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@@ -3,9 +3,11 @@ Richard Stallman
[[!template id=vid src="https://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/emacsconf/2020/emacsconf-2020--39-nongnu-elpa--richard-stallman.webm" size="282M" subtitles="/2020/subtitles/emacsconf-2020--39-nongnu-elpa--richard-stallman.vtt" duration="6:56"]]
[Download compressed .webm video (20.8M)](https://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/emacsconf/2020/smaller/emacsconf-2020--39-nongnu-elpa--richard-stallman--vp9-q56-video-original-audio.webm)
+[View transcript](#transcript)
[[!template id=vid src="https://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/emacsconf/2020/emacsconf-2020--39-nongnu-elpa--questions--richard-stallman.webm" size="470M" subtitles="/2020/subtitles/emacsconf-2020--39-nongnu-elpa--questions--richard-stallman.vtt" duration="46:42" download="Download Q&A video"]]
[Download compressed Q&A .webm video (44M)](https://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/emacsconf/2020/smaller/emacsconf-2020--39-nongnu-elpa--questions--richard-stallman--vp9-q56-video-original-audio.webm)
+[View transcript for Q&A](#transcript-questions)
<!-- from the pad --->
- Actual start and end time (EST): Start: 2020-11-29T11.09.04 ; Q&A: 2020-11-29T11.15.59; End: 2020-11-29T12.04.31
@@ -217,3 +219,528 @@ s.el - that made me aware that there's an issue here. Beautifully written packag
- GNU ELPA is one big git repository, and giving someone access grants them access to everything.
- Note from RMS: "If someone who has condemned me unjustly takes it back, that will make it safe for me to empathize with any feelings of hurt that pers might have felt as a result of the misunderstanding and I will be very glad to show compassion."
+
+<!-- transcript: 2020/subtitles/emacsconf-2020--39-nongnu-elpa--richard-stallman.vtt -->
+
+<a name="transcript"></a>
+# Transcript
+
+Hello, I'm Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU project. In 1976, I
+developed the first Emacs editor with some help from Guy Steele.
+Then, shortly after starting to develop the GNU operating system in
+1984, I wanted an Emacs editor for it. So I started writing GNU Emacs
+in September 1984.
+
+(00:29) Several years ago we decided to move many of the Emacs Lisp
+packages outside the core Emacs distribution into a separate package
+archive that we call the Emacs Lisp package archive ELPA. There were
+two main reasons for this. One is to make the Emacs distribution
+smaller so every user wouldn't have to get all the packages and
+install all the packages. And the other reason was to make it possible
+to release individual packages separately from Emacs releases.
+
+(01:08) Now, at that point somehow we decided to support loading
+packages from a variety of different Emacs Lisp package archives and
+ours would be called the GNU ELPA, but ELPA could be any other. Now, I
+think that naming was a mistake. We should have meant, we should have
+decided that ELPA referred to our package archive and any other
+package archive should be called some other name. Oh, well! Uh this is
+a mistake I believe, because it leads to a lot of confusion it would
+have been clearer if we had uh used the other naming.
+
+(01:55) Because the difference between having a package in core Emacs
+and having it in GNU ELPA, is purely a practical convenience matter.
+Convenience of distribution and convenience of maintenance. We wanted
+to be able to move packages between the two whenever that was
+convenient. So, to make that possible we insisted on getting copyright
+assignments for packages in GNU ELPA just the same way we do for
+packages in core Emacs.
+
+(02:31) Having the facility for installing packages from package
+archives, led to a tremendous boost in the development and release of
+Emacs packages. Unfortunately there was a problem with the way that
+was done. For the most part, the developers of these packages wouldn't
+even tell us about them. They posted them in another package archive
+where we didn't know about them and (where they) no attempt was made
+to try to fit them into Emacs so that they could make sense as parts
+of the Emacs distribution. This led to both moral problems, packages
+that depended on non-free software in order to be usable and technical
+problems because the developers of those packages didn't coordinate
+with us about how to make it useful and convenient and clean to have
+them in Emacs.
