Re: Emacs contributions, C and Lisp

[Daniel Colascione <dancol@dancol.org>]

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On 03/10/2014 07:40 PM, Richard Stallman wrote:
> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
> 
>     But if as a result of those measures, all development moves from GCC to
>     Clang/LLVM, this will be a pyrrhic victory :-(
> 
> That's what life is like.  If you fight, you might lose.  If you
> surrender, you lose for certain.

Suicidal charges on entrenched positions make for great drama, but poor
results; it's better to run and fight another day. Many smart,
experienced people (far more so than I am) have made this point, and it
might be helpful not to immediately dismiss [1] their advice

The GNU project found early success in creating tools that plugged into
non-free ecosystems. GNU tools were better than the proprietary
alternatives, so it's natural that people chose to use them. Users of
these tools found the FSF's political message, agreed with it, wrote
more free software, and proselytized. Eventually, there was enough free
software to build a whole operating system. Free software would have
never achieved its present success if the GNU project had built an
incompatible operating system and stocked it with inferior tools. If it
had, GNU would have been another Plan 9, and we'd have been stuck with
far more proprietary software.

Today, there's a new ecosystem. Clang isn't really a program that
competes with GCC. Instead, it's an entire self-contained universe of
development tools, one that includes a compiler and linker, of course,
but also a debugger, code formatter, static analyzer, JIT system, and
various source-to-source translators, indexers, and IDEs. The ecosystem
approach to toolchain development has tremendous technical advantages
and is a real advance in the state of the art. It's an idea, not a
program; you can fight it no better than Canute could fight the tide.

This new ecosystem is actually a tremendous opportunity for copyleft
free software. Right now, the LLVM world is full of defenseless
permissively-licensed programs, and proprietary components (e.g., GPU
compilers) are encroaching upon it. This situation is unfortunate, but
we can salvage it.

Instead of decrying Clang, we should integrate Emacs and GCC into it as
tightly as possible. Entice users with technical superiority, then help
them understand the other benefits of using software that defend their
freedoms. Start the same positive feedback loop that helped GNU succeed
in the first place. While this strategy will temporarily allow
proprietary software makers to benefit from the work invested in free
software, free components will gradually supplant proprietary ones. The
same logic that applies to competing programs in general apples in the
special case of interoperating LLVM-based components. After free
software fills all the important niches in this ecosystem, users will
once again be spared the choice between free and useful software.

If the FSF pursues its current strategy, however, and current trends
continue, the LLVM world and the traditional one will drift apart, and
in a few years, users will face this choice with increasing frequency.
Do you really think users are going to forgo useful, gratis features
because you tell them they're being naughty? Do you really think
developers will choose inferior tools, and thereby work harder, die
sooner, and provide less for their children all because you scold them
for not following some  moral principle that, from their perspective,
produces only acrimony and missing features? In the past, the GNU
project did an excellent job of demonstrating not only the moral, but
also the practical benefits of free software. Right now, you're doing a
poor job of demonstrating how it's in the interest of developers to
choose copyleft software and doing a disservice to your own cause.


[1] I want to preempt the charge of working to undermine free software.
You should assume that we're all working in good faith. On numerous
occasions (e.g., <E1WN5YT-0003gl-Eh@fencepost.gnu.org>), you've argued
those who disagreed with your decisions could be doing so only out of a
secret desire to undermine free software. Statements like "I don't trust
your judgment about how to achieve our goals because you don't want to
achieve them." are circular nonsense. Supporting the goal of ubiquitous
free software is not synonymous with supporting your particular strategy
for achieving it, and frankly, it's disturbing that you think that it
is. Leaders who adopt this sort of attitude seldom end up on the right
side of history.


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