On Sat, 19 Mar 2005 18:16:24 +0100, David Kastrup <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
PT <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
On Sat, 19 Mar 2005 17:22:49 +0100, David Kastrup <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
The question is: is more people using Emacs a good thing at all? Or is it only an additional burden (more clueless people on the help forums, etc.)?
You are trying to frame loaded questions.
No, it was a sincere question. And if the answer is no, it's not a good thing then I'm okay with it.
What is "a good thing"? More people using Emacs is not a worthwhile objective per se. If it were, we should replace Emacs by toiletpaper, and its user base would explode. A worthwhile objective for a developer is to have Emacs become a more productive tool for his work. This is not unrelated to the size of its user base, since developers usually tend to start out as users.
Exactly. I don't know what resources are at the emacs developers' disposal (do they work on it on their free time? is some of them paid to work on Emacs?),
Most work on Emacs in their free time. There have been times in the past where a main developer got employed by the FSF for completing a particular essential task or feature.
but if companies see more value in emacs then they might even sponsor developing some new features for them.
Emacs has a rather strict copyright assignment policy to the FSF, and it has a rather strict "if RMS does not think it a good idea right now, it does not get in" policy. While there have been corporate or at least institutional contributions (in particular MULE comes to mind), this is by no means easy to do.
[...]
Emacs has not shown itself to accommodate systematic corporate involvement well. It will as far as I can see always be dependent on dedicated individuals instead of corporate support, simply because you can't make a business plan involving Emacs development and timelines.
I see. In that case there really is no obvious benefit of devoting resources to make Emacs more newbie friendly.
BTW, it seems Eclipse will fill this space instead of Emacs. It is universal tool platform - an open extensible IDE for anything and nothing in particular.
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