+
+(03:36) So, the idea of NonGNU ELPA is an effort to smooth these
+things out. The fundamental plan of NonGNU ELPA is that, we won't ask
+for copyright assignments for those packages. So, we won't be able to
+put them into core Emacs; at least not easily, but we will have some
+control over how we distribute them. We can put any package into
+NonGNU ELPA as long as it's free software. If we like it we can set up
+that way for users to get it. We could put the package in exactly as
+it is if there's no problem at all with it. We can make an arrangement
+with the package's developers to work on it with us and maintain it
+directly for distribution by NonGNU ELPA but if they are not
+interested we can put it in ourselves and if we need to make any
+changes we can do so.
+
+(04:52) So, NonGNU ELPA is not meant to be just a way that others can
+distribute their packages. It's meant at least in a minimal technical
+sense to work with GNU Emacs, and we'll make changes if necessary so
+that it works smoothly with Emacs. And this means that we're going to
+maintain it differently from GNU ELPA. Well, GNU ELPA is hosted in a
+way that is actually rather inconvenient. It is one single Git
+repository. And so anybody that has access to write it can write any
+part of it. There are many different packages in there maintained by
+different people, and we have no way to give each one of them access
+to per own package and not to the others. Well, with NonGNU ELPA we
+plan to fix that. The idea is to have a single Git repository where
+you can download various packages from. But, they won't be maintained
+there. Each of those packages will be copied automatically from some
+other place. Probably some other repository where the right people
+have access to work on it. And this way we can avoid giving a gigantic
+number of people access to every part of it. So far NonGNU ELPA is
+just a plan, we need people to implement the plan. So, if you would
+like to help please write to me. I think this is a very important step
+for progress and it's got to be implemented. Thanks and happy hacking!
+
+<!-- /transcript -->
+
+
+<!-- transcript: 2020/subtitles/emacsconf-2020--39-nongnu-elpa--questions--richard-stallman.vtt -->
+
+<a name="transcript-questions"></a>
+# Transcript: Q&A
+
+Okay. So, the first question is, "What is an example of a package
+currently in a non-ELPA repo that does not work well with Emacs?"
+Well, one of them is s.el, and this is what made me aware that there
+was an issue here that caused problems. Well, s.el is a beautifully
+written package that appears to be very useful for people. And there's
+just one thing wrong with it. It gobbled up the name space of symbols
+starting with s dash. And I was shocked to discover that somebody who
+had not coordinated with the Emacs developers at all, had implemented
+a package using such a short prefix, which isn't the right way to do
+things. Oh, by the way, the questions have moved off the screen, this
+is no good. I can continue answering this one, but I'll be stuck when
+this one is over. Anyway, so… I was told that there was nothing I
+could do about it, that so many users, packages were using s.el and
+thus essentially using that definition of the s-* symbols, that any
+attempt to use them publicly or privately for anything else would lead
+to horrible problems. And I don't like that. I decided, I wanted to
+do something a) so that wouldn't happen again and b) to make it
+unhappen in that case. Well, the way to make it unhappen in that case
+is with a new symbol renaming feature. The idea is, you rename that
+file to something else, and then you define an s.el that sets up
+symbol renaming and then loads the something else. So, it actually
+runs the same code, it just doesn't globally define the symbols s dash
+whatever, but they appear to work for the programs that explicitly
+require s.el or the s package. So, this gets the same behavior for all
+the programs that are using that library and doesn't interfere with
+the global name space at all. However, to do that we need to have a
+package s.el, that isn't the same totally. A short one file that's
+totally different. Plus, we've got to have the file that normally is
+called s.el available, but under another name. Well, how are we going
+to do that? We can't put this into Emacs in a nice way that won't make
+the maintainer angry. (or the developer of that package.) But we can
+do it with NonGNU ELPA. We can put those two things into NonGNU ELPA
+without any difficulty. And this shows one of the advantages. We can
+put files, we can put packages into NonGNU ELPA and make changes in
+them. Now, in general we wouldn't go to the effort of making big
+changes. That's just too much to do unless something's really
+important. But small changes that help things fit in are easy to
+do. Okay, oh, so basically the recording didn't get anything until
+now. I just saw a note pop up, "this session is now being recorded". I
+hope it's been recorded all along. It would be a shame to spoil… Oh,
+good okay. So, that's one of the issues.
