

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]

Emacs bloat

[Anonymous Coward]

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:hmm

[notamac]

Yes

Re:Stallman is still around?

[smittyoneeach]

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.

Re:Stallman is still around?

[Antique Geekmeister]

Really? You don't use gcc, which he helped create, or other GPL licensed code, for which he helped create the GPL?

A lot of us use Emacs extensively for code writing. It's a helpful tool.

Re:Stallman is still around?

[Wolfbone]

You Sir (or Madam), are an ignoramus (first class), and the irrelevance is all yours: Emacs, as Neal Stephenson once said; "outshines all other editors as the noonday sun does the stars" - and it still does. Of course if you don't know why it does so, you'd probably be better off using a tool designed for less smart people anyway :) More importantly, it is quite possible - likely even - that there would be no such thing as FOSS if it were not for RMS, and the world would be a much worse place for intelligent and inquisitive tech./sci./math minded people.

Re:Stallman is still around?

[smittyoneeach]

He's got a very clear course plotted for his ideas.
He offers precise feedback on where he disagrees with others.
He does get shrill and baffling when he ventures into the abstract, and calls others "unethical".
For me to follow his train of thought there, he would have to publish a complete philosophical model.
But so what? His flamewars have contributed far less carbon to the atmosphere than those of other Nobel laureates.

Re:Emacs bloat

[bcrowell]

I like mg, which is a tiny, fast clone of emacs. I only revert to using emacs on the rare occasions when I need to do something fancy that mg can't do. On my (pretty fast) system, emacs -nw takes 2 seconds to start up, which is annoying and totally unnecessary when all I want to do is some simple text editing. I also found that with emacs, I was spending a lot of time websurfing for information on how to turn off features that I didn't want (syntax coloring, automatic indentation, ...). "Open the pod bay doors, Hal!"

Re:Stallman is still around?

[cbart387]

Can anyone explain the fascination with there needing to be one that is better? Different strokes for different folks. I don't get how this stupid 'vi VS emacs' is still continuing. I guess the world must be doing alright if this is what people find to argue about :)

Re:Stallman is still around?

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Simplicity: [X] vi [_] emacs
2. Less bloat: [X] vi [_] emacs
3. More users: [X] vi [_] emacs

I'm not sure what you think you're proving. I mean...

1. Simplicity: [_] vi [X] Notepad
2. Less bloat: [_] vi [X] Notepad
3. 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.

Re:Stallman is still around?

[Anonymous Coward]

He is roughly as historically important as the entire Police Academy series.

And you would rate as culturally important as what? Leonard Part 6? Stop! Or my Mom will shoot? Perhaps, Freddy got fingered? RMS may be a well known ass, but his contributions to software will be lasting, yours, not so much.

Re:Stallman is still around?

[alexgieg]

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.

This sentence, as far as Gutenberg is concerned, makes no sense whatsoever. Medieval nobles were illiterate, they didn't consider it worth their time to learn how to read. The thing is, if you were able to read, you would go after a literacy-requiring work, and this usually meant becoming a priest. Also, whenever you wanted to read something you just went for a library and read it there. Those where located inside monasteries, and no monk ever blocked anyone from going inside and reading whatever he so wished. Better yet: if you appeared with paper and ink wishing to copy something, they would be even more glad you were there. Compare this to the current thinking on copy "rights" and I'd say we wend down from the then status quo, not up.

Gutenberg caused copies to become much cheaper to produce though, that's for sure. But this has nothing to do with "taking information out of the hands of the elite". The information was always "out of their hands". To get to it you only had to do some foot work.

Re:Stallman is still around?

[smittyoneeach]

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:Maybe...

[melikamp]

so no human could possibly complete it What does it have to do with RMS?

Re:Are maintainers even necessary?

[nlann]

How about M-x tetris

Re:Stallman is still around?

[pthisis]

You Sir (or Madam), are an ignoramus (first class), and the irrelevance is all yours: Emacs, as Neal Stephenson once said; "outshines all other editors as the noonday sun does the stars" - and it still does. Of course if you don't know why it does so, you'd probably be better off using a tool designed for less smart people anyway :) More importantly, it is quite possible - likely even - that there would be no such thing as FOSS if it were not for RMS, and the world would be a much worse place for intelligent and inquisitive tech./sci./math minded people.

Right, because SHARE http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHARE_(computing) [wikipedia.org] and DECUS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECUS [wikipedia.org] never existed. Nor did BSD* and pcc. Nor did the MIT AI lab, SAIL, or any of the other communities that RMS has said influenced him heavily.

