xemacs vs emacs

[David Kastrup]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org> writes:

> David Kastrup writes:
>
>  > > As I wrote, Aquamacs is a friendly fork.
>  > 
>  > I thought you read emacs-devel?
>
> Yes, but in this case I discussed it directly with Stefan and David.
> I won't claim their sanction for the word "fork", but they clearly
> agree that it's friendly.  Of course neither is happy that the
> combination of Apple's IP and FSF policy make a merge impossible, but
> neither is anywhere close to advocating a change of FSF policy.  And
> of course we can advocate to Apple as much as we like but that won't
> affect anything.
>
> Seems friendly enough to me.

I don't see that "Apple IP" plays much into this if at all.

>  > There is not much redundancy I see.  I am not sure about the split
>  > communities, either.
>
> David claims tens of thousands of downloads at each release.  I don't
> see those users posting to emacs-devel.  I would expect a couple dozen
> based our our experience with Choi's Carbon port of XEmacs.

I doubt that you'll see those users posting to Aquamacs-devel, either.
Or a somewhat commensurate proportions to the Emacs download numbers
posting to emacs-devel.

In the age of caching web servers and webspiders (and restarted
downloads) and mirroring and ubiquitous broadband access, download
numbers are not really much of an indicator for anything.  Add to that
the problem that nowaday, many users come from read-only cultures and
never contribute anything back anywhere.  They are used to just take
what they are given without complaining.  Who knows where complaining
will get them, probably they'll be singled out because of violating some
license.

I don't really know whether there is much of an "Emacs community", to be
honest.  A community is something different to a closed circle where
everybody more or less knows everybody else.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum