Re: Emacs contributions, C and Lisp

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

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You wrote

    Whichever he means, the FAQ itself sanctions my opinion:

and then quoted this:

    If you feel even more strongly about giving credit where it is due,
    you might feel that some secondary contributors also deserve credit in
    the system's name.  If so, far be it from us to argue against it.  If
    you feel that X11 deserves credit in the system's name, and you want
    to call the system GNU/X11/Linux, please do.  If you feel that Perl
    simply cries out for mention, and you want to write GNU/Linux/Perl, go
    ahead.</p>

You quoted part of the entry, out of context, misrepresenting its
point.  I've included the whole entry below so people can see this is
true.

This discussion is a response to your fallacious call for people to
deny us credit for our work.


<dt id="many">Many other projects contributed to
    the system as it is today; it includes TeX, X11, Apache, Perl, and many
    more programs.  Don't your arguments imply we have to give them credit
    too?  (But that would lead to a name so long it is
    absurd.) <span class="anchor-reference-id">(<a href="#many">#many</a>)</span></dt>


<dd>
What we say is that you ought to give the system's principal developer
a share of the credit.  The principal developer is the GNU Project,
and the system is basically GNU.
<p>
If you feel even more strongly about giving credit where it is due,
you might feel that some secondary contributors also deserve credit in
the system's name.  If so, far be it from us to argue against it.  If
you feel that X11 deserves credit in the system's name, and you want
to call the system GNU/X11/Linux, please do.  If you feel that Perl
simply cries out for mention, and you want to write GNU/Linux/Perl, go
ahead.</p>
<p>
Since a long name such as GNU/X11/Apache/Linux/TeX/Perl/Python/FreeCiv
becomes absurd, at some point you will have to set a threshold and
omit the names of the many other secondary contributions.  There is no
one obvious right place to set the threshold, so wherever you set it,
we won't argue against it.</p>
<p>
Different threshold levels would lead to different choices of name for
the system.  But one name that cannot result from concerns of fairness
and giving credit, not for any possible threshold level, is &ldquo;Linux&rdquo;.
It can't be fair to give all the credit to one secondary contribution
(Linux) while omitting the principal contribution (GNU).</p>
</dd>


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Dr Richard Stallman
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