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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • Bram obviously gave so much to the global community, and directly to Uganda through his persistent charity efforts, and no more need be said about what a devoted and generous person he was. We’d all truly be worse off without his contributions and I say that as a devout Emacs user.

    Still, it always rubbed me wrong that his stated plan for the project was immortality.

    How can the community ensure that the Vim project succeeds for the foreseeable future?

    Keep me alive.


  • Bram was notoriously possessive of the Vim project and consistently avoided bringing in other lead maintainers or adding widely demanded features (like async processing). Maybe that changed while I wasn’t paying attention, but it had a lot to do with the very successful neovim fork. Bram eventually added an async feature but not before neovim exploded in popularity.

    It’s tragic to hear of Bram’s passing, and at such a young age. I will be interested to see what happens to the Vim project now, in his absence.








  • Nobody has mentioned one of the top purely technical reasons companies are reluctant to open source things: support.

    I worked for a company that opened a UI design framework and people loved it, but the moment you have an outside audience, you can’t just make breaking changes or pivot the direction. You have to be sure your thing is completely stable before you open it up.

    They felt they couldn’t move fast enough while supporting the open one, so they forked it and just maintained the public one so the private one could change faster.

    There are costs to support. I’m not saying companies shouldn’t do it (Google does, all the time), bit smaller companies may not be able to afford it.