Re: Some general usage questions)
Rob Austein (sra@epilogue.com)
Wed, 9 Nov 94 12:02:50 -0500
Date: Wed, 9 Nov 1994 10:35:10 -0500
From: Stainless Steel Rat <ratinox@ccs.neu.edu>
>>>>> "Jake" == Jake Colman <jcolman@shekel.lehman.com> writes:
Jake> Why did RMS hack up ange-ftp to remove some pretty useful
Jake> functionality?
Simple: he didn't understand what the code did, so he disabled it.
Now, now, be fair. He probably understood it. He just didn't agree
with it. RMS just does this kind of thing sometimes.
There's a story (which may have grown in the telling) about RMS and
the old AI lab Lisp Machine system: apparently one night RMS decided
that either the presence or absence (forget which, doesn't matter) of
"*" characters in about half of the symbol names in the core code was
an offense before God and Man. So he fixed it. Next morning,
everybody shows up and none of their programs work. So a bunch of
people sat on RMS while another bunch of people restored the previous
day's sources from backup tapes.
The GNU Project and the FSF are, on the whole, wonderful, as was
PDP-10 Emacs. I don't want to think about how much worse my work
environment would have been over the last decade without RMS as the
visionary getting people to work on all this free software.
But there still ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
--Rob Austein <sra@epilogue.com>