Re: Summer of Code 2009

[Will Farrington]

On Jan 18, 2009, at 10:02 PM, Chong Yidong wrote:

> Will Farrington <address@hidden> writes:
>
> > Eliminating bugs from Emacs is *always* a good thing, even for
> > proprietary platforms. I think discouraging people from trying to
> > improve Emacs based upon the platform they use sends the wrong
> > message.
>
> That's not the point.  Certainly, contributions are welcome for all
> platforms.  However, in the case of GSoC, we're trying to select a  
> small
> number of projects to be worked on.  In this case, it makes sense to
> steer people towards efforts that do not narrowly benefit non-free
> platforms.

I agree that steering students in this direction of course is a good  
thing, but I also think that students shouldn't be expected to adopt a  
new platform with which they should focus themselves unless they are  
already interested in doing so. Obviously, there are more than likely  
some students who are interested in more open platforms, and more than  
likely GNU will favor those who do so -- which is understandable. But  
at the same time, I think it's important to note that by supporting  
the idea of improving Emacs on *all* platforms, more students are  
consequently encouraged to apply to work on GNU projects (which is  
arguably beneficial with regards to the number of spots GNU is  
allotted during the course of the program).

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