Today two areas matter most 1) Phones, 2) Server/Cloud/PaaS, it's not relevant on Phone and gaps in it's design get abused all the time on the server side.
Additionally a common GPL usage is to prevent usage so that you can sell a proprietary license especially when we speak about variations which try to fix gaps in the GPL, like AGPL. Which is a failure for truley free software, too.
> 2) [..]
Was acceptable in 2000. But in 2020 not well working high maintenance systems are much less accepted even by developers AFIK.
> 3) [..]
But it has become a Lighthouse for how to not try to change things, as it's not an effective approach anymore. Wasn't always that way. It did a lot of good things. It just didn't move with the change of time.
> Someone needs to be standing up for raw freedom, devil take convenience.
Yes but if you bring that into maintenance of relevant software _too_ much then you guarantee that your software will slowly lose it relevance. It might take years, but it's pretty much guaranteed. And at some point you will have lost all influence through software, because all you software lost influence. Means you will have lost beyond a chance for recovery.
I mean look at the change mentioned in the article, I don't expect any relevant amount of the mac users to move away from mac because of this change, I do expect people to move away from Emac because of it, and I do expect people to just have a fork, potentially with increasingly more macOs specific features. Which means it will make the FSF lose influence AFIK.
> I do expect people to move away from Emac because of it, and I do expect people to just have a fork, potentially with increasingly more macOs specific features.
1) Emacs isn't a business, so it doesn't care if it loses market share.
2) Emacs won't have any trouble keeping up with a MacOS fork if it wants to. The software is GPL. It's not like Open Source, it's yours no matter what happens. Apple will be obligated to share everything it does. Emacs will merge it if it likes it.
> Emacs isn't a business, so it doesn't care if it loses market share.
Sure, but "market share" is at least to some degree a proxy for long-term health. My impression -- and I think it's a well-founded one -- is that the most passionate free-software partisans do not like Visual Studio Code, for a variety of reasons ranging from its licensing to "it's Microsoft, dammit." And over the long-term, VS Code is arguably a major threat to all other editors, and perhaps particularly to long-standing editors that are highly extensible but perhaps not the easiest to get comfortably configured.
I love Emacs in principle, but in practice it is way, way, way easier for me to set up and personalize an installation of VS Code. Being that easy to set up isn't necessarily a worthy goal for Emacs, but what the original article is pointing out is, in so many words, that if Emacs' maintainers specifically -- and the FSF more broadly -- consider "fuck you for using a Mac" to be a worthy goal, that's very likely to drive Mac users to non-FSF-approved software. With something as important as your editor, once you have it set up, you're going to want to use it everywhere you can, and like it or not, VS Code's "everywhere you can" includes Linux. Driving people away from any major free software package in the name of purity is something that, at the least, the maintainers should really, really think hard about: there is a generation of developers coming up right now who, even if you convince them to trade in their Mac in a few years for a glorious Linux desktop, may very well keep using Visual Studio Code on Linux because that's what they know. And they know it because Emacs deliberately chose to be frustrating on a Mac and VS deliberately did not.
tl;dr: This sure looks like a case of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
There is indeed already (and long-standing) a Mac-specific Emacs port: https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs-mac and I have no doubt that it would add `ns-do-applescript` right back if it were removed from the upstream. I am also very curious about the breakdown of Emacs Mac users: how many are using the Mac port and how many the GNU upstream?
I use Emacs on Mac OS and I can certainly say that I use it for the features -- it is the editor that best suits me -- not because of the license or anything like that. If it were to become insufficiently featureful, I would pick a different editor, not change my entire OS.
Today two areas matter most 1) Phones, 2) Server/Cloud/PaaS, it's not relevant on Phone and gaps in it's design get abused all the time on the server side.
Additionally a common GPL usage is to prevent usage so that you can sell a proprietary license especially when we speak about variations which try to fix gaps in the GPL, like AGPL. Which is a failure for truley free software, too.
> 2) [..]
Was acceptable in 2000. But in 2020 not well working high maintenance systems are much less accepted even by developers AFIK.
> 3) [..]
But it has become a Lighthouse for how to not try to change things, as it's not an effective approach anymore. Wasn't always that way. It did a lot of good things. It just didn't move with the change of time.
> Someone needs to be standing up for raw freedom, devil take convenience.
Yes but if you bring that into maintenance of relevant software _too_ much then you guarantee that your software will slowly lose it relevance. It might take years, but it's pretty much guaranteed. And at some point you will have lost all influence through software, because all you software lost influence. Means you will have lost beyond a chance for recovery.
I mean look at the change mentioned in the article, I don't expect any relevant amount of the mac users to move away from mac because of this change, I do expect people to move away from Emac because of it, and I do expect people to just have a fork, potentially with increasingly more macOs specific features. Which means it will make the FSF lose influence AFIK.