James.Gosling@CMU-CS-VLSI.ARPA (04/21/83)
The destruction is not so much from going into the public domain but from the loss of any central coordination. When a program evolves by having a lot of different people put in their own "favorite hacks" or "quick patches" it ceases being coherent and dissolves into a bag of used band-aids. For example, many people sent me mail saying that they'd like to see Twenex style filename completion implemented. It seemed to me like a good idea, but I didn't have the time to do it. Over several months I recieved at least half a dozen different implementations of filename completion. Their quality ranged from OK to wretched. These could have become half a dozen different variations of Emacs, none of them similar to any other. And they all suffered from misunderstandings of either the philosophy or structure of Emacs. Continued fragmentation of this sort causes programs to crumble. [The filename completion that was finally implemented was about 5 times faster than the best of the implementations sent in.] I can't continue to look after Emacs since I recently ceased to be a grad student and have to get on with the rest of my life. Getting volunteers from the community of university hackers wouldn't work either. A long term, full time commitment is needed to keep a system like Emacs alive, and I hope that Unipress will provide that. James.