Gary> It appears that RMS complaints about XEmacs have more to do Gary> with licensing issues than design. RMS has no complaints about XEmacs licensing. How could he? It's his own GNU GPL. The problem is that RMS believes in a legal theory that means in practice that the FSF must monopolize free software copyrights for those programs that it wishes to defend in court.[1] Gary> If so, couldn't this be accommodated by the XEmacs gang? Gary> Unless those folks have completely faded away. No. All accommodation must come from the FSF side, or from third parties. RMS's objection is to the fact that some XEmacs copyrights are controlled by something other than the FSF. Most (but not all) current XEmacs developers have assigned their copyrights to the FSF. However, much of XEmacs is copyrighted by Sun Microsystems Inc, which no longer seems to have much direct interest in XEmacs, but which sees no point in assigning its copyright in XEmacs to the FSF. "The XEmacs gang" does not own those copyrights, and therefore is powerless. It is between Sun and the Emacs maintainers; either Sun assigns, RMS relents, or the status quo continues. Footnotes: [1] Theoretically the FSF could sign a contract to cooperate with another copyright holder; it has done this with the Electro-Technical Laboratory of Japan for the Mule subsystem used in both Emacs and XEmacs. But this seems unlikely to be common practice, since most free software programmers are free-lance hackers, and if they are going to assign copyright, they may as well do so to the FSF itself. -- 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 straight lines for? "XEmacs rules."

G> Folks, G> I just read the "GNU vs. XEmacs" page G> http://www.xemacs.org/About/XEmacsVsGNUemacs.html. G> I confess, I rarely use emacs any more, as many of the systems I G> remotely log into don't have it, and I just got used to using Vim or the G> original vi, whichever is available. Since I don't use it regularly, G> most of the key mappings have been forgotten (except the ubiquitous ones G> like ^P, ^N, etc.) I note most distributions of linux include G> GNU Emacs, not XEmacs. However from this page, I surmise that XEmacs is G> nicer for workstation use. But I'm so used to vim now... G> It is not noted on the page whether the FSF position statement was G> written with the XEmacs position in mind. So the following is not G> necessarily a correct presumption: It appears that RMS complaints about G> XEmacs have more to do with licensing issues than design. If so, G> couldn't this be accommodated by the XEmacs gang? Unless those folks G> have completely faded away. The membership of the XEmacs development team has changed over time. Some of the developers feel it is unfair to be required to assign the copyright to _their_ work to the FSF. Other developers are large corporations with busy lawyers and no benefit from copyright assignment.