> I found these two guys who ran this little company called Unipress, it was literally two guys in a garage, and I said, "Look, this needs to be free for universities and not ridiculous for everybody else." Gosling sold them Gosling emacs. Before that he apparently "distributed it freely with no copyright notice." Although Gosling wrote Gosling Emacs, it was based on the plans he and Richard Stallman had developed fo…
If there's no license attached, or no agreement somewhere, then you do not have legal right to redistribute someone else's work, even if they gave it to you freely.
Gosling was perfectly within his rights to sell gosemacs to Unipress (though note that Gosling never explicitly says in the interview that he sold it to them; he may have given it to them for free). RMS was not within his rights to grab Gosling's sources and change the copyright notices to suit his fancy.
You are quoting Gosling in a selective manner in order to paint him in a bad light. Please don't do that. The bit about a bed to sleep in was a direct response to the conversation veering into how RMS at the time didn't have his own residence, and slept in his office, so there was little legal recourse against RMS since RMS had nothing to lose in a suit.
Nor is your comment even relevant: Gosling had not yet made millions at Sun back in the 80s. He was a grad student, and, presumably, like most grad students I know, was not exactly flush with cash.
I really don't get how you're coming at Gosling so hard; after listening to the interview, he's clearly uncomfortable talking about the topic, tries to avoid pointing the finger at anyone unless appropriate, and it was the interviewer who makes a quip about RMS's hygiene, not Gosling.