Jan Vroonhof wrote: OK, I'm donning my asbestos underwear. Forgive my blunt approach: Why does RMS have to sanction everything? He has his opinions, and has certainly provided a great value to the industry. However, when his ideals get in the way of improving something, then that something is doomed. Politics for the sake of politics is silly. I personally don't really like the Qt widget set for aesthetic reasons. However, there is simply no reason, other than lack of resources, not to provide hooks into the libraries. As Kyle pointed out, XEmacs is linkable to Motif, which is far more "closed" than Qt. RMS doesn't run the XEmacs show. In fact, RMS doesn't run _any_ show other than the FSF, and XEmacs is not an FSF product. We do not need his OK to give XEmacs Qt links or anything else, for that matter. I'm not part of the XEmacs team; just a long-time happy (for the most part) user. Before I used XEmacs, I used GNU Emacs for several years. Maybe my opinion won't be heeded; maybe I'll be scoffed. However, that's the price to pay for free speech, no? c.

Olivier Galibert wrote: Is it not under the GPL? c.

Olivier Galibert writes: True, but let's not go overboard. I don't see anything in the GPL that precludes us from coding for non-free libraries as long as we don't ship binaries containing those libraries. We can presumably ship stuff that dynamically links and we can ship source distributions with no binaries.

Kyle Jones wrote: This was my frame of mind with my original post. I wasn't even considering binary kits. If a user has more options available to them if they want to get the source and compile it, then so be it -- this even encourages the proliferation of free software. I say, resources notwithstanding, do it. I personally prefer GTK+, and I suppose there is no legal issue there, since it's GPL'd anyway. However, there is no ethical difference between releasing source code that links against Qt and releasing source code that links against Motif. In fact, the license for Qt is certainly more "free" than the license for Motif. In any case, I may start on a GTK+/XEmacs project of my own. In fact, XEmacs doesn't need to be the core of it, and there might be some benefit to starting from scratch with a clean design and codebase. Not meant as a flame, or to say there's something inherently "bad" about XEmacs. However, the package system, while a good idea, leaves some room for improvement in its implementation. I'm thinking more along the lines of something more modular. jEdit is not a bad start, except that it's written in Java, and _very_ slow. There are editors in the gnome CVS tree as well; perhaps I'll get in on one of those. c.