Re: [tlug] [C&C--potentially] Heisei Emperor's support of XEmacs (was: Gentoo ebuild for XEmacs-21.5)

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Nguyen Vu Hung writes:

 > And IMO, Lucid has done a wrong thing:

As far as I can tell, you lack two essential qualifications for
forming an opinion on the matter: (1) you have never attempted a
compromise with Richard Stallman when your opinion conflicted with
his, and (2) you haven't read http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html.

In particular, the message from Richard Gabriel <rpg@example.com> of 23
Jun 92 is a must-read.  Either that is lying about the amount of
contact between Lucid and Stallman before the public release of Lucid
Emacs 19.2 (19.1 was not publically released), or Stallman's
xemacs.origin is.  I don't know which it is, but I do know that
Stallman is dishonest by my standards (among other things, he has
asked me to suppress research results if they suggested that
permissive licenses were more effective at encouraging free software
development than copyleft licenses).  Gabriel's account is also
partially corroborated by Zawinski in a couple of places.  My money
is definitely on Gabriel's account being the more accurate.

I also suggest that you read the rest of it.  What you will discover
if you read carefully is that (1) Jamie Zawinski is one arrogant son
of a bitch[1] who is clearly brilliant and is on top of every detail
of the work he is doing and (2) Richard Stallman clearly had no clue
about the code he was insisting should not be merged to Emacs, and had
never tried to use Lucid Emacs.  Based on the email record, it is very
easy to believe that Lucid mostly had good technical or business
reasons for each of their positions, while Stallman was mostly just
giving kneejerk responses about things he didn't think about carefully.

Another thing that anybody who thinks they would like to be boss
someday should observe is the relationship between Richard Gabriel
(boss) and Jamie Zawinski (chief Emacs hacker), and compare it to that
of Richard Stallman (boss) with Jim Blandy (chief Emacs hacker).

Footnotes: 
[1]  He flames me regularly, although impersonally.