Re: Emacs Lisp's future

From: Richard Stallman Subject: Re: Emacs Lisp's future Date: Fri, 19 Sep 2014 14:01:00 -0400

[[[ 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. ]]] My understanding is that Magnars lost control of contributors to s and dash some time ago. Getting people to sign papers will be hard. If some contributors don't sign papers, and their contributions are big enough to be legally significant, we may need in some cases to rewrite their contributions. We should get good packages into Emacs early, to prevent this sort of problem from developing. And we should warn the developers that if they don't do this, it will cause problems for our support for their packages. I recommend we set up a group of volunteers to look for new packages at an early (one developer or just a few) that seem promising, and talk with them about proceeding to get those packages into Emacs soon. We should reject the "ecosystem" viewpoint, making it clear that Emacs consists of what's in the Emacs and ELPA repositories; other people's Lisp programs are not Emacs. We should discourage package developers from depending on packages that are not in Emacs, warning them that this would cause trouble for us and we will be peeved at them. To some extent, we have exacerbated the problem by recommending the packages that are outside Emacs too eagerly. See "Where can I get Emacs Lisp packages that don't come with Emacs?" in the Emacs FAQ. -- Dr Richard Stallman President, Free Software Foundation 51 Franklin St Boston MA 02110 USA www.fsf.org www.gnu.org Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software. Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call.