Re: How to make Emacs popular again.

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Sun, 4 Oct 2020 13:07:19 +0300
> From: Jean Louis <bugs@gnu.support>
> Cc: philipk@posteo.net, rms@gnu.org, spacibba@aol.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org,
>  dgutov@yandex.ru, jamtlu@gmail.com, eduardoochs@gmail.com
> 
> > I think we should let the user decide whether such risks are relevant
> > in each and every case, and whether these risks, if they exist, are
> > worth taking.
> 
> Universities are often off-line, something impossible for you to
> imagine in the US, is very realistic in East Africa. Students may be
> prevented having mobile phones, but not prevented having
> computers.
> 
> In too many countries Internet is not easily available or accessible,
> and is too often too expensive for even normal people to access it how
> they want it.
> 
> > We explain these issues on the FSF site, so the considerations and
> > the risks are well known.
> 
> They may be well published by FSF, but they cannot possibly be known
> to general public as referencing and finding articles is not easy. It
> is well known to smaller group of people who are fans of FSF and the
> website. 
> 
> > We can explain this again in our documentation where relevant.  This
> > way, we can consider users informed and capable of making their own
> > decisions.
> 
> I have totally different impression. So many times I am explaining
> friends and associates about this subject, I am talking face to face
> to people I know, majority of people are not aware of any risks in
> networking. That is greatest problem in our society right now. In my
> opinion with technology development, society will become dumber 100%
> within only next 5 years, so avoiding unsecure networking and making
> people aware is necessity of today.

What exactly are you arguing for?  That we forcibly prevent users from
using on-line access where it is available and reasonably fast, just
because in some parts of the world Internet access is nonexistent, or
because there are risks associated with using Internet?  Such
enforcement makes no sense to me.  We should treat our users as
responsible adults.

We've already agreed to look for local resources first, and only fall
back to remote servers if the local resources don't exist.  So I see
no reason to continue arguing here if you are saying we should prefer
local resources.  And if you are really saying that we should forcibly
prevent remote access because our users don't know what they are
doing, then it's so far away of everything I believe in that any
argument will be futile.