Re: Meanness

[Richard M Stallman]

    And the goal of Emacs is to improve the GNU operating system, and not
    non-free operating systems.

Exactly.  GNU Emacs is part of a larger project, the GNU system, whose
goal is to make software free.

Eli wrote:

    As long as Emacs is not sold to Microsoft nor bundled with it out of
    the box, no one can claim that I'm improving non-free operating
    systems.

In a very literal sense, no.  But it does make the non-free operating
system more usable, and that goes directly against the goal of making
GNU superior to Windows.

This is not the only factor in the decision, but it is a factor
that we must not forget.

David wrote:

    But that's missing the point.  Of course free software will also get
    used and employed on proprietary systems.  It is one consequence of
    their freedom.  The question was whether we should make it _our_ focus,
    the focus of the GNU project.

Exactly.  And our decision is that we don't.