Re: PL support

[Daniel Colascione <dancol@dancol.org>]

On 5/11/20 8:21 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. ]]]
> 
>    >  If someone downloads Emacs and
>    > it doesn't even approximate a modern editing experience out-of-the-box,
>    > people are going to use other, less-free or non-free tools.
> 
> Just because a different way is "modern" does not make it morally
> legitimate.  Especially not in computing!  The modern way of doing
> computing is to use apps on a smartphone, each spying on you for a
> server -- and that is almost always unjust.  It takes special care
> to do it in a way that isn't unjust.

Supporting jump-to-definition is not tantamount to supporting a 
surveillance state.

>    >  The moral
>    > purity of a program doesn't matter if it has no impact, and a program
>    > with no users has no impact.
> 
> The assumptions in the concept of "impact" do not fit the free
> software movement.  

The opposite of impact is irrelevance. Do you want free software to be 
relevant? If something makes a difference, that means that it has 
impact. If something doesn't make a difference, it's not worth anyone's 
time to keep doing it. If purity and not impact is the goal, why bother 
with continued development? Emacs is already pure.

> That word assumes that we accumulate a certain
> amount of capacity to have impact, which we can then use against
> against whatever target we choose -- like ammunition in a shooter
> game.

No, it doesn't.

> That may be valid for some kinds of goals.  Especially those, such as
> profit, that can be achieved with popularity regardless of how that
> popularity is achieved.  But it is not valid for what we do.
> 
> The impact we aim for in the GNU Project consists of leading people to
> move away from nonfree software and to understand how it is unjust.
> To achieve this, we have to act in accord with our moral stand, in a
> way that is visibly firm and sincere.

Who's going to use software that's inferior to alternatives? When the 
pursuit of purity prompts you make free software worse on purpose, all 
you do is teach people that free software is worse software. I hope 
that's not the lesson that you want people to take away from the 
experience of trying Emacs.

Besides: it's not as if we're talking about adding a button that 
purchases Microsoft Visual Studio (or, heaven forbid, that renders emoji 
using multiple colors). We're talking about one piece of free software 
using and recommending another other piece of free software. You're 
worried that this other free software might through some chain of 
references lead users to non-free software. The same concern says we 
shouldn't make free software web browsers lest we lead users into 
temptation. The culpability for that is too speculative to attach itself 
to Emacs.