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Well reading the front page it seems to mee that all they do is to deblob coreboot and combine it with GRUB and another package.

I know quite a bit about FSF and GNU. The maintainer of libreboot here makes blunt accusations and decides in the name of other participants of the project (and they don't all agree to her: http://zammit.org/libreboot-screwup.html). She uses vulgarity, over-reacts, abuses her position to publish articles in the name of all the community on the project website.... see, who would you find more dependable in this context?

This is from http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/libreboot/2016-09/msg00036...

LR> I'm declaring here and now to the whole world that Libreboot is no longer LR> part of the GNU project. I do not believe that the FSF or the GNU project LR> deserve to exist.

Mistakes are everywhere and are done by everybody. A mistake was done by some people in FSF, the reaction is exaggerated to say the least. Furthermore, it's not clear whether or not the fired person was fired for being a trans. In fact in an email in the thread Stallman says:

The dismissal of the staff person was not because of her gender. Her gender now is the same as it was when we hired her. It was not an issue then, and it is not an issue now.

Whatever the case is, even though I know null about the project, I can easily say that Leah Rowe, whoever she might be, is apparently toxic for the project. Hopefully, given that it's free software, the other maintainers can get rid of her.

I myself have discovered everything I know along the way, and have read no guides, so unfortunately don't know any of them. Tho C-h t is the unavoidable initiation to emacs the editor.

Using tools lik Org mode, Rmail, Elfeed etc. gives you many opportunities to write some useful elisp, which is a pedagogical experience.

Emacs is like the mildly beautiful geeky girl which you fall in love with: whenever she spots you inclined to some new cute girl, instead of going mad with you, reveals such a wonderful piece of her interior world that you just forget the other one :)

It's such a nice UI paradigm married to a decent lisp (any lisp is better than no lisp :)). Once you get the actual hang of it you can't ever leave it. Just like real coffee vs. instant abominations.

Emacs Lisp. I want to port all my remaining sh awk and perl stuff to it, and I'll havee some time to do that in the coming weeks.

Also, m4. I use it together with awk and bmake for a couple websites. I plan to port awk scripts to sth. else though, I keep forgetting awk.

I use tramp for all things ssh these days. Becomes very practical w/ ssh-agent and Emacs bookmarks.

That's because they've been a bit naughty though, not because of mere corporate evil. Quoting the article you linked:

-----8<-----

A well-designed System Z emulator that allows users to migrate their own mainframe applications to commodity hardware would obviously pose a serious threat to IBM's mainframe business, but IBM's software licensing terms have historically prevented such a threat from materializing.

...

In many ways, the project arguably benefits IBM by encouraging interest in the mainframe platform. [...] What brought about IBM's change in perspective was an unexpected effort by the TurboHercules company to commercialize the project in some unusual ways.

TurboHercules came up with a bizarre method to circumvent the licensing restrictions and monetize the emulator. IBM allows customers to transfer the operating system license to another machine in the event that their mainframe suffers an outage. Depending on how you choose to interpret that part of the license, it could make it legally permissible to use IBM's mainframe operating system with Hercules in some cases.

Exploiting that loophole in the license, TurboHercules promotes the Hercules emulator as a "disaster recovery" solution that allows mainframe users to continue running their mainframe software on regular PC hardware when their mainframe is inoperable or experiencing technical problems. This has apparently opened up a market for commercial Hercules support with a modest number of potential customers, such as government entities that are required to have redundant failover systems for emergencies, but can't afford to buy a whole additional mainframe.

-----8<-----

> Bottom line: children need to learn how to use the 21st century, or there's a good chance they will lose the 21st century.

Most children meet entertainment technology as early as before the first birthday, though. Many pre-teens that I see around possess smartphones and/or tablets. Most of the early teenagers possess multiple devices. None of these will be able to judge what's is beneficial to their future and well-being, and opt for it rather than what is immediately fun and pleasing. Just like most of them will live on chocolate bars and crisps if let to do so. The burden falls on the parents, a burden they don't take.

