Re: Release plans

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hi, Johannes,

On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 12:04:36PM +0200, Johannes Weiner wrote:
> Hi,

> We can fix the former if our definition of freedom allows us to.  This
> was the whole point of my previous email, in fact.

> Emacs has still no support to load shared libraries during runtime and
> IIRC it was rejected back then due to political reasons.  I call this
> crippling.

Well, for a piece of software that is crippled, Emacs works remarkably
well.  If only non-crippled software could run as fast.

I think the lack of provision of binary libraries is more of a legal
thing than a political one.  It would allow people to extend Emacs with
non-free code, and it would be problematic to prevent them distributing
their enslaved versions of Emacs.  I agree with Richard that this would
be undesirable in the extreme.  Linux has taken the opposite attitude:
that extending Linux with non-free modules is OK.  This has not been free
of problems.

If there were a way of licensing Emacs so that only free libraries could
be attached to it, this would be done.

What sort of libraries do you want to use from Emacs anyway?

>       Hannes

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).