Re: redisplay system of emacs

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Alan Mackenzie writes:

 > Are you a native English speaker?  "Ecosystem" is a system of ecology,
 > which is the study of how organisms react with eachother and their
 > shared environment.  Implicit in ecology is its participants'
 > obliviousness to ecology.

I am a native speaker of English, and while *in science* "ecosystem"
*normally* is used to refer to natural systems where the participants
are "oblivious to ecology", in *policy discussions* (like this thread)
it almost always signifies that that speaker takes a moral stance
which (1) values the ecosystem as a whole and (2) holds that conscious
participants in an ecosystem have a responsibility to help preserve
that ecosystem.

Both principles are somewhat opposed to the individualistic ethos of
the free software movement.  I am not at all surprised that (some)
diehard free software advocates dislike the word "ecosystem", and most
especially the suggestion that they are members of one.

 > There are other words which also imply interdependency yet which are
 > less laden with loaded meanings.  "Ecosystem" implies its participants
 > (hackers etc.) are on the level of bugs, beetles and bacteria.

Ah, if only we could aspire to such moral heights!  Unfortunately,
"just call me Lucifer, 'cause I'm in need of some restraint."  (It's
spelled differently in the Preamble to the GNU General Public License,
but you can find that statement there if you look. :-)

 > It denigrates hackers, suggesting they are simply swept along
 > helplessly by outrageous fortune, rather than being the agents of
 > it. 

Hackers certainly do behave outrageously on occasion.  However, while
they are not helpless, to call them "agents of fortune" is hubris.

 > A "community" for example, which expresses all the tenets of
 > interdependency and tension.

No good, sorry.  "Community" derives from the word "common".  As soon
as we speak of multiple communities, we're clearly lost some important
commonality, and the need for a term such as "ecosystem" becomes
urgent.  To borrow a word from David (+1 to everything he wrote, by
the way), "ecosystem" stands for the *emergent* properties of a
network of more or less different communities.

Any casual observer of the Japanese or US political systems is
immediately aware that communities only with extreme difficulty behave
as rationally as humans, let alone beetles.  I see no reason why a
network of communities shouldn't be treated as an ecosystem, even if
you object to the human members being treated as part of an ecosystem.

 > If you want to emphasise the ideas of competition between bits of
 > free software (say, between perl, python and ruby), the best word
 > is perhaps "market", or "marketplace of ideas".

But that is precisely *not* the desired connotation!  The idea is to
emphasize and encourage cooperation and sharing among those bits.  For
example, though Bazaar, git, Subversion, and Mercurial compete "in the
marketplace of ideas", they are currently engaged in hammering out the
"fastimport format", a common dump format for VCS data.  When they're
done, you'll be able to dump a bzr database and read it into git, and
get sane behavior.  Bazaar and Mercurial will probably even be able to
share code for dumping and undumping.

How'd that happen?  I'd sure like to know, because I'd like to apply
it to the Emacs-XEmacs-SXEmacs etc community.  But "community" doesn't
tell me anything about where to look.  Nor does "market".  "Ecosystem"
does....