Re: Emacs contributions, C and Lisp

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

    Now the case of Windows is obviously different (as Windows is
    proprietary and is more of a platform rather than a tool), but I would
    guess that it would be reasonable to apply the same logic here.

Windows is proprietary software -- evil and unjust.  LLVM is free
software, so it is not in itself evil or unjust.  However,
noncopylefted LLVM's entry into a field dominated by copylefted GCC
has the effect of opening the door to injustice.

Morally, the two are not equivalent.  What the developers of Windows
are doing is flat-out wrong, and would be wrong under any
circumstances.  What the developers of LLVM are doing is foolish given
that we already had GCC: it invites others to do wrong, in ways which
were difficult to do with GCC.

The difference is comparable to the difference between strewing
radioactive material on a city and building a skyscraper there with a
nuclear power plant on top.  The latter is not an attack, but it is a
very bad thing to do.

Thus, strategically, there is not much difference between launching
LLVM into a world with only GCC and launching Windows into a world
with only GNU/Linux.

In practice, however, there's another difference: Windows today is not
new; on the contrary, it is far more widely used than GNU/Linux.

In fact, our policy towards the two is pretty similar.

It is ok to make Emacs run on Windows, but we don't accept any Emacs
features that depend on Windows.  Our policy is, "it runs best on
GNU".  There shouldn't be any features in Emacs that give an advantage
to some other system over the GNU system.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org  www.gnu.org
Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software.
  Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call.