I myself can't think of a future other than one full of device addicts, and a small bunch that managed to liberate themselves from perennial procrastination and pseudo-socialisation only in their twenties. And while my country can prohibit certain products (food, etc.) from import and production within its own borders (e.g. genetically modified, chemically engineered to be consumed greedily), this can't be done with websites, because (a) it's technically impossible and (b) it 'contradicts freedom of speech'. I'll ask the reader to philosophise over (b), because neither the founding fathers of the US nor the pioneers of the french revolution, nor most of the libertarian, freedom-bringing revolutionists had a Facebook to tag their friends' faces.

(edit: I don't want to get into a debate over freedom of speech, and don't support any form of cencuring of it, tho I don't want freedom of speech at the cost of exploitation of generations and generations by some companies that use it as a shelter for themselves.)

See also: EXWM, an emacs window manager. Idk if it's mature yet, but I'm keeping an eye on it, and may ditch twm for it if it becomes stable enough (my emacs process is valuable to me, I don't want to ever kill it forcefully).

> Many GNU, Linux and other utils are pretty awesome, and obviously some effort has been spent in the past to port them to Windows. However, those projects are either old, abandoned, hosted on CVS, written in platform-specific C, etc.

I have seen such a paragraph in another projects README, IIRC a Go rewrite of standard utilities. I do not understand why a project would be obsolete because it's on CVS or is old. CVS is simpler than Git, albeit less capable. I, for one prefer it over Git for this reason, and others may do so too. Why would the end user care?

And why would we care about the age of a programme if it works?

Now, that said, the authors need not justify anything, they are free to do whatever they want, and I guess it's fun to code this stuff. I tried this just to play with Golang when it was 1.1.

And lastly, that Makefile is really a bunch of shell scripts, and some common environment variables. There is no real dependency tracking in it, and it is easier to maintain a bunch of shell scripts than a seriously ugly and complex Makefile like this. N.b. that when I say dependency tracking I mean dependencies among input and output files of processing commands, not tasks. I guess Cargo would know how to do that, and how to not build if the build artefact is already there. It's a useless use of make. And that makefile is very GNU-specific, not complying with a project whose purpose is to be cross-platform. Also, I guess, tho I'm really unfamiliar with Rust and Cargo, if that makefile was removed, maybe on Windows they'd be able to drop development dependencies on Cygwin or Msys.

You need not to defend Emacs (saying this per your attitude on the thread). Your argument does not defeat the argument about the lack of proper command-and-movement composition. This neither diminishes nor augments the value of your favourite editor, so no need for religiousness here.

edit: grammar.

come up: (Of an issue, situation, or problem) occur or present itself, especially unexpectedly [1]

inspiration: A sudden brilliant or timely idea [2]

If an entrepreneur trains via founding companies, then, should an architect train via filling the city up with half-arsed buildings? Nowhere in the pg article does occur something like “build random ideas into companies routinely”. Also, in that write-up is writ:

> If you're not at the leading edge of some rapidly changing field, you can get to one. For example, anyone reasonably smart can probably get to an edge of programming (e.g. building mobile apps) in a year. Since a successful startup will consume at least 3-5 years of your life, a year's preparation would be a reasonable investment. Especially if you're also looking for a cofounder.

[1] http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/come-up...

[2] http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/inspira...

I concur, with sorrow. Scheme is such a nice language... I believe a standardised syntax to define compound data structures (aka defstruct) and a standardised C FFI would make Scheme language usable. If these existed, I'd implement a Leiningen-ish tool and a couple libraries for Scheme, to get going with web development.

(There is one more problem I have with Scheme, which is the name. It sounds identical to a vulgar Turkish word for "my penis"; resulting in awkward situations when talking about the language in Turkey, where I live. :))

edit:

  - the Turkish word  
  + a vulgar Turkish word