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11/29/2005: "more questionable history from esr about the origins of GNU"

Here's another ESR recollection that shows on trivial investigation to be questionable:

Richard drew much more from that culture than he seems to remember nowadays. I myself was the person who first suggested to him, at a Boskone in 1983, that Emacs ought to be the GNU project's first product. We'd been friends for nearly five years by that time. It is utterly characteristic of RMS that he says he doesn't remember that conversation, but believes my report that it happened.

As has been shown, the "GNU project" didn't exist until 1984, and wasn't announced until September 1983. Gosmacs went commercial (was sold to Unipress) in April of 1983.

RMS responds on April 19, 1983:

Each time the commercial marketing of Unix Emacs causes someone
to forego it due to price, or to be unable to use it as he would
have liked to due to license restrictions, society as a whole
has been sabotaged a certain amount.

Gosling does deserve a considerable reward for having written
a useful program, but sadly he deserves to lose a lot of that
as penalty for sabotaging its use now that it is written.

Don't let yourself be sabotaged!

Meanwhile, if you are thinking you may be stuck with paying these
prices, and you don't belive in doing something illegal even
if it is good for the world, you still have an alternative.
An editor is being written in NIL. It's at an early stage
but it's far enough along for its implementor to use it to
edit as he adds to it. A Unix that can support shared programs
is coming from Berkeley. NIL for Unix is being worked on
(and for VMS is already available, and public). Since this
will be a true Emacs rather than a semi-ersatz one, it will be
far better than Goslings.

This editor is supposed to be publicly available.
So just hold on a while -- help is on the way.
Sooner if you can help with the work.


Gosling responds to rms on April 25, 1983.

Satotage? I contend that there are more people who don't use Emacs
now because of it's present distribution mechanism than won't because
of it's price. The total lack of support and maintenance has turned
away many people. I get sent tapes and it takes literally months for
me to return them. That turns off far more people than price.
Universites are unusual cases.
Besides. Prices are made of rubber, they can easily change.

On April 28, 1983, Unipress raised the price of Emacs to $1000 for binaries, and $7000 for source code. Unipress eventually backed the price down to $1000 for source.

But back to esr.

Boskone happens in February, typically around the middle of the month, and did so in 1983 and 1984. Boskone #20 happened February 18-20, 1983. Boskone #21 happened February 17-19, 1984.

By March of 1985, we have the first release of GNU Emacs (the one with gosmacs code inside, the very incident which forced the GPL.)

Quoting http://advogato.org/article/512.html:

In 1982, James Gosling wrote the first C-based Emacs called Gosmacs. Initially, Gosmacs was Free Software, but Gosling later sold it to a company called UniPress. However, Fen Labalme, a contributor to Gosmacs, told RMS that Gosling had given him special permission to distribute a free version, so RMS incorporated some of that code into GNU Emacs. However, when UniPress heard about this, they told RMS to stop distributing GNU Emacs. They denied that Fen had been given permission, and even worse, Fen had lost the message from Gosling that could have proved otherwise. Thus, RMS had to comply, but he wasn't happy about it. You have to realize that RMS had been working on Emacs since 1975, and then here comes this company out of nowhere, telling him to stop.

(It strikes me that if Fen was a contributor to Gosmacs, then UniPress had an incomplete copyright to begin with.)

If esr's recollection is accurate, then we must believe that he told rms that Emacs should be the first GNU project while rms was still hacking on lisp machines at the AI lab, some seven months prior to rms annoucing "Project GNU" in September of 1983.

If instead ESR's recollection is off by a year, and the meeting happened in 1984, then we must believe that rms walked away from his newly-enabled life's work after only six weeks, (having quit his job at the AI lab on Jan 5, 1984), in order to attend a science fiction book convention. Even if the meeting did happen, no change in direction was forthcoming until the following September. O'Reilly's "Free as in Freedom" claims that work on GNU emacs didn't start until September of 1984:

In September of 1984, Stallman shelved compiler development for the near term and began searching for lower-lying fruit. He began development of a GNU version of Emacs, the program he himself had been supervising for a decade.

I find the possibility of the meeting and influence that esr claims in 1983 unlikely in the extreme, even in 1984, but of course only esr and rms can tell us if either happened. Eric claims 1983, and this requires that Eric understood "Project GNU" well before rms announced it.

According to Eric, rms says he has no recollection of the event.

Eric's claim is too convenient for me. My assumption, given the above, is that the events Eric claims never happened.