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Vim's Bram Moolenaar On Open Source And Vim 6.0
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An Ada exception is when a routine gets in trouble and says 'Beam me up, Scotty'.
Re:VIm is dog shit! (Score:2, Insightful)
Another point worth mentioning is that out of all four of the text editors (yes Emacs is just a text editor), only MS Notepad seems to follow the Unix philosophy. That's right, the Unix philosophy of having just the right tool for the job and keeping each tool small and simple is exactly how MS Notepad can be described. Somewhere along the line, the editors have gained bloat becoming more than they were ever supposed to and losing all simple-elegance that they might have ever had... except for notepad. Although new versions of Notepad have came and gone, none have increased bloat in any way.
I commend MS for taking this unix approach to text editors. They knew all along that people would use it to edit text and only to edit text. They left all the bloated features to programs such as Office where the features are neccessary and improve the product.
Re:ViM Author has seen the light (Score:5, Insightful)
But he doesn't seem to get the real idea behind Free Software and the GPL.
The GNU General Public Licence (GPL) is more restrictive. Although it claims to ascertain the freedom of software, it restricts the changes you can make. That is, you can make changes, but when you distribute the modified software, you must make the modified sources available as well. Thus people are not free to keep these changes to themselves. I would say this in fact restricts your freedom. On the other hand, allowing anybody to make changes and keep those changes a secret, even though they profit from the part of the program that wasn't changed, also doesn't sound fair. That's why I decided to add the condition that the changes must be made available to me. I can then decide that these changes are useful for most people, and include them in Vim. Or decide that these changes have only a very small audience, and allow a company to make a bit of money from their work. After all, if the source code of a program must be freely available, it is quite difficult to require users to pay money and make a living out of your work.
With the GPL everybody is equal. If you make a little modification to a GPLed program and distribute that to your friends your friends can ask you for the source of the program and your modifications. But that does not mean anybody else can come in and demand all your modifications to their program. But with his license he gets far more power then anybody else that works on VIM. That might seem fair now since he has done a lot (a very lot) of work on it. But this may come back and hunt you after 20 years when someone else is maintaining (a fork) of the program, since for example Bram doesn't like to maintain it anymore, and he suddenly demands that all changes are handed over to him again.
Although respecting peoples privacy is not a very strong requirement for free software it does seem strange that a license that gives the original author more rights then any other authors can be considered Free Software. I really like the fact that the GPL gives alll contributors equal powers and the fact that it only forces you to play nice with people you actually distribute copies to. Having some god like person that can always demand all source code that I changed doesn't sound very free.
I do appreciate his idea that it is unfair that someone can close down the source code and profit from the fact that most the code was free and not sharing improvements is unsocial. But appointing one person to make the "right" decissions what parts of "my" code should be handed over to him doesn't sound fair either. IMHO making everybody equal by using the GPL and giving everybody (including the original maintainer) the same rights or by using the simple MIT/Modern BSD license and risking that someone/everyone closes down the source seems more fair.
Re:ViM Author reperesents darkness (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:ViM Author has seen the light (Score:2, Insightful)
But, imho, he completely misunderstands the GPL, which applies *only* to distribution to external entities and requires *only* that you distribute source code with executables when you do that. His license is intended to give the original author (and only the original author) some few extra rights-- mostly the ability to harvest changes from forks out in the world. But I think his changes are unnecessary, vague, and the world doesn't need another open-source-ish license-- no matter how well intended.
fundamental.... (Score:2, Insightful)
i read the article fully and it seems an incredibly complex piece of work , one which seems to function perfectly too . imho, writing a full-fledged editor like that is one p.i.t.a almost comparable to maintaining kernel trees:)
also from the interview at least, what comes across is a serious, single-minded dedication to making _proper_ stable software.
great work bram. vim rulez
vv
Re:Not Irony (Score:4, Insightful)
That is indeed one of the definitions of dictionary.com, but it isn't a great one since it lacks a part about the incongruity containing a somewhat "humorous/sad" taste which is present in a real ironic case (pardon me for not being able to eloquently explain it, english isn't my native language). For example, if you tell a funny joke and in reaction I punch you in the face, that that is an incongruity between what might be expected and what actually happens but isn't irony.
Re:ViM Author has seen the light (Score:5, Insightful)
The GPL does not allow him to decide... if the program is GPLed and someone modifies it and releases binaries, they have to give out source as well.
He doesn't think that's always reasonable, so he came up with a license that allows him to decide on a case-by-case basis whether it's fair for someone to profit by keeping their changes to themselves or the changes should be made public.
Whether it's well-implemented or not is perhaps debatable, but don't go away with the impression that he doesn't understand the GPL. He clearly does.
Re:Interesting bits from the page (Score:1, Insightful)
One word: bloat.
If you are writing code , any editor that can handle megabyte sized files is more than enough.
If you want to load log files and such use tools that were designed for that.
All I want from my IDE editor is to help my write code, anything above that is pure bloat and should be left to editors covering other domains.
Re:Not Irony (Score:3, Insightful)
One case of a definition isn't great because it isn't the same as another case?
Since English isn't your native language, how about a university where it is:
The definition at Princeton's Wordnet page [princeton.edu].
Do a little searching for "dramatic irony" and "tragic irony". BTW, most places I've seen the "humor" definition, it relies on the other definitions. For example, Merriam-Webster Collegiate defines the usage you're championing as:
"2 a : the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning b : a usually humorous or sardonic literary style or form characterized by irony c : an ironic expression or utterance"
Note that in order for humor to be ironic in this sense, it must be ironic in one of the other senses.
In general, if a person for whom English isn't their native language says something about English, and dictionaries produced by a bunch of English-speaking scholars say something different and largely agree on it, I'm afraid I'm going to have to go with the scholars.
Re:noooooooo! vi has been overrun by newbies . . . (Score:2, Insightful)
Now, by the same token, an "i" entered in Emacs will do something slightly different depending on what kind of buffer you're viewing in the current window. So Emacs is not completely modeless either (very few programs are, if they have any significant user interactivity). However, in Emacs, it is always obvious what mode you're in, because the mode line shows you; and Emacs is less modal than vi, because basic editing activities like entering text, deleting text, and cursor navigation can all take place in the same mode, which is not true in vi.
The problem with the original vi, which has a lot to do with its awful reputation among UI designers, was that it gave no visual indication whatsoever what the current mode was. So if you stepped away from your terminal for a bit, and when you came back, you couldn't remember whether you'd left the program in command mode or insert mode, there was no way to know what would happen if you pressed a key! The safe thing to do, IIRC (I haven't used vi in over ten years), was to hit ESC, which in insert mode would switch to command mode, and in command mode would do nothing -- so you had a reliable way to get to a known state, regardless of the current state.
Newer vi clones, such as vim, use the bottom line of the window to display the current mode. This is a simple but very important improvement, and increases vi's usability markedly.
Re:ViM Author has seen the light (Score:2, Insightful)
Since the above-quoted is not, in fact, a personal attack, your observation, while true, is a non sequitur.
(shrug) Bram would need permission to redistribute third-party patches no matter what license he used. What's your point?