Re: Richard Stallman: Emacs 19

You see wrongdoing in my actions the way some people see faces in pictures of Mars--because that's what you want to see. Initially he was so worried that Lucid would ask people to stop hacking on FSF's version of GNU Emacs (never happened), I don't know whether Lucid did, but people working on XEmacs since then have done so on various occasions. Most recently, Johnston did so with a message on an unrelated mailing list. I asked him, privately, not to do that. but said that *he* would never do so. And I did not do so now. Look at what I said, and look at what I responded to, and you will see that I told Johnston the same sort of thing that I said years ago: please don't ask people to stop cooperating with me. Before you accuse someone of lying, you should see if you know all the facts. I did eventually have a discussion with Zawinski about the design of the new features. But this was months later, when I called Lucid to find out what was going on. When they began the project, they didn't discuss the design with me; they did not even tell me they were working on something for Emacs. I heard about it through the grapevine after a considerable delay. So I called and asked to discuss the design issues. I found out that they had started out with an development version of Emacs 19--code we had not even released yet--and were aiming to release their version before we did. (Lucid's version was therefore admired for some of the improvements we had made, such as multiple frames.) Zawinski and I discussed the features for a while, seeing that we disagreed on some issues, and then he told me, "It is too late to discuss these design decisions. We have already half-way implemented them, and we have a deadline. We want you to accept ALL of our decisions, and all our code, and install it in Emacs. If you don't want to use them all, you can merge the parts that you like, but we won't help you do that." I did not do as they wished, but I liked some of their code. Because Lucid signed papers, I eventually merged those parts--but they did not help me do it. This is why I say that the people who started Lucid Emacs did not even try to work with me. They also did not try to work with the other Emacs maintainer, Jim Blandy. They just wanted to declare themselves in charge. At the time, I was maintaining GCC, not Emacs. If the people at Lucid had approached me with a less inflexible attitude, and asked to join in Emacs development, they could have been welcome. Perhaps I would have eventually made them the Emacs maintainers. There were times when I wished that history had taken that course.