+
+(04:27) "Does NonGNU ELPA already exist or is this a sort of "plan"?"
+I don't know why you have to put scare quotes around the word plan.
+It's sort of in between. The creation of it is started. You will find
+that there is an archive that it's possible to download packages from,
+and there is a repository to put them in, but that's not the way it's
+really supposed to work. This is not supposed to be like the GNU ELPA,
+where there's one repo for all the packages and thus anyone who wants
+to edit any of them, anyone that we want to have edit any of them, has
+got to have access to the whole thing for one thing. Some packages
+will make an arrangement with the developers, and they'll assure us
+that they will do things as things should be done, and then we'll have
+their repo copied automatically or in other cases, say, copied
+manually with a little checking every so often. In other cases we'll
+need to have our own repo for a particular package. But we shouldn't
+have a single repo for all the packages. We should have a repo for
+each package, so that the people working on that can get access to
+modify it. This has to be finished setting up, and we're still working
+out the procedures. For instance, for making the arrangements with the
+developers of a package so that we can, we hope, entrust its
+development to them and rely on them directly. And there may be more
+that needs to be worked on. Oh! There's so many questions.
+
+(06:36) Well, I hope you… The third question is, what are the
+benefits? I hope that people now see the benefits. I've described
+them.
+
+(06:46) Next question, "Is it possible to work with the MELPA team to
+integrate that into Emacs?" No, because the goal doesn't make sense.
+MELPA the way it's done, does not belong inside Emacs in any
+sense. Well, first of all, it can't literally be inside Emacs. We
+don't have copyright assignments for that code and to get it would be
+unfeasible, but we're not asking for copyright assignments for NonGNU
+ELPA so that's you might wonder could MELPA be merged with NonGNU
+ELPA? The problem is, MELPA doesn't modify the packages. It's just a
+place to find releases of packages wherever they happen to be, and
+they put packages in with only a little bit of checking. So, no. There
+are a lot of packages that are in MELPA that we'd like to get into
+NonGNU ELPA. I don't know the names of most of them, but I expect most
+of them would be fine to have. But they've got to be looked at one by
+one. There are some rules for NonGNU ELPA, and the only way to check
+them is to check them on one package at a time, and that's going to
+take effort. Now, with the people who work on MELPA want to get
+involved of this, that would be great. I haven't tried asking
+them. First we've got to get this thing set up. I doubt they would
+want to, but if they said yes, that would be wonderful.
+
+(08:44) "Any thoughts of packages being added…" I'm afraid. Any
+thoughts of packages being added as some URL I don't know anything
+about, but it talks about open source, which means I'm very unlikely
+to have much in common with whatever they say about either licensing
+or what's right and wrong. But this seems to be something about
+disregarding licenses altogether. Well, that is basically asking to
+lose. There are reasons why we developed GNU licenses to release
+software, why we have criteria for which licenses make a program free
+software. If the program doesn't carry a license or if it carries a
+non-free license, that program is not free software. Now, you can
+maybe get away with disregarding that fact unless somebody, an author
+or publisher stops you. But we're not going to take… we're not
+basically going to disregard the question of whether the software we
+recommend to people, really is free software or not. That's basically
+blindfolding yourself to the legal situation of the software you're
+distributing, it's a terrible idea. If they disregard our licenses
+they will hear from us about it. And if you want to contribute to the
+free world put free licenses on your code and choose good ones. To get
+this information, look at gnu.org/licenses, and one page that's
+important is license-recommendations.html, that's where we advise you
+on what license we would recommend you use depending on the
+circumstances. There's also license-list.html which describes a lot of
+licenses and says which ones are free, which ones are compatible with
+the GNU GPL. It's really important to use only GPL compatible licenses
+so that the various programs can be combined together or linked. You
+can also get other information about GNU licenses and the reasons why
+they are written the way they are. Oh sorry, I don't see the next
+question.
+
+(12:03) "Why do I insist on using per and pers?" I'm not happy with
+using they, which is a plural pronoun with a singular antecedent.
