Re: Emacs Lisp's future

[Richard Stallman]

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[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

    My understanding is that Magnars lost control of contributors to s and
    dash some time ago. Getting people to sign papers will be hard.

If some contributors don't sign papers, and their contributions are
big enough to be legally significant, we may need in some cases to
rewrite their contributions.

We should get good packages into Emacs early, to prevent this sort of
problem from developing.  And we should warn the developers that
if they don't do this, it will cause problems for our support for
their packages.

I recommend we set up a group of volunteers to look for new packages
at an early (one developer or just a few) that seem promising, and
talk with them about proceeding to get those packages into Emacs soon.

We should reject the "ecosystem" viewpoint, making it clear that Emacs
consists of what's in the Emacs and ELPA repositories; other people's
Lisp programs are not Emacs.

We should discourage package developers from depending on packages
that are not in Emacs, warning them that this would cause trouble
for us and we will be peeved at them.

To some extent, we have exacerbated the problem by recommending the
packages that are outside Emacs too eagerly.  See "Where can I get
Emacs Lisp packages that don't come with Emacs?" in the Emacs FAQ.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org  www.gnu.org
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