Re: freedomization task list [was: Re: Dangerous precedent being set - possible serious violation of the GPL]
On Tue, 7 Dec 1999, Richard Stallman wrote:
> > Could this be done well enough to make PICO users happy?
>
> It wont make me happy.
> Emacs is really HUGE.
> Too HUGE for me.
>
> Will most PICO users really care about the size of the program very
> much? Given the big memories of modern machines, I would expect that
> the size won't make a practical difference any more--assuming the
> commands and display are similar enough.
>
I'm afraid I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one... pico =
100-200K and EMACS =, well... let's just say they don't call it "eightteen
megs and constantly swapping" for nothing ;)
Half of the reason pico and PINE are as big as they are is because they
are so old, kludgy and written by a University computing department ;) The
admin-type people around my university are so non-hacker, it's not funny.
They're a bunch of morons, basically. This may be why pico and PINE are
also so difficult to compile...
But they ARE relatively small.
My point is-- if someone "whiteroom"-cloned pico and PINE, the resulting
program would probably be faster, almost definitely be smaller, and
DEFINITELY be more portable and easier to compile than pico and PINE. No
one would want to use pico/PINE any more. This could be a major victory, I
think, for the free software world. I brought the topic up because pico
and PINE are two -extremely- common/popular non-free programs, the
popularity of which shows no signs of waning. People learn them on
University campuses and continue to use them for years.
--
= Jon "Caspian" Blank, right-brained computer programmer at large =
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