+It's bad because it causes confusion that is completely gratuitous.
+Many sentences become a lot of work to parse and understand if you add
+that ambiguity, that source of regular ambiguity. Now, I do not accept
+the demands of other people in regard to changing my grammar. You can
+try to convince me, but no one is entitled to give me orders about
+that or state their desires and expect obedience, not for me and not
+from you or anyone. We are all equally entitled to decide how we will
+speak and how we won't speak. I've spelled out all of these points in
+a file called stallman.org/articles/genderless-pronouns.html
+(corrected), of course, this is not a GNU project policy, it's my own
+personal ideas on the subject. If any of you feels offended by my
+referring to you with a singular gender-neutral pronoun, feel free to
+contact me privately and explain to me your reasons. I will pay
+attention to them, I'll think about them assuming that they're not
+something I've already considered and decided to dismiss before. But
+you must not speak to me as if I had no business not obeying you
+because that's rude, and it is not likely to convince me to change my
+mind. I believe it is not actually of stating offense to anyone, and
+the fact that somebody disagrees with me does not mean I'm wrong, but
+I always can be wrong.
+
+(15:00) "When you wrote that you could add a package to NonGNU ELPA,
+are you implying that you would add packages with or without package
+maintainer's knowledge?" Of course, the packages we would distribute
+in this way are free software. Everyone is entitled to redistribute
+them and everyone is also entitled to modify them and redistribute
+them, that's part of the meaning of free software. I have been unable
+to understand how there came to be an idea that those who redistribute
+packages have some obligation to be mere mirrors and not modify things
+themselves. Well, if a package is being maintained by developers who
+are cooperating with us, we'll normally just leave it to them. After
+all, we have lots of other work to do. They are clearly experts on the
+packages they've developed, let's leave it to them if they make that
+sort of arrangement with us. But that's up to them, we can't insist
+that anyone make an arrangement with us, but since those programs are
+free software, anyone is free to redistribute them, and we will do
+that.
+
+(16:41) "Have you ever used vi or vim or evil mode?" No.
+
+(16:52) "Are there any plans to implement security considerations in
+NonGNU ELPA?" We probably should, and this will have to be
+implemented, but at the moment developer Emacs maintainers will copy
+packages into it, and so as long as they are verifying the packages
+and getting the packages from the right place that will take care of
+the security. Once there is… When with automatic copying in, will have
+to do something to make sure that we're fetching the packages
+securely. Some of you might be interested in helping to design and
+implement this system. "What distro do I use?"
+
+(17:52) Well, which distro of GNU/Linux do I use? I use Trisquel, I
+haven't tried most of the free distros and the reason is, it's not
+crucial that I do so, we don't need me to rate the various free
+distros on practical questions because anyone can do that as well as I
+can. And so you can tell people what you think of using them. For me,
+what's important to me is to inform people of the difference between
+the free distros and the non-free distros, making sure people are
+aware that if you install a non-free GNU/Linux distro, you'll get a
+free operating system with non-free stuff in various quantities added,
+thus you will not reach freedom, although you'll make a lot of
+progress compared with using for instance, Windows or macOS or
+whatever vicious thing it might be. I'd like people to be aware of
+this next step towards getting freedom for yourself and your own
+computing, so that you can do that if you want to.
+
+(19:29) "Who gets to make the final decision regarding NonGNU ELPA?"
+The Emacs maintainers are going to be in charge of this, because it's
+not just a technical decision it has with only technical consequences
+but in general unless there's some severe problem with the package we
+will want to put it in, and I expect most packages won't have a
+problem, and we can just put them in when we get to them.
