Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!samsung!uunet!epiwrl!epimass!jbuck
From: jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck)
Newsgroups: gnu.misc.discuss
Subject: Re: FSF featured in "The Guardian"
Message-ID: <3739@epimass.EPI.COM>
Date: 22 Nov 89 23:45:27 GMT
References: <8911201813.AA21712@nlp9>
Reply-To: jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck)
Distribution: gnu
Organization: Entropic Processing, Inc., Cupertino, CA
Lines: 37

In article <8911201813.AA21712@nlp9> gnu-misc-discuss@cis.ohio-state.edu writes:
>Did anyone see the story in the _New_York_Times_ a few months ago?
> The almighty infallible pinnacle of American newspaper journalism
>  reported that Gosmacs source was distributed only to a few
>   friends of James Gosling's.

Basically, the NYT fell for propaganda put out by Gosling and Unipress.
See, essentially everyone on the net had a copy of Gosling's Emacs (plus
a lot of enhancements added by Chris Torek, among others), but
Gosling wanted to sell his rights to Unipress, make lots of money, and
have everyone pay Unipress for Emacs, even though he'd done nothing to
safeguard his copyright up to that point.  So the story came out that
Gosling's Emacs was never publically distributed, which was of course
not true.  Just the same, this line was sold to a lot of people.

A much better argument could be made that RMS was the main author of the
original Emacs, though there were other contributors.
















-- 
-- Joe Buck, just visiting/consulting at Entropic
-- write me at: jbuck@janus.berkeley.edu 
		...!{uunet,ucbvax}!janus.berkeley.edu!jbuck