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.
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.