Re: Proposal for an Emacs User Survey

[Ergus <spacibba@aol.com>]

On Fri, Oct 16, 2020 at 03:17:16PM +0300, Dmitry Gutov wrote:
>On 16.10.2020 11:25, Marcel Ventosa wrote:
>
>>Perhaps. Transitional solutions go both ways though. A cursory glance at
>>Reddit's Emacs group is enough to notice not only ignorance of the
>>philosophy behind GNU, but quite recurrent mockery of what it stands
>>for. Usually in the form of deriding RMS. For the most recent example,
>>one user comments under abrochard's survey post: "So, will you be
>>censoring the survey to maintain ideological purity, like rms
>>insisted?", to which abrochard responds: "I agree with you. The
>>discussion around Melpa is a big factor as to why the survey is
>>happening in parallel to the gnu project."
>
>Do you think the "mockery" is entirely without merit?
>
>It's not even so much real mockery as probably the only way the user 
>could describe the conflict.
>
>When a survey purposefully omits a well-known and popular option, it 
>is going to discount a sizable portion of our community, and ignore a 
>project that has done a lot to popularize Emacs over the years.
>
>I think it's both insulting to its developers, and stinks of thought 
>police. Far from the idea of user freedom I hope to expect from GNU 
>and FSF.
>
>>I'm not saying the obfuscation is purposeful either in the case of
>>`MELPA' imitating the name of the existing `GNU ELPA', or of Adrien
>>calling his survey *The* Emacs User survey", but what I do think is that
>>all non-GNU initiatives that affect perception of GNU, particularly the
>>ones that clearly do not share the GNU philosophy (the survey referred
>>to `GNU/Linux' as `Linux', for example), would seem much more
>>transparent if they were very clearly and visibly labeled as unofficial.
>>My hope, of course, would be that these initiatives could respect the
>>GNU philosophy, even if they did not share it.
>
>Calling it "THE Emacs User survey" is perhaps unfortunate. But 
>likewise it is unfortunate how Emacs leadership does little to follow 
>the external, "unofficial" polls.
>
>A survey doesn't have to be "the official GNU survey" to be useful.
>
I totally agree. I have contributed (and almost maintain) some melpa
packages that have been abandoned by their creators. It is not possible
to add them to elpa because most of the contributors are not active
anymore or are hard to contact, or just don't care at all. This doesn't
mean that they are "bad" or "dangerous" packages just because they can't
follow the paperwork. And that doesn't mean that I should rewrite all
the code just to avoid including the other authors to add them to
elpa. That would be unethical. 

Some melpa packages like LSP, magit, elpy are basically the only
alternative the users have to make emacs useful for their
purposes. While others like helm, use-package, evil are essential for a
huge part of the users.

At the end anyone can use, read the code, distribute and improve that
code... so it is free independently of what a piece of paper says (or
don't say) and closing the code will just kill the packages.

Reject using melpa for ideological reasons means that the users won't
have alternatives for their work and emacs will become like a useless
tool for a big part of our community; whitout melpa many users will go
for more "useful" alternatives that really steal their freedom like
VSCode or Atom... because they need to have the work done any way.