[iLemming]

Please don't do this. "editors outlive their creators' reputations/departures" - is a reasonable point. But to make it land as a zinger, you decided to dig up some most inflammatory Stallman material possible, that does a lot of collateral damage to the framing.

Emacs the tool and Stallman the person are not nearly as coupled as your comment implies. Stallman created Emacs, yes, but the Emacs community drove him out of the FSF in 2019, pushed back hard when he tried to return in 2021, and has been actively distancing itself from him for years. The community's resilience despite Stallman is kind of the opposite of what you're trying to say - it's not like Emacs users were defending him in solidarity.

Tools transcend their creators - it is actually an interesting point and worth making. You just didn't have to push Stallman shit here.

[elif]

I am an emacs main. I boot straight into emacs fullscreen mode by default.

I'm literally describing the resilience of the emacs community exactly as you described.

[iLemming]

I don't disagree with the general notion of your sentiment. I just wish there was less dragging Stallman's dick behavior into the mix of Emacs-related discourse. Which doesn't happen a lot, still would be ideal if it didn't happen at all.

[elif]

Stallman deserves to be criticized for his own positions.

And the emacs community deserves the right to call him out to distance ourselves from them.

[cweagans]

Sure, but that doesn't address GP's argument, which I _think_ is "there's a time and a place for those criticisms, and _literally every time emacs is brought up in a public forum_ ain't it"

[elif]

look i just made a single point about VIM OVERCOMING THE LOSS OF ITS CREATOR by pointing to emacs as a WORSE CASE.

I didn't ask for these weirdos to come demanding to litigate every detail of every sick quote he's ever given.

but i will not stand down to karma bullying to cover up sex crimes of a person just because i like his software.

[iLemming]

I hope it's not my comment(s) that triggered your anger, still, please accept my apology.

> Stallman deserves to be criticized for his own positions.

I fully agree. I'm just asking to try to decouple that from Emacs.

> because i like his software

Can we agree that Emacs is no longer "his software" and it stopped being that long ago? Governance and ownership have separated from authorship, right? The point is - when the scandals got out, we didn't circle the wagons. If the tool and the person were tightly coupled, you'd expect the community to defend him. We didn't. The separation was/is real, not just rhetorical.

Sure, yes, GNU/Emacs is still officially an FSF project, and the FSF is still Stallman's institutional creation, even if he's been sidelined. His philosophical fingerprints - GPL, copyleft, free software ideology as distinct from open source - are baked into the project's DNA in ways that aren't cosmetic. So there's a version of "his software" that's genuinely hard to dislodge. I'm not trying to argue that or erase his authorship, no.

But can we still find a way to deal with it differently? Say:

- Wagner was viciously antisemitic; the music is still the music

- Caravaggio was violent, possibly a murderer, yet painted some of the most incredible art pieces

- Heidegger was a Nazi sympathizer yet produced genuinely influential philosophy

People are complex creatures, sometimes we need to decouple the evaluation of the contribution from the evaluation of the person. I just want to avoid circles like: "using/praising Emacs is bad because Stallman is bad, therefore his creations are tainted".

I'm not defending Stallman or any of his behavior (good or bad), I'm defending something the community itself largely built, maintained, and steered. When people outside of the loop hear these things together, it hurts me personally - the conflation feels like a category error aimed at something I personally have a long relationship with.

The annoying thing about these whole thing is that you threw the Stallman material probably without even thinking about any of that. It's rhetorical ammunition, not a serious argument. You're not really engaging with what Emacs is to its users - just reaching for the most socially radioactive association available to win a point. And I'm now having to "defend" against an argument that was never made in good faith to begin with. Which is exhausting in a particular way - not because the argument is hard, but because you have to take it seriously even when it wasn't offered seriously.