[net.micro.amiga] On the PublicDomain-ness of Gosling Emacs

gnu@l5.uucp (John Gilmore) (12/30/85)

> From: "Neville D. Newman" <NEVILLE%umass-cs.csnet@CSNET-RELAY.ARPA>
>       James Gosling's Emacs done at CMU...This is a horse of an entirely
> different flavor, and according to Gosling himself no part of it is really
> in the public domain.  That is to say that while he did give away and support
> early versions, he did not authorize random redistribution.

This is not *quite* true.  During the Salt Lake City Usenix I approached
James about putting the regular expression code from his Emacs into the
public domain.  (We wanted to use it in the uucp mail routing software.)
He wrote out a little statement that we could have the code and redistribute it
to anybody, and signed it.  Quote:

	"The Usenix/UUCP project has my permission to use the regular
	 expression pattern matcher from EMACS.  James Gosling, 6/14/84"

So the regular expression code from Gosling Emacs is in the public domain,
but the rest of it is not.  (I checked this today with James and he agrees.)

ron@brl-sem.ARPA (Ron Natalie <ron>) (12/30/85)

> 	"The Usenix/UUCP project has my permission to use the regular
> 	 expression pattern matcher from EMACS.  James Gosling, 6/14/84"
> 
> So the regular expression code from Gosling Emacs is in the public domain,
> but the rest of it is not.  (I checked this today with James and he agrees.)

Eh, I'd watch the derived statement here.  Gosling may have said that the
RE code is in the public domain, but you can't infer that from the indented
statement.  

BTW, JOVE, I believe, uses pieces of code borrowed from the UNIX editors,
which is why it is not freely distributed but only to UNIX source sites.

-Ron