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Comment by sillysaurus3 | Hacker News Reader

If it were part of Emacs you'd need to use the FSF's collaboration tools which have a higher barrier of entry, and if you're a first-time contributor with a non-trivial contribution you're going to have to wait days/weeks as your copyright assignment papers make their way over snail-mail.

This is as good a reason as any to try to replace Emacs. Maybe Remacs will succeed.

Though I suppose it'd be best to have proof of this claim. Not that I don't believe you, but this is the type of thing that turns newbies away from Emacs without giving it a shot.

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Can confirm. It hasn't turned me off Emacs by any means, but it is one of the reasons I strongly prefer releasing packages on MELPA to getting patches into Emacs proper.

Neovim came along but majority who use vim still use vim. They won't change. This is in a situation where neovim is ahead of vim in certain areas (some may not like it and call it bloat but I call them features).

Unless remacs gives a clear advantage over emacs in terms of performance while still retaining compatibility people won't switch easily. Even then the switch should be quick and painless. (Neovim had those and so some people jumped ship).

I would never use Remacs but I would use CLemacs. Others wouldn't use the previous two but would use Pymacs, Rbemacs or Hemacs. Then there's people who wouldn't use any of those but swear by Elmacs.

You're aware that remacs rewrite the C part of emacs in Rust, not the ELisp ones? The final goal for users and plugin writers is a fully transparent transition.

That's true but it's only the technical and logistical part of the problem.

There's a moral issue too in giving-up copyright to an entity : What if the future the FSF (RMS is not eternal) changes its policy to turn to something completely crazy with your code ? They will own all will own all your copyright-assigned code and you won't be able to do anything about it.

I mean : what if you were agree with GPL2 but not 3 and that now the copyright owner decides to move the code you've written to GPL3 ?

>What if the future the FSF (RMS is not eternal) changes its policy to turn to something completely crazy with your code ?

The FSF's copyright assignment contract has clauses that prevent them from doing such things. It's really a very fair contract.

To elaborate: the clause is actually designed precisely to prevent a hostile takeover from another entity; it's an important part of the contract. The clause states the conditions under which your code and program will be made available.

Ok this seems more reasonnable than I thought.

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