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Comment by Coffeewine | Hacker News Reader

I recognize that the role of head maintainer is in part a political one, but yow.

Snippet that I believe exemplifies what you mean (since it's a bit hidden):

  It would be wrong and harmful to give MacOS an "equal footing". 
  Our goal is to replace nonfree systems (and nonfree software in
  general), not to enhance them.

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-10/msg00...

I browsed through the email thread briefly and it looks like a lot of "political ideology vs technical purism" drama... Seems high stress.

Looks like after some hearty back and forth it settled down: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-10/msg00...

Although it seems they ended up on an "agree to disagree" finale: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-10/msg00...

> it looks like a lot of "political ideology vs technical purism" drama…

That's pretty much the history of the FSF and the GNU projects considering they were created for political/ideological reasons (the Unix in "GNU's Not Unix" is nonfree/encumbered AT&T UNIX, and the ideological underpinnings are what allowed Linux to overtake BSD during "the troubles" of the early 90s). The pulls ideological and technical pulls have oft conflicted.

the ideological underpinnings are what allowed Linux to overtake BSD during "the troubles" of the early 90s

As I understood it, also to a degree witnessing it as it happened, this lawsuit spiked BSD at the critical period: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc.....

It certainly took Linux a long time to get in the ballpark of quality that BSD started out with at the gate, including the standard TCP/IP stack most everyone used, including Microsoft (initially, at least).

Oops, HN cuts the canonical URL's last character, a period; try this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USL_v._BSDI

...and attitudes like that just result in many people not using any free software at all, when they could instead be running free programs on a non-free platform.

It's important to read the full context. All that snippet means is that the GNU Emacs maintainer should be fine with adding new features to Emacs that are not portable to non-free platforms like Windows and Mac OS X. That is a perfectly reasonable requirement: Non-free platforms shouldn't hold back free platforms, because portability is not the ultimate goal, creating the best free software possible is the ultimate goal.

That's a very positive spin on the message. The way I read it is that developers and maintainers are encouraged to make Emacs work better on free than non-free platforms.

This is, sadly, self-defeating. If Emacs were widely recognized as the best editor (or whatever of its myriad functions you use it for), "works best on GNU/Linux" could advance the cause of free software. As it stands, though, "only works well on GNU/Linux" instead just means that fewer people will be using it.

Or https://lwn.net/Articles/629259/ , referencing the long-standing issues caused by forcing the use of GCC rather than LLVM (and trying to satisfy someone who doesn't understand why people need to process source code and ASTs for anything fancier than indentation and syntax highlighting).

Holy shit. This is incredible. I love Emacs but it's so sad that the stewardship of this amazing piece of software is in the hands of someone who would rather keep the feature-set substandard because of vague fears that someone might steal the AST's from his precious GCC.

I wonder what would be the problem with someone using libclang to generate the same AST information in a much more convenient fashion. Will it break the GPL in some way?

People can and do use libclang for AST info in the same manner that you're talking about: https://github.com/Sarcasm/irony-mode

Almost didn't click on that link because it looked like a joke link (Sarcasm and irony!!). Glad I did and found something new :-)

Stallman's had a long history of hating on Apple, up to and including organizing a GNU boycott of them back in the 90s.

The more I learn about Stallman, the more I admire him.

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