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From: BillW@SU-SCORE.ARPA (William Chops Westfield)
Newsgroups: net.micro
Subject: Re: The GNU Manifesto - let the people decide
Message-ID: <9631@brl-tgr.ARPA>
Date: Sun, 31-Mar-85 22:54:46 EST
Article-I.D.: brl-tgr.9631
Posted: Sun Mar 31 22:54:46 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 3-Apr-85 02:20:18 EST
Sender: news@brl-tgr.ARPA
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The greatest benefit of RMS's GNU ideas may be just getting a lot of
volunteer hackers working together on the same things (the usual case
is that there turn out to be 200 different PD communications programs,
and so on, all of fairly mediocre quality).

With GNU take over the software market?  Never.  It just isn't possible
to provide the sort of support that naive user require without charging
a decent amount of money for your program.  Sure, RMS says that this isn't
true in his manifesto, but he is wrong.  I don't think RMS has ever had
to deal with really large populations of users.  Consider his current
successes:

1) EMACS.  ITS/TENEX EMACS is a good example of RMS's ideal piece of
	software.  User written.  User modified.  Free.  Constantly
	improved and improving.  One of the most complex, powerful,
	and easy to use editors around.  It's concepts have been
	copied in many comercial products.  Many, many hours of
	volunteer labor have gone into its development...

	So what's wrong?  Well, for one thing, EMACS has been 15
	years or so in the making.  The fact that it constantly
	changes is more of an annoyance than a feature to many
	sites.  New features have taken precedence over things
	like efficiency...  EMACS runs on DEC20's.  DEC20s
	are an interesting machine.  There are two PD Operating
	systems you can run. (maybe 3?).  Almost all of the
	useful software you can run is PD.  Why is this?  Well,
	first is that there aren't all that many 20's.  Second
	is that a lot of them are linked together by the DoD
	ARPANet.  DoD funded programs are by definiton free to
	other DoD contractors.  The net makes sharing software
	easy.  The 20 is a popular university computer, generating
	even more free software...

2) LMI Lisp machine Software.
	I don't know much about this.  I suspect the LMI lisp machine
	grew up in an environment similar to that of DEC20s.

The problem is that I suspect that there were more apple macintoshes
sold durring the christmas season than there are DEC20s and LMI lisp
machines put together, total!  Another point is that all that donated
programmer time was in many cases paid for by the programmers current
employer.  A university or a DoD site, and a lot of companies are
quite willing to have a programmer spend a bunch of hours improving
the editor.  And then the changes get sent back to everyone else,
so that THEY can make improvements.  Things may change when the
majority of people using the software DO NOT contribute to its
development or improvement.

BillW