Re: Icon designer wanted (Aquamacs Emacs)

[David Kastrup]

david.reitter@gmail.com writes:

> Jay Belanger:
>
>> For people who to whom the free software movement
>> is important, improvements to the Mac and/or Windows version which
>> cannot be folded back into the main version would not be a good thing,
>> it would seem.
>
> I don't think we disagree. But my thinking is that having free software
> with a high degree of usability at least on a partially proprietary
> system (such as Mac OS X) is better than having the less "lickable"
> interface at all, i.e. on no system.

With that stance, free software would have never taken off, since it
started out, naturally, as being inferior to existing proprietary
solutions.  Only people that value freedom above convenience will ever
carry the torch so far that at one point one need no longer choose
between the two.

> So the technique is to develop stuff on the partially proprietary
> system and port it to the ideologically less questionable free
> system. Of course, we'll do so in a way that doesn't preclude us
> from porting it back, even though we won't do all the work right now
> (e.g. legal business).

Exactly what happened with XEmacs.  Getting assignments gets
exponentially harder with time.  As people get less interested in
former projects, they can't be bothered with footwork like that.

You are afraid to scare off developers with copyright assignments when
they are actively helping to scratch their itch, and think that they
will do so with pleasure when they have no ties to the project
anymore?

Get real.  You are headed for permanent forking for the sake of a
non-free platform.  It's the privilege of history to go unheeded.

> Anything else has only been alledged by other participants in this
> discussion.

Alleged?  Actually, I thought I was being rather blunt about this.

> How far people want to go with this port is their business. As long
> as I'm not getting paid for it, I said, hey, happy to do development
> work, happy to document sources, but not happy to push various
> people to sign certain contracts and not happy to accept
> technologically inferior solutions just because they aren't
> available for all operating systems yet.

> People draw the line at some point, and we all need to respect
> that.

Sure.  Your line is drawn at a position where it does not help free
software, and it looks like you are headed in a direction where it
will become impossible that this changes.

You are free to draw the line there for yourself, and I am free to
call the line by its name.

> I've had a dozen people tell me in the past year that they can't
> contribute or can't contribute more because they don't have time. My
> initial collaborator had to bail out because he's got kids, wife,
> and a business and these things simply had priority. You have to
> accept that, say thanks for your help and your contribution, and
> move on.

And you'll think that a few years later those people will sign legal
papers?  Very likely.

A lot of multi-person projects have sunken into oblivion because past
contributors changed their mind, could not be brought around, or even
contacted anymore.  Suddenly a developer dies: what will you write to
the inheritors to convince them that it would have been the wish of
the deceased to make this software freely available?  When he did not
bother catering for it while he lived?

Yes, the necessity of paperwork has killed projects.  But many more
projects ended in a dead end because people bothered too late about
it.

> Reacting with hostility just because someone isn't willing to
> contribute further, or contribute all that the ideology behind the
> organization providing this mailing list requires will only make
> matters worse.

You are confusing hostility with bluntness.

If you doubt my opinion, ask on the Emacs developer list how good an
idea they think it if you work on improving the icons in Aquamacs only
without heeding the requirements for upstream Emacs.

Or ask on an appropriate internal GNU mailing list whether people
consider this a helpful course for free software in general.

You are free to draw your line there.  But it helps nobody to pretend
it is somewhere else.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum