In support of Jonas Bernoulli's Magit (was: comparing code on different branches)

[John Yates <john@yates-sheets.org>]

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On Tue, Jul 4, 2017 at 7:05 PM, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:

> I wish someone would write a package comparable to Magit that
> we could get legal papers for and include it in Emacs.
>

​Richard,

I cannot let this go without commenting.  Do you understand what
you are advocating?

In Jonas you have someone who is doing just about everything
right per your notion of software freedom including applying gpl v3.
He has made significant personal sacrifices to provide emacs with
a package that is unique among editors and IDEs.  It could emerge
as one of those oh-so-elusive creatures: a true killer app for the
emacs platform.

Jonas has and continues to deliver a steady stream of features,
bug fixes and refinements.  Magit is clearly a work of love that is
wonderfully supported.  Jonas has exhibited admirable project
leadership skill and has published a detailed, credible map to
the future:

  https://github.com/magit/magit/projects/1

Some of us care enough about developers like Jonas and the
value he is delivering to emacs that we have responded to his
plea for financial support via PayPal, Patreon or Bountysource.

Were Jonas' effort invested in a non-GNU project, or at least not
one so dear to you heart as emacs, I suspect that you would
applaud his work.

Instead you seem to advocate undercutting Jonas' efforts with
no good reason to believe that you would get a replacement of
anywhere near the same quality.  Further, were you actually to
mount such a competing effort I am confident that long before it
ever delivered any useful amount of functionality you, the emacs
community, and the gnu effort would harvest significant bad press.

Sometimes community might be more important than copyright
assignment.  Please reconsider you request.

/john

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