From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.devel Subject: Re: Emacs contributions, C and Lisp Date: Sun, 30 Mar 2014 11:02:33 +0900 Message-ID: <87bnwoo346.fsf@uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> References: <83mwhucg1h.fsf@gnu.org> <878ute589i.fsf@fencepost.gnu.org> <83d2iqc84m.fsf@gnu.org> <87wqgxkcr9.fsf@yandex.ru> <834n41db0d.fsf@gnu.org> <52FE2985.4070703@yandex.ru> <831tz5daes.fsf@gnu.org> <8738jlohd6.fsf@yandex.ru> <83txc1bl83.fsf@gnu.org> <5300189A.9090208@yandex.ru> <83wqgv9fbj.fsf@gnu.org> <20140216180712.236069f6@forcix.jorgenschaefer.de> <83sirj9cyp.fsf@gnu.org> <20140217203145.71a849f7@forcix.jorgenschaefer.de> <837g8t8ouc.fsf@gnu.org> <20140219080524.25689b6b@forcix.jorgenschaefer.de> <87fvnfqyfv.fsf@fencepost.gnu.org> <87siq3ovxh.fsf@uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> <87lhvtnsnr.fsf@uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> NNTP-Posting-Host: plane.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 X-Trace: ger.gmane.org 1396144981 13456 80.91.229.3 (30 Mar 2014 02:03:01 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 30 Mar 2014 02:03:01 +0000 (UTC) Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org To: rms@gnu.org Original-X-From: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sun Mar 30 04:02:56 2014 Return-path: Envelope-to: ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([208.118.235.17]) by plane.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1WU55I-0002hj-V8 for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Sun, 30 Mar 2014 04:02:53 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([::1]:42050 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1WU55I-0001uU-9d for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Sat, 29 Mar 2014 22:02:52 -0400 Original-Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:52857) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1WU559-0001u0-Oj for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Sat, 29 Mar 2014 22:02:49 -0400 Original-Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1WU553-0005w5-RX for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Sat, 29 Mar 2014 22:02:43 -0400 Original-Received: from mgmt2.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp ([130.158.97.224]:52059) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1WU553-0005oq-5R; Sat, 29 Mar 2014 22:02:37 -0400 Original-Received: from uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp (uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp [130.158.99.156]) by mgmt2.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp (Postfix) with ESMTP id A03279707DD; Sun, 30 Mar 2014 11:02:33 +0900 (JST) Original-Received: by uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp (Postfix, from userid 1000) id 8CF2F1A28DC; Sun, 30 Mar 2014 11:02:33 +0900 (JST) In-Reply-To: X-Mailer: VM undefined under 21.5 (beta34) "kale" 2a0f42961ed4 XEmacs Lucid (x86_64-unknown-linux) X-detected-operating-system: by eggs.gnu.org: GNU/Linux 2.6.x X-Received-From: 130.158.97.224 X-BeenThere: emacs-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.14 Precedence: list List-Id: "Emacs development discussions." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Original-Sender: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.devel:171188 Archived-At: Richard Stallman writes: > This discussion is a response to your fallacious call for people to > deny us credit for our work. Richard, I did no such thing. I called for you to give the same credit to others you demand for yourself. That FAQ admits that "GNU/Linux" is an abbreviation, and goes on to provide some justification for giving primacy to GNU. But that justification is misdirected, given that the GNU Project with an uppercase "P" does almost no development. More important from a PR standpoint, these days, it basically leaves even distribution up to others -- I don't know how long it's been since I heard the term "gold tape", and I don't think I even heard once about "gold CDs", let alone "gold DVDs" or "gold BDs". The *real* contribution of GNU, as acknowledged by several of the BSD folks, was the *insight* that "hey -- we don't have to deliver just 'a pile of useful software', we can deliver a whole working system *as free software*!" And the GNU Project proceeded to *assemble* the work of others, as a *free software* operating system, nearly complete.[1] As many discussions on this list and others have shown, much of the development work for GNU projects is done by people who feel no allegiance to the GNU Project per se. They feel allegiance to particular project, and often to the Free Software Movement. Commercial interests such as Canonical hitchhike on the GNU name, but fail to even pay lip service on the web sites for "GNU projects" they maintain until prodded. And this is one of the big difficulties *you* face in advocating "GNU/Linux". These days, the "GNU System" is nothing but a "pile of useful software". You yourself encourage folks with no particular desire to promote GNU to slap the GNU label on their products. The actual curating of the GNU System, as a system, is done by the distros. Development of almost all of the end-user-visible software is done anywhere but in gnu.org facilities. And the core GNU people (at the GNU Project level, rather than the GNU project level) such as yourself have a core mission, not of developing the GNU system, but of political advocacy. Compare that with the BSD distros, where the "BSD" name lives on in common parlance: FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and a legion of minor variants. Their leaders concerned themselves with the systems as a whole, starting from the kernel and working out. GNU was -- and is! -- stuck with a system with a hole, and worse, that hole is the kernel. It's ironic that you claim the right to name a system whose raison d'etre is "make the software your own!" based on the initial push in 1985, whose centralizing impetus was basically moribund by 1995 -- core projects like GCC and glibc spawning forks and threatening to bolt the GNU fold entirely, the kernel itself never considering becoming a GNU project. Well, the rest of the world made the GNU System its own, and chose to denote it by the component that they found inspirational. Please note that everything written above is *observation*, not *justification*. You're welcome to promote the name "GNU/Linux", because it's meaningful and true. But I wish you'd drop the "but we built it!" argument and find something genuine to say. Your petulance in insisting that GNU alone deserves credit for the whole makes it embarrassing to use that term outside of GNU channels. I still use it because it makes a couple of points for me (and about me). But I have to be on guard, and I often am called on to justify it, when I do. Footnotes: [1] This is not to deny that many members of GNU projects rejoice in their association with the GNU Project. Nor that core members of the GNU Project, starting with yourself, deliberately set about to create crucial missing components such as GCC and glibc, and extremely useful utilities such as Emacs, gdb, and Make. The point is that as leader of the GNU Project nowadays (and for the last decade or two) you busy yourself not with ensuring that the GNU System is excellent, but with political advocacy and *preventing* addition of software that you consider dangerous to software freedom to the GNU System. How ironic in the context of a claim that GNU is the primary *developer* of the software distributed by so-called "Linux distributors"!