+
+(20:11) "Won't the ELPA link to non-free sites like GitHub?" It's a
+mistake to talk about a non-free site, because a site is not a
+program. A program is either free or non-free, and we have clearly
+stated criteria for that in gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html we have
+the free software definition, but a site, well, there're programs on
+it, but it doesn't make sense to ask whether the site is free or not,
+it's too simplistic a question to have a meaningful answer. Now, one
+thing you can ask about is, does the site send JavaScript to the
+user's machine, to the user's browser and if so, is that JavaScript
+non-free. Well, GitHub does send non-free JavaScript for some
+operations, so we consider it unsatisfactory as a repository, but that
+doesn't mean linking to it is a bad thing to do regardless of what the
+purpose is. For instance, if the purpose is to refer to some things
+that you can access without running the non-free JavaScript, then it's
+okay for that purpose. So, if now that you understand the details of
+this issue, you think that there is a problem with the link to caml…,
+there's, sorry, a link in caml.html, well, report it to bug-gnu-emacs,
+report it as an Emacs bug, but do think about the criteria I've just
+said because maybe it's not a problem.
+
+(22:18) "Is it okay to use the GNU Affero GPL for Emacs packages?"
+Yes it is.
+
+(22:28) "Which is your favorite programming language? If Lisp, which
+variant?" Well, I don't exactly have a favorite variant, but when I
+designed Emacs Lisp, I did the best thing I could think of at the
+time, subject to the need to keep it small. For the first few years it
+was important for GNU Emacs to run in a machine which could only give
+it half a meg of user space. So, there are a lot of constructs that
+clearly were desirable to include that I left out because we could
+make it work without them and then a lot of those have been added
+since because it's been a long time since we needed to keep Emacs so
+rigorously small.
+
+(23:40) Someone is asking about the FSF's repository project. Well, we
+agreed that there would be another virtual machine running one of
+those for the GNU project, but that's as far as the discussion went.
+
+(24:15) Question 17 is extremely insulting! I have not engaged in
+sexual harassment, don't expect me to plead guilty to such a nasty
+claim. People have been accusing me of many things, some of which are
+basically mole hills and some of which are false. So, I'm not going to
+give them anything, I have been bullied in a horrible way, that was
+wrong. I would like the bullies to apologize to me, and when I see
+that they're not bullying, I will forgive them. I would like to have
+conversations with them if any of the mole hills annoyed someone, I'm
+happy to talk with per and thus help resolve things with peace. And my
+opinion on "diversity" within Emacs. Well, Emacs is never going to be
+diverse, it is extended in one language, Emacs Lisp. Well, I don't
+know, we did have an idea of implementing extensibility using Scheme
+and the hope was that Guile could be integrated with Emacs, that
+turned out to be difficult, it may be impossible but in principle it
+might be a good thing, that would be a small amount of diversity, but
+it's not that important. What I think is really important for
+developing Emacs is to make it do word processing. I sometimes use
+LibreOffice, and yeah I can make it do things. It has features for
+WYSIWYG which are very nice, but it's in other regards, it's not
+Emacs, and it doesn't have the abilities of Emacs, and it should. So,
+I urge people to work on extending Emacs in that direction adding the
+features that a word processor has to have.
+
+(27:13) The last question I can answer is 18. Yes, it's a very sad
+thing how many companies insist on using non-free software. Well, I
+would get a different kind of job, that's a decision I made many years
+ago early in the GNU project, I decided, I would not… first I would
+not get a job developing non-free software. And later on I decided,
+once I could stop using non-free software, that is once we had a
+GNU/Linux system that we could switch over to and… Oh, wait. I thought
+magic wand time meant it was time to stop, but now I rather ask the
+question. So, what do you do, well, if I were you, I'd probably not
+work for any of those companies. If I needed to make money, I'd get a
+job, but I get some other kind of job that didn't involve using
+software or that let me choose the software I would use. But I would
+live cheaply, you know, the less you spend, the less you need to make
+and the more time you can take away from your paid work and the more
+flexibility you have in which paid work you can do. Being in a
+position to say no to avoid being desperate to say yes strengthens
+your position, and you need that. One way you can help do that is by
+not having children. Now, that is a tangent, but it can't be denied
+that raising children is very expensive, I have heard many people say
+that they are uncomfortable with their jobs, but they have to do those
+jobs to make enough money to support their children. Well, think
+about that, be aware that's likely to happen to you, before you make
+that decision.
