91–100 of 148 posts
Gosling and Stallman have always been rivals. One of the reasons it took so long for Java to be open sourced was because Gosling was so adamantly against it - in part because of his hatred of Stallman.
Stallman started the whole open source movement in part because he thought it was wrong that Gosling could put restrictions on distribution of Emacs.
What is it, a next generation of #metoo movement? Crowds of developers who were (allegedly) wronged 30+ years ago will come forth with their accusations?
Hold up, is there something wrong with: 1. the #metoo movement 2. the idea that someone would want to tell their side of a famous story ? Even ignoring the above (though I hope you're not insinuating some issue with #1) this is a few minutes, roughly halfway through ~6 hours of video. It's not like Gosling has set out to make a hit-piece on RMS
metoo is fine until any name is called. Then it becomes witchhunt, where the hunted victims couldn't properly defend themselves, as they could in a proper judicial trial.
In many parts of Europe (Germany and France for example), you can't call names, you would be sued for that, even if the story is true.
> the idea that someone would want to tell their side of a famous story
Accusation of stealing is a pretty strong claim, if it's a lie, it's a bad thing of course.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I had to abandon some of my favorite tools when I left university. Tools, or libraries? The distinction I'm making here is between code that gets distributed with the final product, and code that only runs on your machine or just internally in the corporate network. I can understand a company not wanting to intermix GPL code with proprietary code that is shipped to customers, but not being able to use GPL software…
When I was at Amazon we were forbidden from using any GPLv3/AGPL software, including recent versions of GCC and Emacs (there was a special exception for Linux).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was at UCB from 1980-4 and this lines up with what I knew at the time. RMS was a frequent visitor to the group I was in, and I was a user of Gosling's Emacs and switched to the RMS version very early on.
(aside: I'm always curious to hear what was going on with UNIX at Berkeley at that time. I sat in Evans hall in the early 2000s and would randomly find hardware that was from CSRG in the drop ceilings).
> 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…
It has copyright notices everywhere (not that this matters). And following notice in Installation:
Please remember that Emacs is copyrighted. You are free to use Emacs
internally, but you are not free to redistribute it. If someone is
interested in obtaining a copy of Emacs, refer them to me:
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't really expect to find many Emacs users on a platform where 30% of developers uses Notepad++ though, do you? :) I personally wouldn't.
Sigh. Many years ago, I wrote tens of thousands of lines of code in Emacs, wasted many hours in elisp macros, etc. Nowadays Notepad++ is OK by me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As an OSS nerd working in today's corporate culture, I can assure you that GPL is its own form of lock-in. I had to abandon some of my favorite tools when I left university.
Well, I have as part of my job duties scanned dependencies of source code to make sure it didn’t inadvertently include any GPL-licensed libraries. The GPL does not control use, it controls distribution. So, using Emacs and GCC as one’s toolchain does not require a company’s code being made open source. However, using a GPL licensed library “taints” any and all code which touches it. With the complex mazes of dependen…
Many companies selling hardware that uses embedded software find it easier to simply comply with the GPL, thus protecting the users' rights to some extent. The cost of compliance is far smaller than the benefits available from drawing on the world of free software. If we can get more free-software developers to change the licenses of new versions of their software to the GPL, we can increase those benefits and influence more companies to choose GPL compliance instead of GPL avoidance. Even some companies that sell software choose GPL compliance.
Unfortunately, the GPLv2 is not strong enough to prevent "Tivoization", in which the users can obtain copies of the source code but cannot install modified versions on their own devices, even though theoretically they own those devices — in these cases the benefits of free software become impossible for the users to obtain in practice. This is a major reason why the GPLv3 was written.
I think Gosling is claiming that some of his own code was still in there, regardless of what RMS said he rewrote. Just from casually poking the source code I can scrounge up [1], it doesn't look like there's any Gosling code in GNU 16.56 or later versions. But there's a lot of code in there so who knows.
As a side note, as late as 1995 [2] Unipress was still trying to sell its Gosling derivative starting at $395 a seat. It had a nice list of features, including "Demonstrably better than vi", but I bet it didn't let you psychoanalyze Zippy.
[1]: https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/emacs-history [2]: http://web.archive.org/web/19961125071933/http://www.unipres...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google Cache, since jwz is re-directing that link, now. :-) https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:G9nZNd...
It's not him redirecting that link; he redirects all links from HN by checking the Referer. If you copy and paste the URL it works fine.