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Comment by sjm | Hacker News Reader

This kind of thing is exactly why I will always support and use Mitsuharu Yamamoto's macOS Emacs port (https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs-mac), which has been consistently rock solid and committed to implementing nice to haves on macOS that this sort of political bullshit holds back on official development.

Homebrew tap here: https://github.com/railwaycat/homebrew-emacsmacport

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he is the author of the commit http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/commit/?id=934461...

And the commit seems to be in emacs-mac too - https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs-mac/commits/9344612d3cd... (Going by the author date, it was in emacs-mac first.)

Well he seems to have re-enabled colour bitmap fonts at some point on his fork. I'm running his latest emacs-mac 25.1.1 @ head and it supports native emoji.

The strong adherence to "political bullshit" is why such forks are possible.

The Free software movement needs a few extremists like RMS.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if Emacs was licensed under a more liberal license (MIT, BSD) such forks would still be possible. (Non-free forks would also be possible)

The question is can such licenses alone (without radical copyleft GNU) can sustain the free software movement's spirit.

I side with camp which thinks copyleft is major way to push towards free software.

It comes down to wether you ideologically support idea that software should essentially be distributed with the source code always. (RMS's view).

I think software like LLVM, PostgreSQL, Xorg, Hadoop, etc have shown that you don't need a radical copyleft to push forward free software. You need something better than exists elsewhere, and this kind of behavior from Stallman holds back free software out of fear of bogeymen.

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