I'm wondering, how can this not be plagued by GPL-hell. Anyway, the fact that a project like this will not be possible to use in non-GPL software is somewhat of a dealbreaker to me. A perfect example of how Stallman is stifling innovation.
Emacsy is LGPL.
On the other hand, you could embed vim legally in anything. That, and it's a much better editor. (Just kidding, I'm not trying to start a flame war. To each his own; I personally cannot live without vim.)
Actually, it was not clear to me from reading the description whether the code is supposed to be based on the GNU Emacs source ("Extracts the kernel of Emacs" may imply that it is). If it is, I wonder how relicensing the GPL Emacs code under LGPL is supposed to work.
You should really clear that up, because I had the same reaction to the kickstarter as other people have. In the write-up it sounds like you're going to use emacs itself as the starting point to build on (but of course emacs is GPL which means if you did use any code from it, that would infect Emacsy and anything built on it and leave you no choice but to use GPL as well).
Either way you're kind of damned if you do, damned if you don't here, IMO. It won't get much use if it is GPLed and it won't get much use if it isn't actually emacs, because if the core isn't actually emacs it is bound to have lots of small incompatibilities which will break compatibility with the large body of existing emacs scripts that are most of the reasons emacs is nice to use in the first place.
I hear you. Yeah, the problem with changing or updating Emacs is it's been too successful. No one can change its constitution without breaking everything that makes it great.
The leg that I'm trying to stand on is, Emacsy isn't a text editor. It does not use elisp. No Emacs code will ever run on it. It provides a set of Emacs-like facilities that do not currently exist in a lot of interactive applications. So the project has the opportunity to make a clean break with past and still provide something of value. We'll see if can obtain even a sliver of the success that Emacs has.
I updated the FAQs to hopefully be more clear on this issue.
