Why Haven XEmacs and GNU Emacs Merged?
There are currently irreconcilable differences in the views about technical, programming, design, organizational and legal matters between Richard Stallman (RMS), the author and leader of the GNU Emacs project, and the XEmacs development team which provide little hope for a merge to take place in the short-term future. There have been repeated attempts at merging by all of the major XEmacs developers, starting from the early days of Lucid Emacs (in 1991), but they have all failed. RMS has very strong views about how GNU Emacs should be structured and how his project should be run, and during the repeated merge efforts has never demonstrated any realistic interest in sufficiently compromising or ceding control to allow a middle ground to be found. The basic problem seems to be the very different goals of RMS and the XEmacs project. The primary goals of the XEmacs project are technical and organizational — we want to create the best editor possible, and to make it as easy as possible fo
