Re: Let's make Emacs mainstream (through org-mode)

[James Lu]

I have little experience with Emacs– I can't really implement these on my own.

I would however subscribe to an "Emacs Support" service for a monthly fee.

I am short of funds at the moment, so I could only pay $5/month. But I'm sure

other non-students could afford $10/mo or $15/mo for access to support

on a powerful editor.

Start out small: Have more people than easily sustainable[0]. Then, slowly

automate things by writing documentation and possibly interactive tutorials.

Gather the best.

Thereafter, the service could be run as a SaaSS program that asks you

questions and returns the correct tutorial, potentially creating a revenue

stream for whoever makes it or GNU/FSF.

[0]: http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

On Tue, Dec 15, 2020 at 5:56 PM Christopher Dimech <dimech@gmx.com> wrote:

> Sent: Tuesday, December 15, 2020 at 11:22 PM
> From: "Karl Fogel" <kfogel@red-bean.com>
> To: "James Lu" <jamtlu@gmail.com>
> Cc: rms@gnu.org, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Subject: Re: Let's make Emacs mainstream (through org-mode)
>
> On 15 Dec 2020, James Lu wrote:
> >I spent months of my life researching todo app.
> >
> >Every single todo list app would approximate some person's ideal todo
> >list app, but every person complained it was missing one feature they
> >needed.
> >Emacs org-mode solves this problem.
> >
> >Either an app had too few buttons or too many buttons.
> >Emacs org-mode solves this problem.
> >
> >Let's stop messing with code.
> >
> >Let's start hacking.
> >
> >Clever hacking is doing the impossible.
> >Let's start writing GFDL guides and selling them.
> >Let's start selling support plans.
> >Let's start making Emacs org-mode a hot trend.
> >Let's make the website RMS suggested where you can ask questions on
> >org-mode, and see public answers.
> >
> >Who's with me?
>
> Org Mode is very powerful, and some of the ideas you list above could be successful.  I encourage you to try them!  But I think asking "Who's with me?" is not a route to making them happen.  As Eli Zaretskii replied to an earlier post of yours back in September [1]:
>
>   > Nothing in Emacs gets done because someone asks a "why not do this
>   > and that?" question.  We don't have a means to tell some employee to
>   > do this and that job.  For a job to get done, someone motivated
>   > enough should sit down and do it.  The best candidate for that is
>   > whoever raises the issue in the first place, but of course not
>   > everyone who proposes something can actually implement it.

There have been times where discussions led to significant improvements, but mostly
concerned peripheral discussions where many could benefit - e.g., texinfo output
mathematical expressions using Mathjax.  For user specific things, one can get help
implementing an idea.  The person raising the problem is almost always more productive
when that same person works on it.  Otherwise it would be a gamble that can easily
lead to disappointments.     

> Best regards,
> -Karl
>
> [1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2020-09/msg02110.html
>
>