Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: RMS annoys developers, but ESR influences businesses

Author:Nick Sweeney
Posted:8/29/2000; 9:35:16 PM
Topic:scriptingNews outline for 8/28/2000
Msg #:20526 (In response to 20509)
Prev/Next:20524 / 20527

From reading technically (as opposed to politically) orientated interviews with RMS, I have to disagree. He's very good at outlining the intricate and abstract approaches that were needed in the early days of Emacs and GCC. Again, I think there's an ideological gap here: RMS comes out of the Platonic idealism of MIT and the Lisp machine, where things have to be done the right way from the top down. (Philip Greenspun has a similar mindset, and he's proved that the combination of open-source tools with commercial technologies can be bloody successful.) On the other hand, ESR is more of an Aristotelian bricoleur, as can be seen by fetchmail, the quintessential bottom-up hack.

But this week's discussion has been depressingly ad hominem, so I'll shut up now.

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