Re: Emacs vista build failures

[David Kastrup]

Alan Mackenzie <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi, Richard!
>
> On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 12:56:12PM -0400, Richard M Stallman wrote:
>>     IF making free programs working on windows helps promote GNU/Linux
>>     (or Herd) is not that good?
>
>> Yes, but we can't assume in general that that is the case.  For a few
>> programs, such as OpenOffice and Firefox, the fact that they run on
>> Windows seems to be a signficant aid to migration to GNU/Linux.  But I
>> don't see that this is true for other free programs.
>
> This is rather fundamental:  Why do we write free software? My personal
> motivation is to make the world a better place.

But the world is large.  If one can bundle resources by just making one
place that is accessible to everyone better, one can achieve quite more.
And this place are free operating systems.  When there were not any, the
GNU project still worked on making the world better in a lot of hostile
places.  But there is no point to distribute efforts still to places
where nobody really needs to be.

> When I ask myself, is the world better for having Emacs and Firefox
> running on Microsoft Windows, the answer is an unequivocal yes -
> people who hack on MS-Windows can thus do a better job.

But their job does not in general benefit others.  So we are creating
better opportunities for work that does not help the community.

> The availability of free software on proprietary OSs might well cause
> the newly enlightened to explore free software further and possibly to
> start hacking it.  A lack of free software on these OSs most surely
> will not.

But diluting our resources to proprietary dead ends that will not
benefit users of free systems is not a good idea.  If somebody who
otherwise would not do anything else does it, the free software world
does not get reduced.  But that's not the case in general.

-- 
David Kastrup