RMS is incredibly important to the FOSS movement, and is possibly the single most important individual in promulgating it. He did a huge amount to refine a theory of what it means for software to be free and to encourage wholesale development of large free systems. But it was already in motion before him, and certainly would've existed without him. Indeed, the OSS part of FOSS is in some ways a repudiation of a lot of his ideology; it's disheartening to me, but the original reason for the OSS moniker was to disassociate freely available software from FSF rhetoric.

Again, I do think RMS is one of the most important figures in the FOSS movement; saying that it's "quite possible - likely even - that there would be no such thing as FOSS if it were not for RMS" oversteps things rather a lot, though. The polemics would certainly differ, but the core notion of collaborative open development of freely available source (which intelligent and inquisitive people can look at, learn from, and customize) would certainly have continued to exist and grow from its pre-RMS roots.

That said, RMS is incredibly influential not only on the polemics and rhetoric but also in the development realm; a huge amount of code that is widely relied on was originally written by him, and the rhetoric and polemics got a lot of other software written and opened up in ways that tend to assure it will remain open for the future.

*I know the original BSD license is not technically free by FSF standards; in most meaningful ways, though, the culture of free, open development existed in the BSD community,mmuch as it does in the modern X.org or Apache (or other non-copyleft free software) communities.

(and oh yeah, vim >>> emacs)

Re:Stallman is still around?

[Toby_Tyke]

I'm not too sure I agree with you here. Prior to the printing press, as you point out, literacy was a skill set very few people possessed, and the scarcity of texts certainly helped to perpetuate this state of affairs. With the advent of the printing press, texts became far more common place, and hence there was more incentive and opportunity to learn to read.

In a similar fashion, programming is a skill set possessed by relatively few people, but I don't think scarcity of available code or a lack of opportunity to learn is the reason. Ever since the advent of home computers, every bookshop and library has carried text books, crammed with examples and information that will teach you to code. The first computer I ever owned came with a built in basic interpreter and a manual that taught you how to program it. GCC is a huge boon to anyone wanting to learn to program, but you can download a compiler for free form MS's web site and learn with that ( admittedly, their are restrictions on what you can do with programs compiled by it).

I can see why you might want to draw the comparison , but it's a fatally flawed analogy in my opinion. Stick to cars.

That joke was old when I was in school

[Anonymous Coward]

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 [common-lisp.net] 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.

Re:Stallman is still around?

[Moridineas]

Not to really detract from your point (with which I agree), but I would just say that our modern knowledge of medieval literacy is a bit different than older theories. Not bringing up other evidence, the mere fact that within 30 years of Gutenberg's invention of the press that every city of any size in Europe from Andalusia to Hungary had a printing press (literally within 30 years--the rate of advance was staggering!) gives some clues about how many people really were literate--after all, you don't need presses if there's nobody who can read.

I vote for the RMS peace prize

[ODBOL]

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?

[drinkypoo]

You can use printing presses to stamp out libels with cartoons on them. Even people who can't read can get the value of your cartoon if it's good enough. The political cartoon is an extremely powerful form of expression for just that reason.

Re:Stallman is still around?

[totally bogus dude]

You can learn to write programs from books that teach the material, but to learn to write good programs requires seeing other good programs. It takes a very long time to go from your built-in BASIC interpreter and a manual to writing actually useful, well-designed programs, but having access to the source for other programs can accelerate that process.

Microsoft's compiler is very good, and if you're learning to write Hello, World! then there's no real difference between using it and using gcc. But if you want to learn how to write a compiler, gcc is a far more useful tool.

Free software provides would-be programmers with a pool of code ranging from operating system kernels to text editors to 3D games; if you want to learn the craft then that's a tremendously valuable resource.

You can't become literate just by having a stack of books; you need some kind of learning material and hopefully a teacher. But the stack of books certainly helps, not only in giving you stuff to practice reading but also giving you the desire to read; and maybe also the desire to be able to write stuff of the same quality.

Likewise, a stack of source code won't teach you to program by itself, but it can be invaluable as both an aid to your learning and as a motivator to improve your skills. Seeing what can be done isn't without merit, but seeing how it was done is much more valuable.

Re:In fact...

[Scaba]

Unfortunately for me, in 2003 I knew exactly zero French so I mostly stared blankly for an hour and a half.

Then how do you know he was speaking French?