Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

Up early, parents popped past for breakfast, J. took H. to school in the car; admired the builders now correctly sized metalwork. Built and installed the latest image.
In one of those amazing moments of archaeology; I discovered some of the history of XEmacs: and I quote (and this is presumably a very historical 'Currently'):
Why are there two Emacsen?
Hysterical reasons. See the public flames if you must know. Currently the largest problems is that Sun owns the copyright for large part of the code. It is copyleft, but they refuse to sign over the changes to the FSF. Some people think it is good to have an Emacs variant where you can contribute code without signing any papers. Feel free to disagree.
And, of course personally I support at least joint assignment to the FSF (or other suitably structured, non-commercial, representative body). But I'm constantly being told by Sun engineers how no-one cares about copyright assignment, that it is never a barrier to entry, and that it is a total non-issue; what fun. It seems clear that some companies, sometimes, have real problems with it (and that was to a benign non-profit, not a commercial entity).
Since Sam Varghese, while happily calling Bruce Byfield 'clueless', seems unable himself to use a simple google search to find that MS, in addition to blogging, added the C# specs to their Community Promise page last week. A triumph worthy of Schestowitz, who with a simply mind-bending lack of irony or self-awareness has taken to griping that other people are using cheap shot(s), are unprofessional, and give only an illusion of balanced reporting.

My content in this blog and associated images / data under images/ and data/ directories are (usually) created by me and (unless obviously labelled otherwise) are licensed under the public domain, and/or if that doesn't float your boat a CC0 license. I encourage linking back (of course) to help people decide for themselves, in context, in the battle for ideas, and I love fixes / improvements / corrections by private mail.

In case it's not painfully obvious: the reflections reflected here are my own; mine, all mine ! and don't reflect the views of Collabora, SUSE, Novell, The Document Foundation, Spaghetti Hurlers (International), or anyone else. It's also important to realise that I'm not in on the Swedish Conspiracy. Occasionally people ask for formal photos for conferences or fun.

Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

2009-07-13: Monday.

Why are there two Emacsen?