
Emacs & the birth of the GPL - fogus
http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Emacs-the-birth-of-the-GPL-969471.html
======
lispm
What's new? This is just a rewritten version of one side of the Emacs history.
Some parts of that are remembered 'slightly' different by other involved
persons.

Example: 'He took his revenge by going on a two year coding binge to reproduce
every advance that was made by the team of hackers at Symbolics, and match it
feature for feature on behalf of Greenblatt and LMI.'

That's a myth.

[http://danweinreb.org/blog/rebuttal-to-stallmans-story-
about...](http://danweinreb.org/blog/rebuttal-to-stallmans-story-about-the-
formation-of-symbolics-and-lmi)

Weinreb::

'Next, he says: “After a while, I came to the conclusion that it would be best
if I didn’t even look at their code. When they made a beta announcement that
gave the release notes, I would see what the features were and then implement
them. By the time they had a real release, I did too.” First of all, he really
was looking at the Symbolics code; we caught him doing it several times. But
secondly, even if he hadn’t, it’s a whole lot easier to copy what someone else
has already designed than to design it yourself. What he copied were
incremental improvements: a new editor command here, a new Lisp utility there.
This was a very small fraction of the software development being done at
Symbolics.'

But worse, again Weinreb:

'And while I’m setting the record straight, the original (TECO-based) Emacs
was created and designed by Guy L. Steele Jr. and David Moon. After they had
it working, and it had become established as the standard text editor at the
AI lab, Stallman took over its maintenance.'

~~~
bitdiddle
By any chance were you there? I'm kind of curious as to why you would consider
Dan Weinreb's account more creditable than Stallman's.

I will say I used a Symbolics machine for a few years and boy they were sweet.
Both Weinreb and Stallman wrote some pretty awesome code

~~~
lispm
The people I talked to, from Symbolics, did not tell me the Stallman version.
So at least I have a lot of doubt about the story that the article linked
tells.

Especially since Stallman and the FSF surrounds a lot of propaganda.
Essentially Stallman was working for a government lab paid for mostly by the
military (DARPA). DARPA wanted to see their investments applied to military
software and created the commercial structure to do that. Stallman was living
in his dream world thinking that all that money was coming for free and for
the best of mankind and he could play there forever, working on editors and
other stuff - when in fact the military wanted all kinds of advanced software
for their projects, which then lead to 'Strategic Computing Project (SCP)' and
'SDI'. DARPA paid the whole show and had the goals - intelligent software for
weapons, battle management, pilot training, logistics, etc.

~~~
hga
The above is interesting, but I never felt it was a driver of any significance
for RMS, especially since the AI Lab was so very far removed from the sharp
end of the spear.

A much better explanation someone told me was that one day RMS realized he no
longer had anyone who'd go out to lunch or dinner with him (since they'd
almost all gone to work at Symbolics and [you can fill in the rest]).

Now, there were people working on that sort of thing, e.g. I did some customer
support for an LMI CADR that was sold to MITRE in Virginia (as I recall) where
they were trying to do what you might call "battlespace SIGINT with memory",
i.e. help get around the switching your transmitter on and off and hopping
frequencies fun. Very interesting problem, but it was _very_ early level
research, I think more a proof of concept than anything else. I.e.
unclassified research, at least at the level I've described it (I certainly
didn't have a clearance).

And then there was the company that had Lispm's driving bulldozers (for
maximum efficiency), but I was only told that 2nd or 3rd hand.

~~~
lispm
I don't know if Stallman was aware that he was working as a programmer in an
early stage (basic research, tool building, ...) of a multi-year military
project.

All the stuff was basically paid for by DARPA (and related). Symbolics sold
much of their initial production to SDI projects. It was thought that the SDI
systems were extremely complex and that many Expert Systems were needed to
design, deploy and maintain the space-based weapons and their infrastructure.
The SCP projects were more down to earth: battle management, logistics, pilot
training, etc. SCP was spending one billion dollar in ten years on AI - add to
that the money that was spend on the AI-related parts of SDI.

The background of SCP is told here:

<http://books.google.com/books?id=eD4taFgeTUYC>

'Strategic computing: DARPA and the quest for machine intelligence, 1983-1993'

~~~
hga
Please ... we _all_ knew the money came from DARPA and that they weren't
interested in improving the state of the art in plush toy design.

SDI officially started in March 1983 (although BMD had been a hot topic for
decades) ... and that was about the time RMS started transitioning out of
Lispm work. We were roommates in September 1983 when he officially started the
GNU Project.

We certainly had debated BMD/SDI (before I started working for LMI I was the
editor of the ARM-D mailing list), and I can't remember him ever saying GNU
had anything to do with that sort of thing. It had to do with end user
freedom, as he has explained at length, with a singular purpose of mind and
consistency.

If this was a major motivator, shouldn't he have put in a "you can't use this
software for evil" clauase in the GPL? His GNU EMACS and GCC work has
certainly enabled _much_ more development in weapons and the like than
anything he did at the lab, and I assure you he's intelligent enough to have
realized that, and at least in the '80s he had enough intellectual honesty to
realize that ... we all had to ask ourselves that question (and I wouldn't let
anyone weasel out of it if they tried :-).

Hmmm ... maybe he claimed this to others, but he knew it wouldn't fly with me.
But surely only as a minor aspect of why he was going from proprietary Lispm
work to free software.

------
hga
See also my comments in an earlier submission of this item:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1242192>

