Re: New maintainer

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Tom writes:

 > Richard Stallman <rms <at> gnu.org> writes:
 > > 
 > > Naturally -- because I think freedom is more important than technical
 > > progress.  Proprietary software offers plenty of technical "progress",
 > > but since I won't surrender my freedom to use it, as far as I'm
 > > concerned it is no progress at all.
 > 
 > Then there is no sense talking about competing with IDEs. IDEs provide
 > cutting edge features in the areas of completion and refactoring and
 > most users will only choose Emacs over an IDE if it provides a
 > a comparable level of these features.

I disagree with Richard's approach to the problem of advocating
freedom.[1]

But let's not be extreme, especially not in the face of the GNU/Linux
experience.  We *can* do, we have done, the "impossible".  While Emacs
is the best at what it does, admittedly it caters to a particularly
refined taste.  But Apache and Linux prove that not only can we do the
impossible, we can do it better than well-funded corporations,
sometimes.

 > Most users won't switch just because of the freedom aspect.

True.  But so what?  A few will switch for freedom alone (eg, Richard
Stallman ;-), a few more will switch for freedom and 10% of the
proprietary alternative's functionality.  Let's see how high we can
push the comparison coefficient on functionality (without sacrificing
the freedom), and see how many come.  We all love dog food, right?


Footnotes: 
[1]  I managed to suppress the temptation to explain my viewpoint and
left only this footnote.  But I couldn't resist leaving the
footnote.... ;-)