GNU and XEmacs (was: gnuclient and emacs21?)
(Hi list, sorry for the noise, I know that this is quite off-topic,
but I started to write it thinking that epg's message was sent to
help-gnu-emacs, that gets a lot of spam...)
Eric Gillespie, Jr. <epg@pretzelnet.org> wrote:
> I switched to XEmacs months ago because it is developed in the
> open. I was tired of using buggy FSF warez. Since switching, i
> have found that XEmacs is actually far superior. GNU Emacs is
> years behind. Plus, if i submit a patch, no one will make me
> sign copyright assignment papers. I'm not interested in a flame
> war, i'm just letting people know that i don't exactly care about
> the gnuserv package anymore.
<time to share personal experiences & impressions, and random
prejudices and impolitenesses>
I have tried to use XEmacs a handful of times (mainly on Slink and
Potato), but it kept crashing on me, and I found its docs horribly
messy if compared to those of GNU Emacs... the result was that I was
never able to port to it some elisp libraries that I wrote, and that
even if in some sense XEmacs was superior to GNU Emacs I was't be able
to verify that, because XEmacs didn't work :))
As for patches and bug reports, some years ago I submitted a bug
report describing an operation with glyphs that crashed GNU Emacs
20.3.2, and in less than one week I got a response by Gerd Moellman
and another by RMS himself... that was a sort of a mystical experience
for me, much better than being able to send patches to the CVS of one
fork of Emacs done by people who decided to rewrite it to make it
market-friendly and commie-free.
I have also submitted an elisp library to GNU Emacs -- "eev", it
hasn't been accepted into GNU Emacs yet because it still needs some
cleaning up -- and after a bit of thought I became very proud that the
FSF was asking me to sign papers, because that would let them defend
that code in legal disputes if needed, and they would still keep the
notice that I was the author in the headers... Oh, and they have spent
the price of a soap bar in postage stamps to send me a copy of the
transfer contract, and I got an envelope with the drawing of a GNU and
a contract with RMS's signature on the side of mine!
About the old discussion on GPL and freedom, here's an argument that I
haven't seen published anywhere. You are not completely free; if you
decide that you want from life is to be raped or enslaved you won't be
able to obtain that legally, so there are things you are not free to
do -- but, for complex reasons, this is generally considered a good
thing. Also a GPLed software can't be enslaved or raped, and this is
because it -- the software -- is free, in contrast with the cases
where the users are free to do whatever they want with the software.
If you want to create a free software or a software that is free to be
abused it is a matter of personal choice, but a lot of GNU software
was created by people who explicitly wanted to promote sharing with
their works, even if they had to forbid some uses (the "enslaverings"
and "social rapes") in the way.
Anyway, it is good to see how GNU Emacs and other free softwares
provoke strong reactions like love and hate. Let's hope that someday
someone would write a guide explaining how to learn one Emacs starting
from the other, and then we'll be able to see why we are both seeing
wonders that the other doesn't have access to.
</time to share personal experiences & impressions, and random
prejudices and impolitenesses>
Cheers,
Eduardo Ochs
http://angg.twu.net/
http://www.mat.puc-rio.br/~edrx/
edrx@inx.com.br
(Again, sorry for the help-gnu-emacsish tone.)
--
Get your free warez from ftp://127.0.0.1/ !
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