Emacs being such an important part of the FSF it makes a lot of sense that its maintainer should be conscious of this fact and prioritize it accordingly, even if sometimes that means not making Emacs as good as it could be (see the clang/gcc discussion in the linked thread).

   The GNU Emacs maintainer's responsibility is to take charge of Emacs
   on behalf of the GNU Project, and produce the best possible GNU Emacs
   -- which means, the one that advances our aim the most.
   [...]
   It includes making sure dynamic loading resists GPL violation. [1]

Note that I'm not sharing my opinion of whether this is good or bad; I just dislike bs.

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-10/msg00...

edit: I take it back; you're talking about the message to the NSA? I skipped over everything in brackets while reading...

I have seen many demos and such where Steve Jobs and the like talk about how they want to make the best product possible for users and so forth. According to you, they all have saying "the task of our company is to build the best product possible, subject to the overriding concern - profits for the billionaires who own a majority of our stock".

I have never seen this. They don't say this. That's the real bullshit doublespeak. Stallman is honest and straightforward about his goals, and you use that honesty to not only attack him, which is fair enough, but to use his honesty to say he is being dishonest. It is you who is being dishonest. Why aren't you attacking companies who don't say "Our #1 priority is making profits for the billionaires who own a majority of our stock, the quality of our products reflects this concern". That's the truth, that's the agenda, but you say nothing about this. Stallman is honest about his agenda, and you use his honesty not to attack him because you disagree, which is fair enough, but use it to call him dishonest, which is ridiculous.

Kind of funny to then sign off with

> I'm not sharing my opinion of whether this is good or bad; I just dislike bs

   we want to create the best X (*)
   [...]
   * NB: not the best

   we want the best X (redefinition of best)

Finding mangling language to deceive dumb is orthogonal to my opinion of the political goals of the gnu foundation.

Stallman is, quite properly, clearly addressing the relevant utility function. This may differ from your preferred utility function, but that doesn't make RMS's definition a "redefinition of best".

(And this also how I read his message the first time, before I read your post)

The thread makes hilarious reading for those who don't care so much about the FSF's ideals. E.g.

> The liberation effort of the soviets died from these kind of treatment.

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-10/msg00...

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-10/msg00...

  It would be wrong and harmful to give MacOS an "equal footing". 
  Our goal is to replace nonfree systems (and nonfree software in
  general), not to enhance them.

I wonder what would be the problem with someone using libclang to generate the same AST information in a much more convenient fashion. Will it break the GPL in some way?

Looks like after some hearty back and forth it settled down: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-10/msg00...

Although it seems they ended up on an "agree to disagree" finale: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-10/msg00...

That's pretty much the history of the FSF and the GNU projects considering they were created for political/ideological reasons (the Unix in "GNU's Not Unix" is nonfree/encumbered AT&T UNIX, and the ideological underpinnings are what allowed Linux to overtake BSD during "the troubles" of the early 90s). The pulls ideological and technical pulls have oft conflicted.

As I understood it, also to a degree witnessing it as it happened, this lawsuit spiked BSD at the critical period: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc.....

It certainly took Linux a long time to get in the ballpark of quality that BSD started out with at the gate, including the standard TCP/IP stack most everyone used, including Microsoft (initially, at least).

This is, sadly, self-defeating. If Emacs were widely recognized as the best editor (or whatever of its myriad functions you use it for), "works best on GNU/Linux" could advance the cause of free software. As it stands, though, "only works well on GNU/Linux" instead just means that fewer people will be using it.