rms@prep.ai.mit.edu (12/13/85)
From: rms@prep.ai.mit.edu (Richard M. Stallman) I know that Montgomery for some time distributed free the Emacs that he wrote. I do not know for certain that the copies did not say Copyright AT&T, but I suspect they did not, because Zimmerman would probably not have modified it and redistributed it if it had had a copyright notice. If this is so, that version went irreversibly into the public domain and AT&T can no longer have the government's help in interfering with people who want to share it. Don't trust AT&T's statements on this, any more than you would listen to your landlord's advice about your rights as a tenant. Instead, look for someone with an old copy and find out whether the copy came with a copyright notice.
preece@ccvaxa.UUCP (12/15/85)
> From: rms@prep.ai.mit.edu (Richard M. Stallman) I know that Montgomery > for some time distributed free the Emacs that he wrote. I do not know > for certain that the copies did not say Copyright AT&T, but I suspect > they did not, because Zimmerman would probably not have modified it and > redistributed it if it had had a copyright notice. > If this is so, that version went irreversibly into the public> domain > and AT&T can no longer have the government's help in interfering with > people who want to share it. ---------- This would all depend on who was the holder of the copyright. The distribution by an unauthorized third party would not have any effect on the validity of the copyright. -- scott preece gould/csd - urbana uucp: ihnp4!uiucdcs!ccvaxa!preece arpa: preece@gswd-vms
warren@ihwpt.UUCP (warren montgomery) (12/17/85)
My emacs implementation was begun in 1979, after having left MIT. I made it freely available to people INSIDE of Bell Labs, and it was widely used. It was never officially "released" from Bell Labs. At the time, Bell Labs had a policy of not copyrighting software, but instead trying to protect it by keeping it secret within the company, thus no code was ever marked with copyright notices. Unfortunately, several copies did get out during that time, mainly due to people who left Bell Labs to return to school or gave copies to friends. When Zimmerman modified one of those copies as the original basis for CCA emacs, AT&T and CCA had a prolonged debate over it. Eventually the matter was resolved when Zimmerman replaced the last of my code, and AT&T has tried to be more careful with it ever since. To summarize, I don't think my employer considers any of the escaped copies of my emacs to be public domain, though there may be legal grounds to contest that. (I'm not a lawyer, so don't take my word for it). As for what's good or bad about my implementation, here is some information: Mine is probably the least extensive of the unix emacses, as it has never been even close to a full time job for me. I emulated the emacs that I had come to know and love at MIT, as of 1978, so it diverged a little earlier than the others. It is certainly the smallest in code and data of the various implementations, and runs quite well on split I&D pdp-11's, memory starved PC's, and other small machines (though I doubt it would run on an 11 with only 64K total I&D any more). The last time I saw any timing comparisons, it ran much faster than Gosling's, though that was years ago. The editor is written entirely in C, which is an advantage in speed and a disadvantage in flexibility. It is reasonably straight-forward code, which is an advantage to anyone who wants to hack it up, but as a result it doesn't optimize odd cases at all. It also depends relatively little on it's environment, relying only on the section II system calls, which has made it easy to port. It now comes with an extension language that is lisp-like, and is compiled to teco-like gobbledygook, and provides a good deal of flexibility. You are still limited in changing the behavior of the stuff hard coded in C. It has a solution to the flow control problem that in most cases allows it to work fine with networks or terminals that need ^S/^Q for flow control and still allow you to type ^S and ^Q as commands. As for the pricing, AT&T's pricing structure is different from industry norms. The single user price listed ($950, or something like that) is for a single purchaser to do anything they want with it internally. Thus if you have a hundred vaxen and want to run it on all, you pay just the one fee, making it a good deal for organizations that want a lot of copies. A major objective of the Toolchest is to make software available to people who will re-package and support it. For a one time fee of under $10K, you can buy the right to repackage and sell it however you want. -- Warren Montgomery, ihesa!warren