Re: Emacs User Survey 2020 Results

[Jean Louis]

* Göktuğ Kayaalp <self@gkayaalp.com> [2020-12-09 23:14]:
> 
> On 2020-12-09 20:22 +03, Jean Louis <bugs@gnu.support> wrote:
> > Number one critic to you is that you drive people who use free
> > software to non-free software.
> 
> Please, please, let we be done with this.  People have the choice as to
> what software they decide to use, so let’s not spam people’s inboxes
> with this useless tirade, especially if it’ll be in this patronising and
> ungrateful manner.

Your comment could be maybe proper in the context in some other
mailing list, maybe on Matlab mailing list, but not on GNU mailing
list where people use free software and promote free software. B

Issue is solved quickly on Adrien's website.

There are various communities and their unions and intersections and
subsets. The union of Emacs community is large and includes all kind
of people, I do not mind what is their relation to proprietary
software. Here we are in the subset community which is on GNU server
where we help and teach people to use free software. Not
proprietary. 

> If this person chose to use Matlab, it’s totally their decision.
> Software they used on their own device.  Nobody gets to say anything
> about that.

When Emacs Survey is promoted here, I will tell that there is Octave
as free software as that is what people should know. Using proprietary
software and promoting it to others is detrimental for safety of
people and in itself unjust. I will always say something about
that. 

> Now, the choice of Google forms is not great, but nobody forced anybody
> to fill in the survey, and nobody has the right or authority to decide
> with which software people get to use the name of Emacs with. That sort
> of language policing is easily fascistic, whatever the yardstick looks
> like.  Also, looking over your email again, I see no link to any online
> survey tools that could replace the use of Google Forms here.

I have already pointed out to Adrien before the survey how that can be
done. I would be happy to write the HTML with the form and I have my
own system to write it. The survey is very simple to implement in
simple HTML which can look nice with some stylesheet. And there are
few free survey options. Adrien could ask for that and would get an
answer on Emacs devel mailing list when he presented it first time.

Yet, there would be no need for complex software, as simple HTML and
simple one program in background on the server could collect
information without problem. Times change and people are new and do
not know that problem have been solved before decades since form.cgi

German quality LimeSurvey is free software:
https://demo.limesurvey.org/index.php?r=admin/authentication/sa/login

Change language here:
https://demo.limesurvey.org/index.php?r=admin/globalsettings#language

> Also, just because it’s about Emacs, they need not be using Emacs
> solutions for everything they do.  If they like Jupyter over Org
> mode, that’s it, nobody gets a word to say about it.  Furthermore,
> there is a package that lets you control Jupyter notebooks from
> inside Emacs.  Besides, the data is public.

Definitely, you are right. I have commented how it would be more
entertaining. There is no must to use this or that. Yet Emacs is
specific case and Emacs survey even more specific. Many using Emacs
are enthusiasts, some more or less. It is nice to see nifty fancy
stuff done with it.

> > - html/css is not a programming language, SQL is a structured query
> >   language with some functions but it is not a programming
> >   language.
> 
> Both of those claims are debatable.  The latter _highly_ debatable.

Could be. I think it was meant to say what all modes are you using, so
it is just small inconsistency. I would prefer for example that
markdown is included, I have not seen anything about that. LaTeX and
TeX are excluded completely. This is because of how design of the
survey have been made.

Jean