+
+(30:06) "What would I change about free software?" Well, since this is
+magic, I would magically find a way of showing everyone why most free
+software needs to be copy lefted, so that our community would not
+basically submit to abuse by proprietary software developers. Of
+course, I could go further if I could magically recruit a hundred
+thousand good programmers to do lots of work improving free software.
+We might… Well, if we could do this 20 years ago, we might have wiped
+out non-free systems, and then we wouldn't have had horrible things
+like World Wide Web DRM, that no one has the courage to resist if
+they're desperately trying to get money for anything, and if they need
+approval of companies, of the big companies that push for DRM, then
+they don't dare even resist as much as they can resist. And look what
+happened to the World Wide Web consortium, they surrendered blatantly
+and ignominiously by endorsing the DRM system. So what can you do? I
+don't have a magic wand, I'm a human being with the capabilities I
+have, but the advantage of great firmness in campaigning for free
+software, and this enables me to do things that no one else will do.
+
+(32:27) "What tools from pre-UNIX days do you miss?" Well, I don't. I
+don't think about them with missing them actually. It was sort of nice
+to have ddt as your login shell. So, in using modern terminology,
+because that meant at any time you could stop a program, load its
+debugging symbols, and start examining the data in the
+instructions. You could debug it that way, and then you could even
+patch in instructions to continue running that job with the bug fixed,
+in fact, you could even do this with the system kernel, so that your
+jobs wouldn't get lost. I did that quite a few times, of course,
+sometimes I saw what was wrong, and I just had to fix a piece of data,
+but sometimes it took me a long time to figure out how to get the
+system to keep on going. But with the work I had done, I didn't want
+to lose that work, and, so one of the first features I put into GNU
+Emacs was auto save.
+
+(33:47) I'm not going to try to figure out which packages I actually
+used.
+
+(33:54) "If I knew, I would get hit by a bus tomorrow, say because of
+a fortune-teller." No, a fortune-teller doesn't give you any
+knowledge, it's just superstitious hand waving. So, assuming that I
+talked… that I got a reading from a fortune-teller, which is
+implausible enough to begin with, that wouldn't give me any knowledge
+about what was going to happen to me. Oh, by the way fortune-tellers
+generally play back to you facts that they've discovered about you
+together with cold reading, which means, they say things calculated to
+make it appear that they know more than they do or things that sound
+wise to anyone, so you can say the same thing to, say, 100 people and
+80 or 90 of them will say, "boy that was really accurate". But what if
+for some reason… "What advice would I give for stewardship of Emacs?"
+Well, basically focus on keeping the community strong in defending
+freedom, if you have a choice between keeping the community strong in
+defending freedom and getting more people to participate in the
+development, you've got to choose the freedom. It is very easy for
+free software projects to subordinate freedom to other criteria, and
+once that happens, it's easy for those who don't care much about
+freedom, such as, sometimes companies that might offer you some money
+to purchase your soul, not that there are really things that exist
+called souls, it's a metaphor, but it's an important metaphor for
+something important. People in the community have to be thinking about
+freedom when they make decisions about what is wise to do. The
+decision to set up NonGNU ELPA has a drawback, it was a compromise.
+Now, a lot of people will tell you that I am uncompromising and say
+that, that's a flaw. Well, they're wrong. I make little compromises
+very often, and occasionally I make a medium-sized compromise. The
+compromise is, in the past we wanted to get copyright assignments for
+the packages in GNU ELPA, so that we could move them into core Emacs,
+and of course, sometimes we move packages in the other direction, that
+way where we distribute a given package, is something we can decide
+purely technically. And however make insisting on getting copyright
+assignments for all the packages in GNU ELPA meant that we had to say
+"sorry, no, we will not install that package in GNU ELPA, unless the
+authors sign copyright assignments". And sometimes that's a lot of
+trouble. Well, NonGNU ELPA won't require copyright assignments. If
+there's a free package, we can make whatever changes, presumably
+small, otherwise, we would probably say we don't have time, and then
+put it in. But it does have the drawback that, in general we won't be
+able to move those packages into core Emacs without getting the legal
+papers then that we didn't get before.
