From: mellon AT vix DOT com (Ted Lemon) Subject: Re: Starting all over from 16.1 ? 17 Feb 1997 18:37:42 -0800 Approved: cygnus DOT gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com Distribution: cygnus Message-ID: <199702171929.LAA00222.cygnus.gnu-win32@andare.fugue.com> Original-To: hans AT brandinnovators DOT com (Hans Zuidam) Original-cc: james_osburn AT e-stamp DOT com (James Osburn), gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com In-reply-to: Your message of "Mon, 17 Feb 1997 09:40:32 +0100." <199702170840 DOT JAA06708 AT truk DOT brandinnovators DOT com> Original-Sender: owner-gnu-win32 AT cygnus 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_ - For help on using this list, send a message to "gnu-win32-request AT cygnus DOT com" with one line of text: "help".