OStatic

This month marks the 25th anniversary of the founding of the GNU Project by Richard M. Stallman. GNU is one of the oldest and best-known organizations in the free and open-source world, providing not only high-quality software, but also a well-known license (the GNU General Public License), and a philosophy that continues to influence many activists and programmers. The exact anniversary of Stallman's announcement is September 27th, 1983, when he called upon programmers to join him in creating free Unix.

Emacs is one of the oldest and best-known text editors, beloved by programmers not only for its amazing functionality, but also for the fact that it can be customized and extended in almost every way. Emacs might seem like a dinosaur, and there are many people who have abandoned it in favor of IDEs such as Eclipse. However, Emacs continues to undergo development, and there are two excellent implementations for OS X. If you are a Macintosh user, and have thought about trying Emacs at some time, read on: You'll not only learn something about Emacs history, but also about the two GUI versions that are available (free of charge, of course) for the Mac.

I've been using open-source software for 20 years. Why do I use it? And why should everyone consider it when they're comparing software options?