[Jtsummers]

It's OSS, people can and have forked it before, if the present (primary) maintainers aren't doing what people want then they can do it themselves. In the meantime, quite a few people are using emacs as it is and it is getting updates that people seem to care about (like native compilation of elisp).

[jimmyvalmer]

Okay, you obviously missed my point about owning the distribution channel.

[Jtsummers]

They don't own it in any meaningful sense. They do not prevent others from distributing variations and forks via those same channels. It's not like Apple or MS who would sue someone for releasing "Xcode-but-not" or "Visual Studio but not". That's the beauty of OSS. Until you pay them or your desires otherwise align with theirs they don't have to do anything for you, but you aren't prevented from doing it yourself.

[jimmyvalmer]

Okay, I'll make sure Ubuntu's next release puts my fork of emacs in /usr/bin instead of Gnu's. If you're still not understanding this, you might read Nudge by Thaler and Sunstein.

[Jtsummers]

You used the term "monopoly", which is absurd. It's FOSS for crying out loud. Literally fork it, that's what XEmacs did (which has fallen by the wayside). Sure, you can't get Ubuntu to publish your emacs alternative as if it were GNU Emacs. Boo fucking hoo. The Ubuntu maintainers have too much sense to be talked into doing stupid things by you. But if you build it and develop a community, you can get it published through their package systems just like all the other software out there. You have to do some work to get there, but so did everyone else who has a package in all the Linux distro package management systems.

If you believe that there is a fundamental flaw in the GNU Emacs maintainership and you cannot join them to influence it yourself and you care enough, fork it. Build your own community. Give it its own name (Valmer Emacs, vemacs for short) and get on with it.