Re: Contradictiory directions

[tomas]

On Thu, Dec 16, 2021 at 12:09:48PM +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Date: Thu, 16 Dec 2021 10:41:01 +0100
> > Cc: Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es>, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> > From:  <tomas@tuxteam.de>
> > 
> > > That rings a bell: it's what I heard 20 years ago about XEmacs vs GNU
> > > Emacs when I talked (in person) to its main developers.  The rest is
> > > history.
> > 
> > I think it is still relevant. Big corps have learnt to ride the waves
> > since then.
> 
> Nothing new here: XEmacs started because a certain company wanted to
> make profits from it, and was unhappy with the pace and directions of
> the Emacs development.

I remember well, I'm /that/ old :)

> > They still want some kind of user [1] control, but they know they can't
> > be as ham-fisted as they used to be in the '8ies and '90ies.
> 
> If you pay too much attention to details, you can never learn from
> past experience, because there's no exact repetition of precisely the
> same circumstances.

I'm not advocating that. I'm just pointing out that the strategy has
become "softer". For example, someone pointed out that Google doesn't
avoid the GPL. They do (especially V3), but in a less aggressive way.

>                     Which details are important and which aren't is a
> non-trivial judgment call, and I guess we differ in how we make that
> call.  Which might mean you are right and I'm wrong, of course.

I think everyone is wrong, in a different way :-)

> However, my point was that Óscar approaches the issue in a too
> simplistic way (if I take what he wrote as the description of his
> approach), and that there's more here than meets the eye.

Agreed on this, definitely.

Cheers
-- 
tomás

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