+
+(38:20) "How do you see the future of GNU Emacs?" I don't see the
+future. I used to say that my crystal ball is cloudy today,
+unfortunately, that has another meaning which is quite ironic. We
+certainly don't want our lives to be somewhere in a cloud, because
+that clouds remind, and then people start cheating you and taking
+advantage of you, and it's horrible. But I don't see the future, I
+just can be sure from the past that there will be challenges where
+some of the people involved want to make a big compromise that isn't
+worth it, and they may even get the impression that it's up to
+them. Well, actually Emacs has appointed maintainers just as every GNU
+package does, and they are the ones in charge of developing that
+package, and this is for a good reason because the appointed
+maintainers take responsibility to carry out the GNU project policies,
+and most important of all are the ones that make the whole system work
+together, and the ethical standards to respect freedom and defend
+freedom.
+
+(39:59) "Is there any plan to move more packages from core Emacs into
+ELPA?" I don't know whether there is a plan, I suppose if there's a
+plan, we probably would have done it. If there had been a plan, some
+have been moved. I don't see this as a fundamentally important issue,
+it's a matter of what's convenient for the users, and their advantages
+and disadvantages to each choice.
+
+(40:29) "What is your opinion on higher education requiring non-free
+software, for instance…" Well, I wouldn't matriculate in a school
+which did that, unless I saw a way I could refuse. Now, of course, I
+do this because I can get away with it, and therefore my doing it is
+extremely important to show somebody does resist. I don't expect most
+people who support free school, who advocate free software to go that
+far. I published an article in the spring entitled saying no even once
+is helping, saying no to non-free software even once, because the more
+you do it, the more you help, but even doing it a little in a way that
+other people notice, is starting to help. So, please don't think that
+your choices are either be as firm and stubborn as I am or just give
+up and let yourself drift helplessly as if you had no volition. There
+are a lot of points in between there, and you can surely manage to say
+no some of the time and show people an example of saying no some of
+the time, for instance, you could say to people, "You know I hate the
+fact that my school makes me use Zoom, so whenever I'm not being
+forced, I'm not going to use it". Or "I hate the fact that the only
+way I can talk to that group of people is with Zoom, but for anything
+else I will feel better about myself if I don't". See, lots of ways to
+say no some of the time, and yield some of the time, and when you try
+saying no occasionally, you may just develop the ability to say no
+more often. Now, whether you would ever get to be as stubborn as I am?
+I don't know, but what I find is that I like the fact that I've never
+made this kind of compromise. I feel I have a reputation to maintain,
+nobody's forcing me, but I get satisfaction out of maintaining…, out
+of being able to continue to say I will not. And that also can happen
+at various different levels, so, you can get that satisfaction of
+fully maintaining a refusal that applies only to certain areas. (Amin:
+since it's noon already, let's maybe take one or two more questions
+and then break for the lunch break) Okay. (Amin: Thank you).
+
+(44:03) "How often do you personally use Emacs?" is the lowest
+question now. Well, I use it most of the day. I occasionally do use
+other things, in fact, I occasionally edit with LibreOffice, I
+occasionally use media players, I occasionally ssh to a machine and
+type some commands on it, which occasionally includes running Emacs on
+it. I read PDF files a lot, would be nice if you could get those into
+Emacs, so that I could read them with Emacs commands, and I maybe even
+edit them with the Emacs commands when they can be edited. I use
+Xournal sometimes to write on a PDF file. "Are there any more
+interesting projects you have in mind over and above NonGNU ELPA?" I
+can't think of one right now, well, there are things that the GNU
+project needs doing, there are packages that don't have maintainers or
+could use more maintainers. Talk with maintainers@gnu.org, and the
+assistant GNUisances will help you find a package where you can do
+good. Not for beginners though, you got to learn a substantive
+substantial level of capacity to develop and debug programs before you
+can be a maintainer.
+
+(46:00) "Have I ever looked at Magit?" No, I haven't, but I believe
+work is being done to get it put into Emacs, and at that point I'll
+give it a try. I do not want to share my configuration files they're
+personal. How about if we end this now? (Amin: sounds good to me,
+thank you very much Richard for joining in for live questions.) Okay.
+
+<!-- /transcript -->