Re: Emacs contributions, C and Lisp

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>]

David Kastrup writes:

 > Shrug.  The whole point of the GPL is "crippling by policy",
 > preventing reuse in proprietary software and thus also affecting
 > legitimate uses in Free Software.

It's true it has that effect (although I think you're being overly
melodramatic), but that is *not* the point of GPL.  The point of the
GPL is reciprocity.  That has been shown to work in many businesses,
including some that depend on proprietary licensing for the lion's
share of their profit.  And yes, it has affected legitimate uses, but
those issues are becoming fewer as more and more projects switch to
GPL-compatible policies (including dual licensing).

The "use GNU" policy is merely self-defeating, I think -- stifling
friendly competition is a very bad thing, have we learned nothing from
the Great Planning Experiments of Marx-Lenin-Stalin-ism?  How long
does it take to see that GNU Arch is dead and WannaGNU Bazaar had its
commercial support withdrawn ... er, just about the time it became
really usable for Emacs development?  But OK, the "avoid redevelopment
of every feature" argument is very appealing, and the failure of
communism is merely an analogy so why not try it?

But this anti-LLVM policy?  Let's see if I understand how this works.
We have Groff, so TeX modes are treason.[1]  We have GNU sed and gawk,
so Perl, Python, and Ruby modes gotta go.  Oh yeah, don't forget to
rip out raw X11 and TTY support in Emacs entirely, just link to GTK.

Where does it stop?  Oh, yeah.  It stops with LLVM.  Good thing!  But
the logic escapes me.  (And no, I see no logical reason to only
ostracize a program if it implements the same language standard as
another.  If use cases are similar, that should be enough to argue
against use of the permissively-licensed product in favor of the
copyleft substitute.)

Footnotes: 
[1]  I wonder who might object a bit strongly to that decision, hm?