On Sun, Jan 26, 2014 at 12:28 AM, Daniel Colascione <dancol@dancol.org>wrote:

> On 01/25/2014 03:02 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. ]]]
>>
>> We don't want to make a program's entire AST available for parsing
>> because that would make it easy to extend GCC with proprietary
>> programs.
>>
>
> It would also have made it easy to add modern features to Emacs and other
> free editors. Symbol table information is flatly inadequate given that in
> modern languages, typing information is highly contextual.
>
> Users will adopt tools that provide these features when FSF programs
> support these features or not. If you keep these features out of GCC, users
> will go to Clang. If you keep Clang integration out of Emacs, users will
> either maintain out-of-tree integration or (eventually) just fork Emacs, as
> the various starter-kit packages have already essentially done.
>
> Free software is great, but if nobody uses it, the entire enterprise is
> futile, sad, and ultimately irrelevant. How will the world be a better
> place when almost every every free operating system and free development
> environment is based on Clang and explicitly non-free derivatives are
> rampant?
>
>
> +1

It even make it look like free software can't do this.