Re: Emacs vista build failures

[Richard M Stallman]

    It might be difficult to demonstrate but what I am thinking is that if 
    more people knows the tools for developing software on/for free system 
    they can contribute on their free time. (And in many cases bring 
    experience with them from non-free systems.)

In principle, they can.  But do they contribute to things that are
generally useful, or only to porting to their systems?

    One way to look into this question is perhaps to ask people developing 
    software that runs on free systems where they have learned it and if it 
    has been any help to them that these tools also runs on non-free systems.

That would be an interesting question to ask in a survey.