jww@sdcsvax.UUCP (Joel West) (07/11/85)
The July 1985 Digital Review (an advertising throwaway mag aimed at the DEC-compatible market) contains an article about Emacs, "Have it Your Way" by Jane Penner Silks (p.93). Given the recent raging controversy of distribution rights, nonetheless I think it goes a bit far: ....[EMACS was] developed by Richard M. Stallman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the '70s as an extension to the more primitive TECO text editor, the fast, flexible EMACS soon became public-domain software and spawned dozens of look-alikes, subsets and commercial versions. Today, although it HAS BEEN REMOVED FROM THE PUBLIC DOMAIN, [emphasis mine], EMACS is as powerful and customizable as ever. There are currently two commercial versions of EMACS available to VAX users, one from CCA Uniworks, Inc. of Wellesley, Massachusetts, and one from Unipress Software, Inc., of Edison, New Jersey, which is based on the updated UNIX version of EMACS written in 1983 by James Gosling at Carnegie-Mellon University. The two programs offer the full range of EMACS features and now run on VAXes under VMS as well as UNIX. The remainder reviews the two commercial VMS versions, notes costs (Unipress: $2,500 VMS binary, $7,000 VMS source, $995 UNIX source + 25% annually for maintenance; CCA: $1,900 or $5,000 VMS, $850 or $950 UNIX + $800/year maintenance). It does recommend EMACS wholeheartedly, however. If you'd like to send any comments directly, the address is Reader Input, DR, 160 State Street, Sixth Floor, Boston, MA 02109.
dgary@ecsvax.UUCP (D Gary Grady) (07/12/85)
> The July 1985 Digital Review (an advertising throwaway mag aimed at the > DEC-compatible market) contains an article about Emacs, "Have it Your Way" > by Jane Penner Silks (p.93). Given the recent raging controversy of > distribution rights, nonetheless I think it goes a bit far: > . . . > Today, although it HAS BEEN REMOVED FROM THE PUBLIC > DOMAIN, [emphasis mine], EMACS is as powerful and > customizable as ever. Evidently Jane Penner Silks needs to read up on US copyright law; once something is in the public domain it is owned by the public (by definition, in fact), so it cannot be removed from the public domain except, perhaps, by a special act of Congress. -- D Gary Grady Duke U Comp Center, Durham, NC 27706 (919) 684-3695 USENET: {seismo,decvax,ihnp4,akgua,etc.}!mcnc!ecsvax!dgary
chuqui@nsc.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach) (07/14/85)
In article <1633@ecsvax.UUCP> dgary@ecsvax.UUCP (D Gary Grady) writes: > >Evidently Jane Penner Silks needs to read up on US copyright law; once >something is in the public domain it is owned by the public (by >definition, in fact), so it cannot be removed from the public domain >except, perhaps, by a special act of Congress. Oh, I DO so love beating dead horses.... True, something placed in the public domain cannot be removed from it (even by a special act of Congress) but that doesn't mean that enhancements to that public domain software are also placed in the public domain. If you want to use RMS's original PD emacs, great, but the stuff gosling did to it he did under copyright, and you can't use that part of Emacs without permission. chuq -- :From the misfiring synapses of: Chuq Von Rospach {cbosgd,fortune,hplabs,ihnp4,seismo}!nsc!chuqui nsc!chuqui@decwrl.ARPA Admirals, extoll'd for standing still, Or doing nothing with a deal of skill. -- William Cowper
barmar@mit-eddie.UUCP (Barry Margolin) (07/16/85)
In article <2980@nsc.UUCP> chuqui@nsc.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach) writes: ... >but that doesn't mean that enhancements to that public domain software are >also placed in the public domain. If you want to use RMS's original PD >emacs, great, but the stuff gosling did to it he did under copyright, and >you can't use that part of Emacs without permission. Please, if you are going to flame about this issue, get your facts straight. Gosling did not do anything to RMS's original Emacs. Gosling's Emacs contains no code from the original Emacs. The original Emacs is written in TECO for ITS, and later ported to TOPS-20. Gosling's Emacs is written in C for Unix, and later ported to other systems such as VMS (by Unipress?). And in the case of the redisplay, which is getting much of the discussion, RMS's is part of the TECO runtime, written in PDP-10 assembler, not part of EMACS itself. While I will agree that TECO and C are about equal in readability, and PDP-10 assembler and C are about equal levels, that doesn't mean that code can be copied from one language to the other. As far as I know, none of the Emacs clones took anything from RMS' implementation but the user interface paradigm, and often the idea of user extensibility. -- Barry Margolin ARPA: barmar@MIT-Multics UUCP: ..!genrad!mit-eddie!barmar