GNU Emacs Developement Inefficiency (commentary)

[Emmy Noether]

On Jul 15, 4:23 pm, Xah Lee <xah... at gmail.com> wrote:
> • GNU Emacs Developement Inefficiency
>  http://xahlee.org/emacs/GNU_Emacs_dev_inefficiency.html
>
> essay; commentary. Plain text version follows.
>
> --------------------------------------------------
> GNU Emacs Developement Inefficiency
>
> Xah Lee, 2010-07-15
>

> I've also written to Richard Stallman a few times in private in about
> 2008 or 2009, about documentation improvements. With extreme
> politeness and respect on my part.

You took good precaution to deny him any excuse to fend you off ... so
that we can all know the true reality of the situation. Its long said
by others that this idea of freedom is a bait. Still, I want to give
him / FSF a chance to prove their sincerity in enabling others in
reading the code and learning from it ...

> Without going into detail, i'm just
> disenchanted by his reaction. In short, it appears to me he did not
> pay much attention, and basically in the end asked me to submit
> changes to him. Yeah right. The whole shebang seems to be very well
> described by Ben Wing. (See: GNU Emacs and Xemacs Schism, by Ben
> Wing.) (Richard Stallman's emails are pretty short, just a couple
> terse sentences; but he does, however, whenever he got a chance, tell
> his correspondents to use the term GNU/Linux, and ask them to
> contribute.)
>
> Re-writing the whole doc in a modern perspective might take me one
> month full time. (e.g. 160 hours) But if it were to be done in a
> public way, or submit to him, the time it takes to communicate, email,
> write justifications, create diffs, etc, can easily take half a year
> full time (960 hours). In the end, i'm not even sure half of the text
> in the new doc would be accepted.
>
> The GNU Emacs's bug database sucks majorly. I have problem finding all
> bugs posted by me. (it's using Debbugs.) Hard to find any bug by its
> search feature. They did not have a bug database, only in around 2008.
> Most commercial software have a bug database system in 1990s, and most
> large open source projects have one by early 2000s. (I wrote a bug
> tracker in 1998, 4k lines of Perl (with CGI, MySQL), in about 2 weeks,
> for a startup brainpower.com.)
>
> Am pretty sure there are several good “FSF Free” bug databases. (see:
> Comparison of issue-tracking systems) Few years ago, some may have
> problem to be politically qualified to be “Free” for FSF to adopt.
> However, these days there are many that FSF officially sactions as
> “Free”. However, when you look at FSF, you see that even when a
> software became free, they usually are still picky with lots qualms,
> and typically always ends up using their OWN ones (i.e. from GNU
> project), even though it is clear that it is inferior. (the GNU emacs
> dev's revision control system was CVS up to ~2008. CVS has been phased
> out by 2000 in vast majority of software orgs or projects. I think GNU
> emacs now using SVN, while most bleeding edge orgs have switched to
> git, mercurial, distributed systems. (e.g. FireFox, Google))
>
> These are consequence of old and large orgs, with its old policies and
> beaucracies. See: “Free” Software Morality, Richard Stallman, and
> Paperwork Bureaucracy.
>
> Who are the main developers of FSF software these days? Mostly, they
> are either paid as FSF employee, or students still trying to break out
> their craft in programing, or 40/50 years old semi-retired programers
> who otherwise isn't doing anything. Those willing and able, spend time
> and get decent salary in commercial corps, or went to start their own
> projects or business that'd be far more rewarding financially or not
> than being another name in FSF's list of contributors.
>
> These days, FSF and Richard Stallman more serves as a figure-head and
> political leader in open source movement. FSF's software, largely are
> old and outdated (e.g. unix command line utils), with the exception of
> perhaps GCC and GPG. If we go by actual impact of open source software
> in society, i think Google's role, and other commercial orgs (such as
> Apache, Perl, Python, PHP, various langs on JVM, and other project
> hosters hosting any odd-end single-man projects), exceeded FSF by
> ~2000.
>
>   Xah
> ∑http://xahlee.org/
>
> ☄