Editing Gosling Emacs (section)

==Distribution==

Since Gosling had permitted its unrestricted redistribution, [[Richard Stallman]] used some Gosling Emacs code in the initial version of [[GNU Emacs]].<ref>{{cite book |title=Making and Unmaking Intellectual Property |author1=Christopher Kelty |author2=Mario Biagioli |author3=Peter Jaszi |author4=Martha Woodmansee |year=2015 |publisher=University of Chicago Press |isbn=9780226172491 |quote=...Stallman was using code from Gosling, based on permission that Gosling had given to Labalme, but Labalme had written code for Gosling that he had commercialized without telling Labalme.}}</ref><ref>{{Citation|title=Oral History of James Gosling, part 1 of 2|url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJ6XHroNewc |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/varchive/youtube/20211211/TJ6XHroNewc| archive-date=2021-12-11 |url-status=live|language=en|access-date=2019-10-14}}{{cbignore}}</ref> Among other things, he rewrote part of the Gosling code headed by the skull-and-crossbones comment and made it "...shorter, faster, clearer and more extensible."<ref name="rms-slashdot"/>

In 1983 UniPress began selling Gosling Emacs on [[Unix]] for $395 and on [[OpenVMS|VMS]] for $2,500, marketing it as "EMACS–multi-window text editor (Gosling version)".<ref name="byte198312">{{cite news | url=https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1983-12/1983_12_BYTE_08-12_Easy_Software#page/n335/mode/2up/search/unipress+emacs | title=Unix Spoken Here / and MS-DOS, and VMS too! | work=BYTE | date=Dec 1983 | access-date=8 March 2016 | pages=334 | type=advertisement}}</ref>

Controversially, Unipress asked Stallman to stop distributing his version of Emacs for Unix.<ref name=faif7>{{cite book|chapter=7. A Stark Moral Choice|chapter-url=https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch07.html|title=Free as in freedom|isbn=0-596-00287-4|author=Sam Williams|year=2002|publisher="O'Reilly Media, Inc." |quote=According to the developer, Gosling, while a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon, had assured early collaborators that their work would remain accessible. When UniPress caught wind of Stallman's project, however, the company threatened to enforce the copyright...In the course of reverse-engineering Gosling's interpreter, Stallman would create a fully functional Lisp interpreter, rendering the need for Gosling's original interpreter moot. |url-access=registration|url=https://archive.org/details/freeasinfreedomr00will}}</ref>
UniPress never took legal action against Stallman or his nascent [[Free Software Foundation]],{{Citation needed|date=May 2011}} believing "hobbyists and academics could never produce an Emacs that could compete" with their product.{{Citation needed|date=May 2011}} All Gosling Emacs code was removed from GNU Emacs by version 16.56 (July 1985),<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.jwz.org/doc/emacs-timeline.html|title=Emacs timeline|author=[[Jamie Zawinski]]|date=8 March 1999}}</ref> with the possible exception of a few particularly involved sections of the display code.{{Citation needed|date=May 2011}} The latest versions of GNU Emacs (since August 2004) do not feature the skull-and-crossbones warning.{{Citation needed|date=May 2011}}