Re: redisplay system of emacs

[David Kastrup]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

>> From: Paul R <address@hidden>
>
>> As many emacs youngsters, I feel that emacs really uses too much
>> home-made code. Surprisingly, Emacs does not benefit that much from
>> the free software ecosystem.
>
> That's a pretty general assessment.  Any data points other than the
> display engine?

One main data point is that its copyright assignment policies don't
allow taking XEmacs code.

Since only explicitly FSF copyright-assigned contributions can be used
in Emacs, Emacs' involvement in the "free software ecosystem" as such is
purely contributing, not taking.  As far as generally available material
such as toolkit libraries are concerned, Emacs does not benefit more or
less than proprietary applications from the "free software ecosystem".

It is a consciously made tradeoff.  It has been expensive at times.  Not
everything comes cheap.

-- 
David Kastrup