Re: Starting all over from 16.1 ?

[Ted Lemon <mellon at vix dot com>]

> As far as I know, the real reason for starting GNU was the copyrighting
> by MIT of emacs which opened the possibility for MIT to deny others
> access to the emacs sources.

The real reason for starting GNU was that Lisp Machines Incorporated
(LMI) used to make Lisp Machines which ran the MIT lisp system.   Then
Symbolics came along (no, I don't remember the names of the
principals), hired away any MIT AI Lab hackers who would come, got MIT
to assign them the copyright for MACSYMA, and started doing serious
development on the MIT lisp system under a Symbolics copyright.

Stallman wasn't willing to work for Symbolics because he didn't like
the idea of the free MACSYMA and MIT lisp system work being made
proprietary by Symbolics - since Symbolics had most of the AI Lab
hackers, no future MACSYMA or lisp system work would be free - so he
spent a year or so trying to keep the MIT lisp system
feature-for-feature compatible with the improvements Symbolics was
putting into its lisp system.

Eventually he gave up on this - it's impossible for even the mobiest
hacker to keep up a large design team made up of similarly moby
hackers.   So Stallman came up with the GNU Manifesto, and started the
Free Software Foundation.

Needless to say, Stallman tells a different story than the Symbolics
or even LMI people.   I wasn't there, so I don't know what really
happened.   Stallman probably still has his diatribes on this subject
lying around in his home directory if you want to see the original
source material.   I don't know any Symbolics people, so I can't tell
you who to ask there.

The Emacs conflict was that James Gosling wrote a version of Emacs for
Unix and VMS, which was originally under a copyright that encouraged
people to contribute changes and features.  The FSF based versions of
GNU Emacs prior to 17 on this ``free'' version of Gosmacs, and made
their own distribution, which was a lot closer to the old emacs from
ITS Teco and Lisp Machine days.  Gosling later sold the copyright for
his emacs to Unipress, who contacted the FSF and told them to cease
and desist in using Gosmacs-based code.  So the FSF rewrote their
emacs from scratch, with a real lisp interpreter instead of the crappy
Gosmacs MockLisp interpreter.  That was GNU Emacs version 17.

I think that this conflict may have been what caused the FSF to come
up with the GPL, but it wasn't the root conflict in the creation of
the FSF.

Anyway, this is all, of course, way the heck off topic.   But since
people keep posting off-topic flames (sorry, Jim, I mean intellectual
disagreements) about the GPL on this mailing list, I thought I'd
contribute a little historical note to add interest...

			       _MelloN_
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