The shot at Stallman's hygiene was unnecessary. It was the interviewer, not Gosling, that brought it up...still.
James Gosling on Richard Stallman [video]
21–30 of 148 posts
Re: James Gosling on Richard Stallman [video]
#22What is it, a next generation of #metoo movement? Crowds of developers who were (allegedly) wronged 30+ years ago will come forth with their accusations?
> developers who were (allegedly) wronged 30+ years ago I listened to it and didn't hear the story of a developer whining about being wronged 30 years prior. The guy says clearly that he wanted to move on from Emacs. On the other hand, it's the story of an alleged source code theft and copyright violation. I hope the story is false but I don't think it's irrelevant because 30 something years have passed.
As far as I'm concerned source code cannot be stolen.
Re: James Gosling on Richard Stallman [video]
#23What 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
Re: James Gosling on Richard Stallman [video]
#24There's a transcript https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20... This part starts at the bottom of page 29. Edit: I suspect the professor mentioned there is Mike Shamos and the transcript misspelled his name. http://euro.ecom.cmu.edu/shamos.html
Thanks for posting that... Here's the core piece:
> And then Stallman freaks and he gets a copy of my source code, does a whole lot of editing. He doesn't actually-- You know, he edits, like, almost all of the copyright headers, but he doesn't edit all of them and he only kind of thinly edits it and then he re-releases it as GNU Emacs. And then IBM and Digital Equipment pick that up and start distributing it. So these, so the two guys in the garage who had been doing okay suddenly find that IBM and DEC are distributing their thing for free and they're dying. So they decided to sue DEC and IBM and they got a, you know, and that turned into a big, big court case. They won. It was kind of a pyrrhic victory. You know, so IBM and DEC paid them some damages, but that didn't stop GNU Emacs. .. ..he hadn't actually changed all of the copyright notices. So it was like, duh. But then it sort of took on its own life and it's become the GNU Emacs that everybody uses.
Re: James Gosling on Richard Stallman [video]
#25I found watching this at 1.5x speed was good as James ums a lot.
Re: James Gosling on Richard Stallman [video]
#26From a 2002 Stallman lecture: There was no free software Emacs editor that ran on Unix. I did, however, have a friend who had participated in developing Gosling's Emacs. Gosling had given him, by email, permission to distribute his own version. He proposed to me that I use that version. Then I discovered that Gosling's Emacs did not have a real Lisp. It had a programming language that was known as ‘mocklisp’, which l…
> Gosling had given him, by email, permission to distribute his own version. He proposed to me that I use that version.
It's important here to note that Stallman does not claim it was his own brainchild, and did give Gosling credit.
However, from I understand, the email that Stallman claims gave said permissions does not exist (or at least could not be found) and I'm not sure that Stallman's friend confirmed Stallman's claim.
Re: James Gosling on Richard Stallman [video]
#27> 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 for a new, widely portable Emacs.
> And, you know, I realize I'm a radical. I like to actually have a bed to sleep in and food and I will occasionally sleep in my office, but not as a regular thing.
Gosling made millions at Sun Microsystems. That's a little more than needing "food on the table" and "a roof over one's head". Stallman also could have made similar money, but didn't because he thought other things were more important. That's everyone's choice to make, but putting down others because they approached something differently is just bad form.
(edit: spelling name)
Re: James Gosling on Richard Stallman [video]
#28What is it, a next generation of #metoo movement? Crowds of developers who were (allegedly) wronged 30+ years ago will come forth with their accusations?
[deleted]
Re: James Gosling on Richard Stallman [video]
#29From a 2002 Stallman lecture: There was no free software Emacs editor that ran on Unix. I did, however, have a friend who had participated in developing Gosling's Emacs. Gosling had given him, by email, permission to distribute his own version. He proposed to me that I use that version. Then I discovered that Gosling's Emacs did not have a real Lisp. It had a programming language that was known as ‘mocklisp’, which l…
>I concluded I couldn't use it and had to replace it all
Which happened over time. He used it as a starting point, replaced some important parts first and gradually rewrote everything. This took some time. Meanwhile the partial rewrite was being distributed.
It's not a black-and-white story of theft versus clean rewrite. Also I don't recall Gosling Emacs having any license terms included with the code ... and I studied it at the time (before GNU Emacs.)
[edit] this emacs timeline is helpful: https://www.jwz.org/doc/emacs-timeline.html
Re: James Gosling on Richard Stallman [video]
#30What is it, a next generation of #metoo movement? Crowds of developers who were (allegedly) wronged 30+ years ago will come forth with their accusations?
There has been a lot on RMS recently with his various resignations, but this seems to be an older issue that's been known for a while. I am against call-out culture in general (people should be evaluated on their whole and not be told to resign over singular events) -- and there is stuff we can debate about RMS's behavior over time and everything -- but I have a feeling this issue is independent.
If we're talking about people taking things they weren't licensed for, it can get into the hairy mess of the old SCO/Linux/RHEL days. Just because certain companies might be defunct or other copyrights abandoned doesn't mean other issues could crop up later.