> In fighting software that restricts its users and doesn't respect their freedoms, you've become the thing you despise.
GNU Emacs is still under the GPL. Feel free to modify it to re-add the feature that was removed. The only reason you have the freedom to do that is because of Richard Stallman's "high horse".
> Oh, and the rest of the Emacs team:
Reminder that GNU Emacs is part of GNU/Linux, and thus features are developed against GNU/Linux first and other operating systems later. In addition, it is part of the requirements of GNU packages that they not encourage users to use proprietary operating systems. This includes having features on proprietary operating systems that do not exist on free operating systems.
Surely you see why that's important, right?
> I may well actually work on exporting the GCC AST in protest.
Have fun using the freedoms that the GPL grants you while protesting against the movement that caused free software to exist in the first place. Hypocrisy is so much fun.
>Reminder that GNU Emacs is part of GNU/Linux, and thus features are developed against GNU/Linux first and other operating systems later.
Yes, but that's terrible. Making your software demonstrably worse for a subset of your users isn't acceptable. If any other group did this, you'd likely be enraged. What if .NET Core dropped support for an API on Linux? Would you really be comforted by the people saying: "it's open source: fork it if you want the features back"?
>Have fun using the freedoms that the GPL grants you while protesting against the movement that caused free software to exist in the first place. Hypocrisy is so much fun.
I have no wish to protest GNU as a whole. I do wish to protest the pig-headedness of RMS and others, which keeps us from actually moving Emacs and other packages forward. Not allowing Emacs to touch the GCC AST isn't protecting freedoms: it's needlessly obstructive, and utterly pointless.
It's the same situation here: not patching in functionality until there's cross-platform support? Okay. Actively removing functionality that doesn't work cross-platform (yet)? Not cool.
> Making your software demonstrably worse for a subset of your users isn't acceptable.
Which is why they removed a feature after realising it made GNU/Linux users have a worse experience than on other platforms.
> What if .NET Core dropped support for an API on Linux? Would you really be comforted by the people saying: "it's open source: fork it if you want the features back"?
Yes, because I guarantee that someone would fork it. Just like someone already has a fork of Emacs that is macOS-friendly. And it probably already has the patch reverted.
> Actively removing functionality that doesn't work cross-platform (yet)? Not cool.
It was a mistake for them to merge it, and they're fixing their mistake. That's how I see it. GNU packages have to be "portable to GNU", specifically all of their features have to be portable to GNU. A feature which is not portable to GNU is not a feature that the package should have -- otherwise you're both encouraging people to use proprietary operating systems as well as fragmenting your userbase.
GNU Emacs is still under the GPL. Feel free to modify it to re-add the feature that was removed. The only reason you have the freedom to do that is because of Richard Stallman's "high horse".
> Oh, and the rest of the Emacs team:
Reminder that GNU Emacs is part of GNU/Linux, and thus features are developed against GNU/Linux first and other operating systems later. In addition, it is part of the requirements of GNU packages that they not encourage users to use proprietary operating systems. This includes having features on proprietary operating systems that do not exist on free operating systems.
Surely you see why that's important, right?
> I may well actually work on exporting the GCC AST in protest.
Have fun using the freedoms that the GPL grants you while protesting against the movement that caused free software to exist in the first place. Hypocrisy is so much fun.