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From: barmar@mit-eddie.UUCP (Barry Margolin)
Newsgroups: net.emacs
Subject: Re: Commercial vs. Public Domain
Message-ID: <4700@mit-eddie.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 16-Jul-85 00:42:04 EDT
Article-I.D.: mit-eddi.4700
Posted: Tue Jul 16 00:42:04 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 17-Jul-85 08:10:26 EDT
References: <969@sdcsvax.UUCP> <1633@ecsvax.UUCP> <2980@nsc.UUCP>
Reply-To: barmar@mit-eddie.UUCP (Barry Margolin)
Organization: MIT, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 24

In article <2980@nsc.UUCP> chuqui@nsc.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach) writes:
...
>but that doesn't mean that enhancements to that public domain software are
>also placed in the public domain. If you want to use RMS's original PD
>emacs, great, but the stuff gosling did to it he did under copyright, and
>you can't use that part of Emacs without permission.

Please, if you are going to flame about this issue, get your facts
straight.  Gosling did not do anything to RMS's original Emacs.
Gosling's Emacs contains no code from the original Emacs.  The original
Emacs is written in TECO for ITS, and later ported to TOPS-20.
Gosling's Emacs is written in C for Unix, and later ported to other
systems such as VMS (by Unipress?).  And in the case of the redisplay,
which is getting much of the discussion, RMS's is part of the TECO
runtime, written in PDP-10 assembler, not part of EMACS itself.  While I
will agree that TECO and C are about equal in readability, and PDP-10
assembler and C are about equal levels, that doesn't mean that code can
be copied from one language to the other.  As far as I know, none of the
Emacs clones took anything from RMS' implementation but the user
interface paradigm, and often the idea of user extensibility.
-- 
    Barry Margolin
    ARPA: barmar@MIT-Multics
    UUCP: ..!genrad!mit-eddie!barmar