chuckw@babel.UUCP (Chuck Wegrzyn) (07/19/85)
Now come on, Unipress sue because Stallman had looked at the Gosling Emacs code. Give me a break would you. The copyright law is in force for the Gosling code not a trade secret agree- ment. Have any of you looked at the Gosling-free Emacs yet? If you have it is like night and day - Stallman's version of Emacs is built on top of a Lisp-like environment, while Goslings has lisp attached to it. The only questionable code in the old GNU emacs was the Gosling display code and it has been removed and replaced with something entirely different. I would suggest that before 'jumping the gun and panicking' that some of you read the copyright law. All (and I repeat all) things that are copyrighted are placed in the public trust with the Library of Congress and open for inspection. This means that you can go there are read of the stuff. A copyright is not meant to protect the contents of an algorithm : that has been the place of trade secret agreements. You will, by the way, find a copy of GNU emacs there! Generally speaking something is not a copy if the algorithm is the same, no more than two books on functional analysis are the same (unless one is a copy of another). Laws regarding copyright infringement, especially of sources centers around whether something is a direct copy of another within certain bounds. You will find that the new Emacs from Stallman is not at all like Gosling's Emacs, and that can be determined by a court of law. You see, the court will bring in experts that will review the source code of both and try and determine if they are the same. I think you will find out that they are not the same. Stallman has taken the Gosling code out and replaced it with something that doesn't even look like Gosling's code. Perhaps someone at uniPress would like to see the code that replaced the Gosling stuff. I would like to emphasize that this deals only with version 16.56 and later. I would recommend that people not distribute earlier versions of Stallman's Emacs for the reason that there is some disagreement about the Gosling code.