4 ms·

> It's not just that his knowledge is outdated, it's also that his philosophical principles will always take precedence over everything else To be fair to RMS

> It's not just that his knowledge is outdated, it's also that his philosophical principles will always take precedence over everything else To be fair to RMS he has tried to consider opposing views in the past when he can see and understand the need behind the proposition. In this case the problem is that RMS doesn't know enough C++/Java/C#-style OO programming, and can't understand why you would need refactoring tools to rename a method, because in his C-style world a search and replace should be sufficient. And because he doesn't see the need himself, he wont consider it a valid use-case which GNU/GCC/Emacs needs to support. This already has lead to chilling effects: People have stopped working on adding GCC-based support for auto-completion and similar functionality. RMS may be stubborn, but he's not stupid: He sees adding the proposed LLDB/LLVM-based functionality as a direct consequence of this, and bypassing his "authoriity" on the GCC-issue and thus an "attack" on GCC and the goals of GNU/FCC itself. In my mind, he is obviously right that people are side-stepping his judgement, but he is wrong that this is an attack on free software: People just want to make Emacs better, and he is vigorously fighting them to make it not happen. And now we have RMS fighting to artificially limit free software, in his mind to preserve it. I'm not sure how long this has been going on now... A decade? To me forking core GNU projects to leave RMS out just in order to get things done is increasingly looking like the only option.

hga 12y ago
"People just want to make Emacs better, and he is vigorously denying people the features they ask for." And while I have as of yet no opinion on the concept, a lot of people believe he's hypocritical for supporting non-free OSes in GCC and Gnu Emacs.
- thoth 12y ago
  I believe the explanation here is that the FSF/GNU is willing to support their tools on non-free OSes as long as those tools work the same as the do on free OSes, and in particular, don't work "better" as compared to the free version because the non-free OS provides additional services somehow. They don't want their tools to be superior or have better functionality on a non-free OS. For example, emacs wouldn't take a patch that hooked into speech recognition provided by the OS, unless that was also available on a free OS. And say Microsoft or Apple provided powerful functionality for debuggers via a system api (and this same functionality isn't on a free OS) - gdb would not take a patch that used it.
noselasd 12y ago
>and can't understand why you would need refactoring tools >to rename a method, because in his C-style world a search >and replace should be sufficient. Is that really the underlying reason, or are you making it up ? From what I've seen, he doesn't want to expose internals of GPL software such that non-free software can be built on top of it, which is a fair stance to take - even if you and I might disagree to it as it as a consequence might prevent our life to be easier/better - at least in the short term.
- eropple 12y ago
  The direct and inescapable consequence of this is that he makes things more difficult for other GPL (and non-GPL-but-free) software, just because maybe some closed-source software might do something with it in a day and age when they can already just use clang. Dying on this hill makes him a bad steward of the projects other people have entrusted him with (and fortunately the maintainer of the Emacs debugger stuff is ignoring him), while also making everybody else's lives suck a little more.

hga 12y ago

"People just want to make Emacs better, and he is vigorously denying people the features they ask for." And while I have as of yet no opinion on the concept, a lot of people believe he's hypocritical for supporting non-free OSes in GCC and Gnu Emacs.

thoth 12y ago
I believe the explanation here is that the FSF/GNU is willing to support their tools on non-free OSes as long as those tools work the same as the do on free OSes, and in particular, don't work "better" as compared to the free version because the non-free OS provides additional services somehow. They don't want their tools to be superior or have better functionality on a non-free OS. For example, emacs wouldn't take a patch that hooked into speech recognition provided by the OS, unless that was also available on a free OS. And say Microsoft or Apple provided powerful functionality for debuggers via a system api (and this same functionality isn't on a free OS) - gdb would not take a patch that used it.

noselasd 12y ago

>and can't understand why you would need refactoring tools >to rename a method, because in his C-style world a search >and replace should be sufficient. Is that really the underlying reason, or are you making it up ? From what I've seen, he doesn't want to expose internals of GPL software such that non-free software can be built on top of it, which is a fair stance to take - even if you and I might disagree to it as it as a consequence might prevent our life to be easier/better - at least in the short term.

eropple 12y ago
The direct and inescapable consequence of this is that he makes things more difficult for other GPL (and non-GPL-but-free) software, just because maybe some closed-source software might do something with it in a day and age when they can already just use clang. Dying on this hill makes him a bad steward of the projects other people have entrusted him with (and fortunately the maintainer of the Emacs debugger stuff is ignoring him), while also making everybody else's lives suck a little more.