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."
Maybe... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Maybe... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Maybe... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Maybe... (Score:5, Funny)
T,FTFY. HAND.
Re:Maybe... (Score:5, Funny)
That joke was old when I was in school (Score:4, Insightful)
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Guess it's not all it's cracked up to be.
As expected. (Score:5, Funny)
no, wait....
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Re:As expected. (Score:5, Funny)
(asdf-just-because-the-code-is-all-in-one-namespace-p
asdf-does-not-make-it-ineffective))
Re:As expected. (Score:5, Funny)
I heard this was so he could have more time to work on HURD
Well, he could always port HURD so it runs on Emacs ...
Re:As expected. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:As expected. (Score:5, Funny)
No wait...
Are maintainers even necessary? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Are maintainers even necessary? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Are maintainers even necessary? (Score:5, Funny)
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:May His Next Adventure Be Twice as Fruitfull (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Or go with the XEmacs fork, which supports real bitmaps (and has been maintained without RMS for years).
Butterfly effect? (Score:5, Funny)
Wow (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Wow (Score:5, Funny)
I kid, I kid... all the best wishes for RMS and Emacs both.
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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... :)
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Then how do you know he was speaking French?
Re:Wow (Score:5, Funny)
Of course, being Slashdot, comparing Bill Gates to him is Official Policy....
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Those that want to look past Castro's brutality and focus on "stickin' it to the man" are in very poor taste.
That kind of sloppy thinking abets the Castros of the world in their efforts to suppress political freedom and practice brutality.
The media are a bunch of sycophants for doing this, and it's a shame that the more technically sharp on
Emacs bloat (Score:5, Insightful)
Bring back 19.34b!
Re:Emacs bloat (Score:4, Funny)
Please explain.
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No, the GP was referring to the emacs shrink (Score:3, Informative)
Me: Every release since 19.34b has suffered badly from bloat and other crud.
Emacs: What would happen if 19 34b has suffered badly from bloat and other crud?
Me: MULE was probably the worst offender.
Emacs: Why do you say mule was probably the worst offender?
Me: Such a fat jackass, that MULE.
Emacs: Can you elaborate on that?
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Re:Emacs bloat (Score:4, Funny)
syntax highlighting
I love you (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:I love you (Score:5, Funny)
Wait... how do you pronounce Eclipse?
I pronounce it (Score:3, Funny)
Downhill since 18, mostly because of windowing (Score:4, Interesting)
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hmm (Score:5, Funny)
Re:hmm (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:hmm (Score:5, Funny)
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The article is EXTREMELY misleading (Score:5, Funny)
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Damnit RMS .... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Damnit RMS .... (Score:5, Funny)
(Had to say it)
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Petty, but it had to be said.
Goodbye (Score:5, Funny)
More time to work on HURD? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:More time to work on HURD? (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/ [debian.org]
Question on "use" (Score:2)
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The reason he is leaving.. (Score:5, Funny)
I'm honestly surprised he's been maintaining it (Score:2)
Favorite from reddit: (Score:5, Funny)
Good news for MS coders! (Score:5, Funny)
Real reason? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
editing LaTeX under Emacs (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Stallman is still around? (Score:5, Insightful)
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]
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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:5, Insightful)
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? (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?
I vote for the RMS peace prize (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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,
Re:Stallman is still around? (Score:4, Insightful)
You can certainly attack the comparison on technical grounds.
It's like a car, see...
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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 oppor
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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
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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:Stallman is still around? (Score:4, Insightful)
A lot of us use Emacs extensively for code writing. It's a helpful tool.
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Less cheekily, I'd say he's after building a community that has a homogeneous view. Kinda like the Amish, with source code instead of plows.
The point about tapering off that I'm making is this: it's one thing to state your views in a positive way, and quite another to anathematize others who disagree.
Stallman's desire for community is simply one among many
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Re:Stallman is still around? (Score:5, Funny)
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
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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.
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That's only because we're closer to the sun than to all the other stars. In other words, its a matter of perspective. Take a step back, and you'll KNOW that vi outshines emacs ;-0
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Re:Stallman is still around? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Stallman is still around? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure what you think you're proving. I mean...
- Simplicity: [_] vi [X] Notepad
- Less bloat: [_] vi [X] Notepad
- 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: (Score:2)
Ok, I admit that was funny.
Silly argument in any case. Kate is a much better editor than either vim (stateful editor? No thanks!) or emacs (ever tried to get line numbers on that thing?)
Runs and hides
Re:Stallman is still around? (Score:5, Informative)
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1. Simplicity: [_] Notepad [X] Ed
2. Less bloat: [_] Notepad [X] Ed
3. More users: [_] Notepad [X] Ed
and, remember, it's the standard!
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The reason RMS is stepping down is Emacs doesn't need any more developement - its self-aware,
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.