effects of competition

Richard> If we had all been working together from the beginning, Richard> I'm sure that the total progress on GNU software Richard> including Emacs would be greater. I disagree. But then, that's a religious conviction for me---I'm a neoclassical economist. However, to take Emacs as a case in point, we have one Emacs running on top of a conventional Lispy no-holds-barred type-free Lisp providing an advanced "Mule" environment, and another Emacs running on a more strongly typed Lisp providing an advanced multimedia environment. Of course (as a person who uses both Mule and w3.el heavily every day) I regret that you can't have both in the the same Emacs at present. But the fact that both exist and are available as free software seems to me to be unambiguously a good thing. I doubt we would have it had the projects been unified; the people who made Lucid Emacs vigorously insisted on stronger typing, the GNU policy remains self-typing. This allows people who prefer one or the other environment to choose which one to work in. And Lisp packages that don't heavily use the new Mule or the multimedia features can (mostly, with more or less effort, usually less) run on both---even compiled files have been historically sharable! Sure, this took extra effort (not to mention the unfortunate flamewars), but some at least of the effort would have to have been spent in a unified project (and internal discussions). -- University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091 __________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________ What are those two straight lines for? "Free software rules."