Z:gnu-www-ja-byte-interview--f1e8c0-=3Cstrong=3EStallman=3C/strong=3E: I s/en

Stallman : I suspect that those users are misled and are not thinking clearly. It is certainly useful to have support, but when they start thinking about how that has something to do with selling software or with the software being proprietary, at that point they are confusing themselves. There is no guarantee that proprietary software will receive good support. Simply because sellers say that they provide support, that doesn't mean it will be any good. And they may go out of business. In fact, people think that GNU EMACS has better support than commercial EMACSes. One of the reasons is that I'm probably a better hacker than the people who wrote the other EMACSes, but the other reason is that everyone has sources and there are so many people interested in figuring out how to do things with it that you don't have to get your support from me. Even just the free support that consists of my fixing bugs people report to me and incorporating that in the next release has given people a good level of support. You can always hire somebody to solve a problem for you, and when the software is free you have a competitive market for the support. You can hire anybody. I distribute a service list with EMACS, a list of people's names and phone numbers and what they charge to provide support.