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...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.

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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.

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