bob@MorningStar.Com (Bob Sutterfield) (10/17/89)
In article <2616@cs.yale.edu> spolsky-joel@CS.YALE.EDU (Joel Spolsky) writes:
why... do Gosling & Unipress Et al. sell emacs for money?
Because they are capitalists, and people will pay them for it.
Did they reverse engineer it or steal it?
For something to be called "Emacs" (not a restricted name, as far as I
know) it simply has to feel close enough to the other things that
people know as "Emacs" that they don't flame you for applying the name
to something completely different. There are lots of things calling
themselves "Emacs", all presumably of legitimate parentage.
Because he wanted to use the same editor commands on UNIX as on the
-20s around campus, Gosling wrote an Emacs that would run on UNIX,
then sold his implementation to Unipress when he wanted to move on to
other things. There is at least one other commercial Emacs for UNIX
(CCA) that you don't hear much about any more.
and who is stupid enough to pay for it?
(a) Those who want to be able to hold someone fiscally responsible for
the problems they cause, and (b) those who value the features found
only in a particular implementation. Each has several fine
capabilities not found in the others.
Why is this in info-gnu-emacs/gnu.emacs? I'll try, likely in vain, to
move it over to unix-emacs/comp.emacs.