🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <395rlr$3eh@csnews.cs.Colorado.EDU>,
Tom Christiansen  <tchrist@mox.perl.com> wrote:
>As I've said before, what I'm afraid of is not being given the choice,
>that any GNUware will require that we use gnuscript.  This is a matter of
>political strongarming, and no one will put up with it.

Tom, much as RMS comes across as dogmatic and his message is always at
least partly political, I've yet to seem him trying to force anyone to
do anything.  Not that he could, but that doesn't stop other people
from trying... anyway, in his various public "position statements"
that I've seen RMS has always said "_please_ do/don't do X", rather
than "you must do X".  It's a small matter of words, but words
matter... RMS is an advocate with a political agenda, and I _expect_
him to push his agenda and am not affronted by it so long as he's
open about it and doesn't try to ram it down my throat.

In any case, once a gnuscript exists, RMS may say "the FSF will not
accept software using other scripting languages to distribute as
official components of the GNU system" (I doubt he will, though), and
he's certainly within his rights just as much as Sun would be if they
said something like "everything that's part of Solaris will have its
configuration files written in TCL".  If this (the former) did come to
pass I would be annoyed, but it wouldn't detract much from the FSF
software's enormous value to me, and it won't prevent me from
releasing software that uses Perl/TCL/Jurgenscript under the GPL if I
want to.

>If in fact RMS does not want to stop us from writing software that uses
>other extensions languages *EVEN FOR GNU SOFTWARE*, then fine -- and vice
>versa.

Well, again, what do you call GNU software?  All software published
under the terms of the GPL?  Then he can't (stop us).  All software
distributed by the FSF?  That's his prerogative.  (When RMS says "GNU
software" I'm sure he's referring to the later, even if the FSF does
not have a TM on GNU.)

What RMS _wants_ doesn't matter much.  What he does to achieve those
ends does.  So far the primary thing he has done to achieve his ends
has been to write software, and that's never hurt any other honest
programmer.  Apple/CMU are developing Dylan, Sun may push TCL, RMS is
going to push gnuscript, and many others are working on other
incompatible languages to fill similar nieches, which they'll
similarly promote (using their own style and methods).  IMHO, this is
all A Good Thing.