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James Gosling on Richard Stallman [video]

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Re: James Gosling on Richard Stallman [video]

#41

Post by namirez »

TheNorthman wrote: post #35
namirez wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Is there anyway he can get the stolen items back though? He should either go to the police and request them to help him get the stolen items back. Or maybe talk to his insurance company, they might help to compensate him for the loss. But a helpful idea; if they've stolen something and then put copies of that on a website that is freely accessible, I would suggest just copying it, so that both him and they have the s…

"Stealing" in the context of intangible entities is equivalent to appropriation without permission. It has nothing to do with conservation of the total number of intangible entities. If you don't like the choice of word, use appropriation or plagiarism instead. The basic argument doesn't change though.

Re: James Gosling on Richard Stallman [video]

#42

Post by lliamander »

saagarjha wrote: post #36
lliamander wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't learn emacs because it's GPL, or because of who wrote it. Learn emacs because it's a great tool.

Learning great tools that aren’t under the GPL may leak to lock-in and pain in the future.

Oh, the GPL certainly provides value to me as a user. But that value would mean very little if Emacs were not a fantastic tool.

Re: James Gosling on Richard Stallman [video]

#43

Post by peterkelly »

TheNorthman wrote: post #35
namirez wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Is there anyway he can get the stolen items back though? He should either go to the police and request them to help him get the stolen items back. Or maybe talk to his insurance company, they might help to compensate him for the loss. But a helpful idea; if they've stolen something and then put copies of that on a website that is freely accessible, I would suggest just copying it, so that both him and they have the s…

It might surprise you to know that many people believe in, and is codified in law in most countries, the concept of intellectual property: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property

In fact it is this very idea, and the notion that an author of a work should be able to dictate the terms under which it may be distributed, that underlies the concept of copyleft on which the GNU General Public License is based. If no-one respected intellectual property, then any company could take GPL code and incorporate it into their own closed-source products without distributing the resulting source code (as the license requires) or even acknowledge the original author. All other FOSS licenses similarly rely on intellectual property as a legal concept.

I do agree that the words like "stolen" or "theft" do not really make sense in the context of intellectual property or digital artifacts, due to their differences from physical objects. I'm not sure what other terms to use, though I'd like to see a consensus reached. Nonetheless, the fact that data can be copied for effectively zero cost does not make it moral or legal to do so when the author has made it available under specific terms.

Re: James Gosling on Richard Stallman [video]

#44

Post by saagarjha »

lliamander wrote: post #42
saagarjha wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learning great tools that aren’t under the GPL may leak to lock-in and pain in the future.

Oh, the GPL certainly provides value to me as a user. But that value would mean very little if Emacs were not a fantastic tool.

Sure, a garbage tool licensed under the GPL isn’t all that useful.

Re: James Gosling on Richard Stallman [video]

#45

Post by lliamander »

klyrs wrote: post #40
saagarjha wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learning great tools that aren’t under the GPL may leak to lock-in and pain in the future.

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.

> 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 internally is a different matter and would be very strange.

Re: James Gosling on Richard Stallman [video]

#46

Post by lazyjones »

XEmacs docs sound a little bit different: http://xemacs.org/Documentation/21.5/html/internals_3.html#T...

> As described above, Emacs began life in the mid-1970’s as a series of editor macros for TECO, an early editor on the PDP-10. In the early 1980’s it was rewritten in C as a collaboration between Richard M. Stallman (RMS) and James Gosling (the creator of Java); its extension language was known as Mocklisp. This version of Emacs-in-C formed the basis for the early versions of GNU Emacs and also for Gosling’s Unipress Emacs, a commercial product. Because of bad blood between the two over the issue of commercialism, RMS pretty much disowned this collaboration, referring to it as “Gosling Emacs”.

My impression is that "Gosling Emacs" is misunderstood as "Gosling wrote all of it", even though it just meant "the dirty commercial version of Gosling and RMS Emacs".

Re: James Gosling on Richard Stallman [video]

#47

Post by segfaultbuserr »

wiz21c wrote: post #4

Ouch, that's no small claim. I was just learning emacs because it's GPL... But if it was stolen then, well, that's an entirely different story... What about the other tools Stallman wrote ?

> All Gosling Emacs code was removed from GNU Emacs by version 16.56 (July 1985). with the possible exception of a few particularly involved sections of the display code. The latest versions of GNU Emacs (since August 2004) do not feature the skull-and-crossbones warning.

Re: James Gosling on Richard Stallman [video]

#48

Post by floren »

craigsmansion wrote: post #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 fo…

Gosling.

Re: James Gosling on Richard Stallman [video]

#49

Post by NotCamelCase »

flowerlad wrote: post #38

It is a bit late to be arguing about the IP in Emacs. Only 4.5% of developers use Emacs today. More than 50% use VSCode. See https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology-_-...

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.

Re: James Gosling on Richard Stallman [video]

#50

Post by wiz21c »

lliamander wrote: post #19
wiz21c wrote: post #4

Ouch, that's no small claim. I was just learning emacs because it's GPL... But if it was stolen then, well, that's an entirely different story... What about the other tools Stallman wrote ?

Don't learn emacs because it's GPL, or because of who wrote it. Learn emacs because it's a great tool.

Came for the GPL, stayed for the editor :-)
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