RMS Steps Down As Emacs Maintainer 321
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."
May His Next Adventure Be Twice as Fruitfull (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Stallman is still around? (Score:3, Interesting)
Obviously you have never met RMS.
I can't decide whether to put a ":-)" on that or not. I'll just leave it ambiguous. He's yelled at me. I won the argument by leaving.
Re:Stallman is still around? (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
What I sadly discovered about RMS and GNU/GPL. (Score:2, Interesting)
Now I know that some of you will step up to defend the GPL and that's fine (since I support your right to free speech) but how about listening quietly for a change and just absorbing the facts that the GPL has a dark side.
The challenge of letting your code out into the world is trusting people will make changes and contribute them back. The GPL assumes the worst of people. I guess that's why the Apache Project is such a success with it's freer license? It's trust of your fellow programmers without limiting what they can do.
Once RMS visited the town where I live and I went to see him speak about the open source software. This was, oh, a long time ago, maybe ten years... Afterwards he took questions and he and I had an interaction regarding innovation and the X Window System. The gist of it being that stagnation was fine for him. RMS accepts no more change. X was fine. X was perfect. To him, not to me. From my view X is bloated and archaic. Worst of all X's design and code base are cryptic. What I discovered about RMS is that he likes cryptic rather than keeping it simple as possible but not simplistic. What I discovered about RMS is that he likes silly catch phrases about "beer" and cryptic nonsense like recursive acronyms such as GNU. What I discovered about RMS is that he's likely ten times as anachronistic as he seems. Now any of these aspect of his person would be fine with me except that he is also a cult leader leading the cult of GNU and GPL. Now we end up with a wild, crazy and cryptic legal nonsense of the GPL (et. al.) that has really messed up the free software license space with rules that limit rather than rules that empower those who really count: programmers. While RMS is a genius he is one genius the world would have been better off never hearing about. Since that isn't the way that things have transpired and he does exist and he did inflict upon the universe his wacky crypticisms (emacs, GPL, GNU, Hurd, etc...) we have to live with it. Above all though, the worst thing I learned about RMS is that he didn't care about improving software systems he had worked on, and to top that off, he didn't even care if anyone else did either. I discovered that RMS didn't care about innovation as much as he cared about his religious quest for GNU and GPL. That's when he lost me and when I really examined the GPL and his motives to the eye opening discovery that the GPL was a lock down of rights rather than an opening of rights.
If Microsoft is the BORG, RMS is the AntiBORG; and, much like Christ and the Anti-Christ both must be avoided like the plague otherwise one's freedom of thought is compromised as one is swallowed up into their cult of dogma. I choose to live free of religious dogma no matter where it comes from: RMS (et. al.) or the Bible (et. al.).
The reason that these discoveries about RMS were sad for me was that I expected more from someone who said that they supported free software. Unfortunately every paragraph of what he supports goes against real freedom. As a result the truly massive code base of infected code is off limits. What a waste. However, it's typical of cults that have a deceptive message in them.
May you choose what ever you want for your software license. Please just be aware that your choices can have a dark side to them especially if they are going the way of a cult group.
True freedom comes from trust. True freedom comes from letting others choose their path. The movie Born Free says it quite well; if you set it free it w
More a story on Emacs than on RMS (Score:3, Interesting)
"Gerd Moellmann was the Emacs maintainer from the beginning of Emacs 21 development until the release of 21.1."
Yet RMS has had a decades-long involvement with Emacs. It seems he will continue to be involved, so what's the big deal? More generally, GNU has always been about freedom first, development second.
Re:What I sadly discovered about RMS and GNU/GPL. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Downhill since 18, mostly because of windowing (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:In fact... (Score:3, Interesting)
Indeed he can. In 2003 I attended a free software press conference in Soissons, France at which he spoke at length in French about free software, GNU, and a few other topics. While socially awkward, he is quite capable in front of groups and spoke well and without the need for assistance.
Unfortunately for me, in 2003 I knew exactly zero French so I mostly stared blankly for an hour and a half. Oh well... :)
Re:Stallman is still around? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is an oversimplification of what happened then.
If the Church (not only the Pope, but a lot of people; just the Pope disagreeing meant nothing if the others agreed) saw a problem in what you wrote, they would send someone knowledgeable on the subject to talk to you ("inquisitor" means "asker"), requesting you both to talk on the subject. This talk could proceed for as long as it was needed for one to convince the other, or for both to agree that an agreements was unreachable. Depending on what of these things happened, this was the procedure:
a) In case you were convinced by the inquisitor, nothing happened, of course. You both went back to your lives.
b) In case the inquisitor was convinced by you, what historically happened many times, he would take the subject back to the Vatican where it would enter the list of themes to be debated in the next council. Afterwards, once the council happened, one of two things could happen after some months of debate: the Church as a whole might conclude you were in fact correct, and change accordingly (what also happened historically many times), or it could conclude you and the inquisitor were wrong. What, however, didn't exclude the possibility of the theme being the subject of other councils, and the Church position change again, what also happened many times.
As for you yourself, the practical consequences while your position wasn't agreed upon by the Church were similar to the next case:
c) In case you both agreed that you couldn't reach an agreement on the subject, a document was presented to you wish you was expected to sign. This document basically said that you were aware that your arguments weren't strong enough to convince other sages as much knowledgeable on the subject as you; thus, that the Church's position on the matter could very well be the correct, that you're just unable to fully appreciate it; and thus, that since it's not a certainty, it isn't worth disclosing to less knowledgeable people as a proven fact, so to avoid social distress. You signed it, and while nothing happened to you, you could still bring the subject to discussion and investigation on Universities.
d) The last alternative was you refusing to sign the document, and then walking around preaching your ideas as if they were pure facts, trying to convince the simple people as a compensation for the fact you didn't manage to convince those at your own knowledge level, i.e., by becoming a cult leader and, as more and more non-scholars were convinced by you, a source of social unrest. This would set you as an heretical and put an excommunication decree over your head, with the consequences we know.
So, it's extremely naive, historically, to think the Church went directly to 'd'. It rarely happened, and most of the time the Church was a very reasonable entity for the time (for example, by threatening with excommunication those civil official who used more than one torture session on a suspect, as the custom was a lot of torture sessions; and by dismissing as unfounded and freeing the accused in 99 of each 100 witchcraft trials). They assumed that the unrestricted diffusion as fact of unproven and unsustainable hypotheses and theories would result in utter chaos, and history has shown they were correct in this regards as far as the immediately following centuries is concerned, as the many religious wars of the subsequent Modern Age have shown.
In fact, it took a lot of blood for societies to develop the profound concept of "Just don't care what your neighbor think, damn it!". Now we know this is possible, but at the time no one dreamed of such a possibility, and contrasting their stance of "perfect the proof, reach unanimity on it, and only then diffuse it" with the current understanding that "complete freedom of
Re:Maybe... (Score:3, Interesting)