cmplres@ucbvax.ARPA (Andrew Purshottam) (03/25/85)
[This is the file "DISTRIB", which comes with GNU Emacs and is the output of the help message describing how to obtain GNU Emacs from Richard.] GNU Emacs availability information, March 13 1985 Copyright (C) 1984 Richard M. Stallman Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim copies of this document provided that the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved. GNU Emacs is legally owned by me, Richard Stallman, its author, but I regard myself actually as its custodian on behalf of the public, since all software ought to be the common property of mankind. I permit everyone to have and run copies of GNU Emacs, at no charge, and to redistribute copies under certain conditions which are designed to make sure that that all modified versions of GNU Emacs remain as free as the versions I distribute. These conditions are stated in the document "GNU Emacs copying permission notice", a copy of which is required to be distributed with every copy of GNU Emacs. It is usually in a file named COPYING in the same directory as this file. I also ship copies of GNU Emacs, and provide some services, to people who pay for this. I will send you a tape of the latest version of GNU Emacs, including full sources, if you send $150 to Richard M. Stallman c/o Lisp Machine Incorporated 1000 Mass Ave Cambridge, MA 02139. (This price is subject to change without notice.) If you are on the Internet, you can at present copy the latest distribution version from the file /u2/emacs/edist.tar on host MIT-PREP. After you unpack it, be sure to look at the files README and INSTALL. Currently GNU Emacs has only been tested on a Vax running Berkeley 4.2 Unix. Efforts are being made to port it to other Unix versions, and to VMS. It is far too large ever to run on a PDP-11. There is no manual for GNU Emacs now, but it is mostly compatible with ITS/Twenex Emacs, and the file DIFF in this directory describes most of the differences. You can get a manual for Twenex Emacs for $3.75 per copy from Publications Artificial Intelligence Lab 545 Tech Square Cambridge, MA 02139. I will probably write a manual for GNU Emacs by the middle of May 1985. Tapes sent before then will come with a copy of the Twenex manual immediately, and a copy of the real manual will be sent when it is done. GNU Emacs is distributed on an as-is basis; no guarantee is made that it will not break down or that it is suitable for any particular purpose. I do not promise any users that I will make any particular change. However, I plan to continue to improve GNU Emacs and keep it reliable, so please send me any complaints and suggestions you have. I will probably fix anything that is clearly (to me) a malfunction, and install any easily made improvement if I agree it is desirable. More difficult improvements I may or may not make, depending on my evaluation of their importance and difficulty; also I may be willing to accept a contract to make a specific improvement. Other people may also be willing to do this for you. If you have paid for a tape, I will also notify you by mail when a new version is available and give you a reasonable amount of assistance in getting GNU Emacs to work for the first time, as long as you use it on a system it is supposed to work on. Note that there is significant variation between Unix systems supposedly running the same version of Unix; it is possible that what works in GNU Emacs for me does not work on your system due to such an incompatibility. Since I must avoid reading Unix source code, I cannot even guess what such problems may exist. If you are a computer manufacturer, I encourage you to ship a copy of GNU Emacs with every computer you deliver. The same copying permission terms apply to computer manufacturers as to everyone else. If you like GNU Emacs, please express your satisfaction with a donation: send me what you feel would be a fair price for GNU Emacs, if you were buying it. If you are glad that I developed GNU Emacs and distribute it as freeware, rather than following the obstructive and antisocial practices typical of software developers, reward me for doing so! Your donations will help to support a career dedicated to developing useful software such as GNU Emacs, and distributing it all on the same free basis. In particular, I am working on a complete imitation of the Unix operating system, called GNU (Gnu's Not Unix), which will run Unix user programs. For more information on GNU, see the file GNU in this directory. Richard M Stallman Chief GNUisance, inventor of the first (PDP-10) Emacs.