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From: wesommer@athena.mit.edu (William Sommerfeld)
Newsgroups: comp.emacs
Subject: Re: The Selling of GNU Emacs
Message-ID: <1808@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Date: Sun, 15-Nov-87 16:39:56 EST
Article-I.D.: bloom-be.1808
Posted: Sun Nov 15 16:39:56 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 16-Nov-87 06:17:55 EST
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Reply-To: wesommer@athena.mit.edu (William Sommerfeld)
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In article <2833@megaron.arizona.edu> gudeman@arizona.edu (David Gudeman) writes:
>Stallman has said many times
>that the "free" in his free software does _not_ refer to money, it
>refers to free distribution.  

I'm not sure what you're paraphrasing here.  Reread the copying
policies on GNU emacs more carefully.

>Good grief, Stallman and the FSF sell GNU software.

Wrong.  They sell _tapes_ which contain GNU software; they are
charging for the cost of the tape, plus the labor and wear&tear on the
hardware involved in copying.  They consider the bits themselves to be
free, and won't charge you for them if you can pick them up in a way
that won't cost them anything.  The basis of Stallman's argument
(which I don't happen to agree with) is that you can't charge money
for information, because you can give a copy of it to someone without
losing it yourself.

				- Bill Sommerfeld
				wesommer@athena.mit.edu

Disclaimer: I don't believe in the "GNU manifesto" and the software
socialism of his proposed "software tax", but I have yet to see
anything but good come out of the GNU project.