For immediate release: April 1, 1998
Contact:
Steve Baur: steve@calag.com
Martin Buchholz: martin@xemacs.org
Kyle Jones: kyle_jones@wonderworks.com
Hrvoje Niksic: hniksic@srce.hr
MAJOR CHANGES IN THE XEMACS PROJECT
SAN LUIS OBISPO, CA USA
In a press conference in the central coast town of San Luis Obispo,
California major XEmacs developers announced that they were stepping
down from the XEmacs project.
It all began seven years ago as a schism from the One True Editor and
a bunch of renegades who were impatient for a future that was not to
be. Under a variety of project leaders including Jamie Zawinski,
Chuck Thompson and Steve Baur the XEmacs project has finally reached a
dead end. Effective today, leadership of the project will be in new
hands.
The final project leader of "Traditional XEmacs", as it is now called,
Steve Baur said, "I've gone so crazy trying to manage a million line
SLOC program written in "C" and Lisp that I'm completely giving up
programming and am going to work for Microsoft as a systems consultant
for their NT operating system, which I now consider perhaps the finest
operating system ever written."
The now former rising superstar of the XEmacs project Hrvoje Niksic
stated today "XEmacs development is dead. I became seduced by the
dark side of Emacs Lisp. I never knew what kind of an obstacle it
would become as I started to get deeper and deeper into it. I deeply
regret the error of my ways and vow to do all future programming in
Cobol to help nations of the world avoid disaster at the millenium."
Kyle Jones stated, "I have finally realized the error of my ways, and
assigned copyright to Richard Stallman and the Free Software
Foundation for all the past and present work I've ever done on Emacs
or its cheap imitations like XEmacs, but it was too late."
XEmacs has been turned over to the leadership of Martin Buchholz and
developmental guidance from Eugene O'Neil, Jari Aalto, and David
Formosa who immediately announced that they would be redoing the
editor in a combination of Java and Perl.
The choice of Martin Buchholz as a new leader was an uncontested one
given his connections to Sun and to lead developers inside Sun on
Java. Martin stated, "Java and Perl are the only logical choices of
languages. Due to my campaign contributions to American political
parties, I'm having heretics like Michael Sperber sent to prison for
life even though I'm not a citizen and neither is Michael. God, I
love America!"
The new Java and Perl XEmacs which will be named XEmacs 21.0 for
legacy sake is expected to be released sometime in the 1st quarter of
1999.
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