Re: Variant spellings in GNU Emacs documentation

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Barry Margolin <barmar@alum.mit.edu>
> Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.bug
> Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2004 07:39:34 GMT
> 
> I don't really have much problem with people using these derogatory 
> nicknames in Usenet postings and similar media; this is an informal 
> environment, and it's common to throw opinions and biases around in 
> conversation.  But putting them in published software documentation just 
> makes us all seem unprofessional and juvenile, and hurts the whole free 
> and open software movement.

Just FYI, these names were in the manual since about forever,
certainly before I came on board of Emacs maintenance circa 1993.
Heck, even the name of the Texinfo source file for the MS-DOS appendix
to the manual is msdog.texi.

So I think whatever juvenile and unprofessional attitude follows from
this, it's been out there for so long that nothing can now change our
image in people's eyes, and any damage it could have possibly done to
the free software movement is already done.