Gosling's version paints a decidedly different picture than the GGP's quote from RMS.
I wonder if RMS was mad at Gosling for having the temerity to allow Unipress to sell his (Gosling's) version of Emacs, instead of leaving the Gosling version free for everyone as required by RMS's personal purity code?
Gosling: Right. I mean, you can't sue a homeless person, right, which is, you know, he-- Yeah, he had sort of weird views on, you know, economic models at the time.
RMS is very critical of things and as much as I have great respect for him I cant just take his side without all the facts. I dont even know a single person paying for emacs today either way. Seems like an old beef thats dead as dead can be considering GNU Emacs seems to have won out. Unless you are Walter Bright, you do you sir, you are awesome! I guess same with Linus who uses Micro Emacs if I remember correctly.
I always wanted to get more into emacs but I spend more time fighting the setup to bother anymore. I love Spacemacs but I am leaning more towards Neovim + Spacevim since its pretty damn nice.
RMS is a very black and white, tunnel visioned, ideologue: there's no gray. You can ask him his thoughts about a great new general technology and he'll stop you before you describe it and ask how it pertains to open source; if you don't answer exactly in alignment he will immediately dismiss you and shut down the conversation without hearing the question. (edit, I tried this once in person). He's absolutely correct, having given us the route to modern software reuse, but at the same time a highly dysfunctional person.
I agree with you entirely. I think the sweet spot is more obvious to me and you: software applications don't really need to be open source, but if the Operating System is, it allows a lot of flexibility, not to say people can't be flexible on proprietary operating systems, but I think for systems utils and kernels open source has strong benefits.
What I really think we're all missing out on is companies pushing more legacy GPU drivers out under an open source license, or opening up a spec for the community to build a correct open source derived driver from at the very least. It's a shame I can have a really irrelevant GPU that would be perfect for a Linux OS (I'm talking ATI level of old) and yet I can't get proper drivers and they wont be releasing any updates but I'm sure the old drivers are probably still functional enough to make my experience on Linux slightly more pleasant.
Engineers need to get paid, and not a lot of people become as successful as quickly with fully open sourced works.
