NEVILLE%umass-cs.csnet@CSNET-RELAY.ARPA (12/23/85)
From: "Neville D. Newman" <NEVILLE%umass-cs.csnet@CSNET-RELAY.ARPA> >>From: intelca!cem@caip.rutgers.edu (Chuck McManis) >> >> At risk of sounding over-fastidious, do you have permission >> to port and distribute this? Is it public domain? >> >> -- >> scott preece >> gould/csd - urbana > >EMACS (the original) and also GnuEMACS are both public domain. > >Some peoples implementation of EMACS arent. (Unipress comes to mind) > >--Chuck McManis Chuck, i think you didn't answer the question completely. And your reply could be misleading to some people who don't know the facts. Presumably when you say "EMACS (the original)" you are referring to RMS's program done at the MIT AI lab. Many people, however, consider "original Emacs" to be 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. When support became too time-consuming and he *had* to finish his PhD, he sold Emacs to UniPress. So UniPress sells not their own implementation of Emacs, but their own modification of Gosling Emacs. He cleared all this up a few months ago in the ARPAnet Info-Vax notesfile. The discussion there was instigated by a question about the Public-Domain -ness of GNU Emacs. Which brings us back to RMS (Richard M. Stallman). His GNU Emacs (GNU is a public domain OS under development and stands for GNU's Not Unix, although it will run any Unix program) was very loosely based on a version of Gosling's and some Gosling code was in fact distribituted with GNU Emacs. It turned out that there had been a misunderstanding of terms somewhere between RMS and Gosling, and RMS removed all Gosling code from his Emacs to avoid further problems. You have said that your MicroEmacs was a ported and modified version of an IBM-PC MicroEmacs by another author. Of course this chaining could go on quite a ways, but the question that needs to be answered is: ******** IS THIS IMPLEMENTATION FREE OF PROPRIETARY CODE (INTACT OR MODIFIED) FROM GOSLING, UNIPRESS, CCA, OR ANYONE ELSE? ******** Don't take this as a rebuke, by any means. i am grateful for your work on this and would really like to have a copy of the program (i don't subscribe to net.sources or Unix-Sources and can't FTP to ARPA sites) if it is really in the public domain. Proprietary source is tempting to use (i know, i have access to 3 proprietary Emacs sources, and need Emacs on my micro) when it is available and i would hate (for anyone) to unwittingly get stuck with it. i posted this to info-amiga/net.amiga so that other interested users could watch for the final answer. Please post a reply here so we could all find out together! Looking forward to a "YES", Neville D. Newman neville.UMass-cs@CSnet-relay (ARPA) * at least three words in the above text are trademarks. Pick your favorites.
george@osu-eddie.UUCP (George Jones) (12/26/85)
> From: "Neville D. Newman" <NEVILLE%umass-cs.csnet@CSNET-RELAY.ARPA> > >******** >IS THIS IMPLEMENTATION FREE OF PROPRIETARY CODE (INTACT OR MODIFIED) >FROM GOSLING, UNIPRESS, CCA, OR ANYONE ELSE? >******** > > i posted this to info-amiga/net.amiga so that other interested users > could watch for the final answer. Please post a reply here so we > could all find out together! > > Looking forward to a "YES", > > Neville D. Newman > neville.UMass-cs@CSnet-relay (ARPA) > YES. As I stated before my criteria for obtaining the sources for MicroEMACS was that it be public domain. I wanted to port a version of Emacs to the Amiga for public consumption. The header says it is public domain and is lacking any sort of copyright notice. As to using any of Gosling's code or any other proprietary code I can't say one way or the other. I am not the author. So there it is. Go to it. Emacs away. One final thing...I think that the source should be genneraly available now that it has been posted to net.sources and is available for FTPing. I am hesitating to send out all 180K of sources again (via INFO-AMIGA). I would much prefer to mail copies to anyone that still has not been able to get a copy (I have posted the sources to CompuServe if you would prefer to get them there...look in the Amiga Forum). If you want a copy send a stamped self addressed mailer to me at 8080 Flint Rd. Worthington, Ohio, 43085. ----------- George M. Jones cbosgd!osu-eddie!george (uucp) (614) 885-5102 (home) george@ohio-state.csnet (csnet) (614) 457-8600 (work) 70003,2443 (CompusServe) -- ----------- George M. Jones cbosgd!osu-eddie!george (uucp) (614) 885-5102 (home) george@ohio-state.csnet (csnet) (614) 457-8600 (work) 70003,2443 (CompusServe)