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Comment by MatthewPhillips | Hacker News Reader

Why is Stallman still BDFL if he hasn't contributed a meaningful amount of code in years? Let him be the spokesperson so he gets the attention he desperately needs and leave the coding standards to people who code.

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The FSF isn't about coding standards, its foremost about moral and ethical standards.

Edit: Oops! You mean BFDL for GNU, as compared to the FSF. That's a good question - should Stallman relinquish GNU leadership? What is the replacement plan should something happen to him?

I don't think that recent hands-on code experience necessarily plays a role in either case.

I wish people would stop parroting that stupid lie. RMS is curently heavily involved in GNU Emacs development and has been for many years. Just check the mailing list sometime.

Yes, where he has, for example, refused to allow emacs to use any sane bug tracking system because it would interfere with his workflow, despite the fact that he's not the only developer.

Its all code. If a group want a bug tracker system X, and a second group want bug tracker system Y, then build a middle layer system that converts information back and forth from X <--> Y.

and then build it into Emacs.

For the help of other people: BDFL = Benevolent Dictator for Life. Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_Dictator_for_Life ) doesnt list him as an example, but that doesn't stop him from being pretty close.

Agreed, but by definition BDFL is FL - For Life.

I actually never heard that he was BDFL. I thought that only applied to Guido and Python.

John Gruber considers himself to be the BDFL of Markdown [1], though many question the 'B' part.

[1] http://www.mail-archive.com/markdown-discuss@six.pairlist.ne...

I agree wholeheartedly, as Eben Moglen succintly put it in Die Gedanken Sind Frei: "The revolution runs on working code". Those write the code, make the shots. Free Software is a push effort.

http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/berlin-keynote....

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