Why you might ask? Well I initially moved from the standard GNU Emacs editor to XEmacs for one feature: tabs displaying open buffers (similar to tabs in Firefox). Then out of curiosity I began do delve further into the rift that was the Richard Stallman / Jamie Zawinski split of Emacs & XEmacs. I won't get into it here, but I suggest to anyone that's having a hard time sleeping, read JWZ's recount of how everything unfolded (cliff's notes here).
So I saw Richard Stallman a.k.a. RMS speak last night. He's still as smelly of a geek as anyone's ever described him. I'm pretty sure he picked his nose several times during his talk. But I think he is fighting for a good cause, and he's one of the few people that are willing to go the required distance to see the vision incarnate. Some may still argue (myself included) that while he speaks about community, his actions do not always foster it -- this is one of the things I believe caused the XEmacs rift. I dared not to ask about this subject as it might have bored everyone into a coma. But here you can choose to leave this page before comatose is induced.
To me an open source community becomes truly "open" when developers can submit patches in a civilized fashion. BTW "Open Source" is another term RMS doesn't like. I understand that these projects have maintainers that choose the direction (i.e. Torvalds with the Linux kernel), and there are often egos involved (see also: CK's resignation from kernel development). Egos are always going to be a factor because people take pride in ownership of something they feel they either started or make major contributions to. However sometimes we need to put egos aside to take in a broader 'world-view' so that every voice is heard. If you're unwilling to do that, you might as well just keep the source-code to yourself IMO.
To open it's doors to the world XEmacs began accepting developer patches from the community via their mailing list as of version 20 (Feb. 1997). They are using a modern bug tracking system as of 2008. Not a stellar performance, but on the other hand GNU Emacs' developer list was opened up for version 21 (released Oct. 2001), and are not yet using any bug tracking software.
More important than these dates is the fact that GNU Emacs now has a GUI interface and a multilingual environment... all features implemented in XEmacs and submitted as patches to GNU Emacs but were disregarded due to the maintainer's (Richard Stallman's) lack of interest for whatever reason. But I suppose RMS would argue that this is how Free Software works: If you don't like it, change it; and if the original author doesn't like what you changed, fork it!
Now back to that tabs issue. It seems someone wrote a (albeit uglier) version in lisp that works in GNU Emacs. So for today I'm going to be a visitor in the Church of GNU Emacs. If I find the pews comfortable enough, I may stay.
