James.Gosling@CMU-CS-VLSI.ARPA (04/09/83)
The version of Emacs that I wrote is now available commercially through a company called Unipress who can be reached at (201) 985-8000. They will be doing development, maintenance and will be producing a real manual. Emacs will be available on many machines (it already runs on VAXen under Unix and VMS, SUNs, codatas, and Microsoft Xenix). Along with this, I regret to say that I will no longer be distributing it. This is a hard step to take, but I feel that it is necessary. I can no longer look after it properly, there are too many demands on my time. Emacs has grown to be completely unmanagable. Its popularity has made it impossible to distribute free: just the task of writing tapes and stuffing them into envelopes is more than I can handle. The alternative of abandoning it to the public domain is unacceptable. Too many other programs have been destroyed that way. Please support these folks. The effort that they can afford to put into looking after Emacs is directly related to the support they get. Their prices are reasonable. James.
furuta (04/12/83)
I, for one, am sorry to see Emacs go commercial although I sympathize with the reasons for doing so. For the benefit of the list, could someone please summarize what Unipress' terms are? What's "reasonable"?