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Re: MAINTAINERS file


From: Jeremy Maitin-Shepard
Subject: Re: MAINTAINERS file
Date: Tue, 04 Mar 2008 13:41:24 -0500
User-agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/23.0.50 (gnu/linux)

Thien-Thi Nguyen <address@hidden> writes:

> () "Juanma Barranquero" <address@hidden>
> () Tue, 4 Mar 2008 13:56:47 +0100

>    Yes, I can easily imagine the faces of any vi-loving Bazaar
>    developer if we asked them to drop it and use Emacs...

> Hey, i love vi (the same way i love sunsets: from afar, w/ a nice
> cool beer on a hot day, hacking on Emacs in Emacs, head toasted
> gently by the trees tickling the brain :-) ...

> But, i don't use bzr.  I hope that 1/ the git<->bzr gateway grows
> fully-functional quickly; 2/ someone starts a GPLv3+ (able to be
> subsequently adopted by GNU) project that reads/writes git repo
> format.

"Reads/writes git repo format" essentially means a compatible
reimplementation of git.  Reimplementing git solely to be able to
license it under GPLv3 instead of GPLv2 is one of the biggest wastes of
time I've ever heard of.

More seriously, I think the goal of the GNU project should be to promote
free software.  Showing "loyalty" to another GNU project by using it in
favor of an alternative that is equally free and may be technically
superior does nothing to promote free software.  (In fact, to the extent
that using an inferior tool may interfere with Emacs development, the
Emacs project, and consequently free software as a whole, is harmed.)
Favoring projects that have the "GNU" label suggests a real motivation
of merely promoting the "GNU" name.

You may argue that promoting the "GNU" name is important for promoting
free software, but I don't buy that.  When it was first founded, the FSF
may have been the only "producer" of free software, but that is
obviously no longer true, and this fact reflects the now widespread
adoption and popularity of free software.  Sure, you may be sour that
the name "Linux" is far more widely known and used than the name "GNU",
and it is legitimate to be slightly upset that "Linus Torvalds" may be a
name slightly more widely known than "Richard Stallman" (though I'm not
even sure how true that is), but given that most of the people that use
the name "Linux" to refer to what is actually a system running the Linux
kernel (probably compiled using GCC) plus the usual glibc, coreutils,
findutils, etc., X11, other stuff have no idea what "Linux" technically
actually means (and certainly are just confused by names like BSD or
Hurd), you cannot expect that merely having more people blindly use the
name "GNU" will actually increase their understanding of the idea of
free software.  Instead, it is more useful to actually promote the idea
of free software directly.

I think the most significant barrier to greater appreciation for the
idea of free software is the fact that it is very hard for
non-programmers to understand or appreciate the idea of free software,
and the vast majority of computer users are non-programmers.

> Hey look, we already have sha1.el (though its Commentary
> sez: "Rewrite from scratch", hmm).

> thi

-- 
Jeremy Maitin-Shepard




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