Re: FYI: "Emacs and XEmacs" on the Emacs Wiki

David Kastrup writes: Good advice. But it seems there remain a number of points where your own understanding is belated or insufficient. Which is, of course, what I have been telling you for nearly a decade. I didn't call anyone a liar, though I admit that Jamie is one of my personal heroes.[1] I said that the claim that Lucid tried to hijack the Emacs project is a damned lie. Not only did Jamie and Richard Gabriel say over and over again that their goal for a merge was a GNU- maintained Emacs (indeed, alluding to "your version of Emacs" in the post you quote, clearly foreseeing that the merge interlude would be brief, and after that full control would return to GNU, and Lucid would again be maintaining their own version), but all their behavior and the incentives of a commercial firm back that assertion up. The main point is that it was RMS who insisted that they try to merge, not Lucid. And Lucid insisted on control of the merge process that RMS asked them to perform, not ongoing maintainership. But I have never seen it that way; yet another "damned lie", and I wish you would stop attributing to me views I have never held. True, IMO Lucid *was* heroic, trying to build a major commercial endeavor based partly on free software. But they were not fairy-tale heroes in the fork; Gabriel knew Stallman very well, and baiting him with the announcement of "Emacs 19 is here, now, not at GNU" was nasty and dumb at best. On the other hand, there is substantial evidence of their goodwill and contribution to Emacs: the Lucid code in Emacs proper (ie, excluding the Lucid Widget Library and the interface to the Energize product) was already assigned to the FSF as of May 1992 (Lucid Emacs 19.0), almost a year before the flamewar. So even if they wanted to, they had absolutely no legal possibility of "hijacking" anything! Footnotes: [1] He got that way not by producing Lucid Emacs, but on the quality of his bug reports, and the purity of the acid in his flames. _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta