Re: Rethinking the design of xwidgets

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > And yes, I do think Emacs for Linux deserves proper hardware
  > acceleration.

GNU Emacs isn't "for Linux", it is for the GNU operating system.

Perhaps when you say "Linux" you're talking about the GNU operating
system, with Linux as the kernel.  That's what people usually mean
when they say "Linux".  See https://gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html and
https://gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html, plus the history in
https://gnu.org/gnu/the-gnu-project.html.

It makes a practical difference, indirectly, which name you call it.
When people think of the GNU operating system as "Linux", they tend to
forget its goal.

The goal of the GNU operating system is to help people escape from
nonfree software.  We want that because nonfree software does
injustice to its users.  See fsf.org/tedx and
https://gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-important.html.  So
we judge any change by its effect on what we can do in the Free World.
That means, what ew can do with no nonfree programs installed.

Before 2000 or so, we didn't even have a real graphical desktop in the
Free World.  So we used our computers without them.  To run Qt
(nonfree, at the time) plus KDE would have been an advance in
convenience but a step backwards in ethics.

An operating system is not a person.  It has no rights, and it has no
interests.  To speak of what it "deserves" is a metonymy which really
means what its users deserve.

For the free software movement, what users deserve above all is
freedom.  Graphical acceleration is nice provided we don't have to pay
for it with freedom.

We determined a few weeks ago that graphics acceleration is available
in the free world.  So Emacs can make use of it, within carefully
studied limits.

The reason I'm posting this now (replying to a message I just saw) is
that discussions on what to do in developing GNU Emacs should not
forget the basic goal of work on GNU Emacs: defending and extending
the Free World.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)