"In the summer of that year, about two years ago now, a friend of mine told me that because of his work in early development of Gosling Emacs, he had permission from Gosling in a message he had been sent to distribute his version of that. Gosling originally had set up his Emacs and distributed it free and gotten many people to help develop it, under the expectation based on Gosling's own words in his own manual that he was going to follow the same spirit that I started with the original Emacs. Then he stabbed everyone in the back by putting copyrights on it, making people promise not to redistribute it and then selling it
to a software-house. My later dealings with him personally showed that he was every bit as cowardly and despicable as you would expect from that history. "
From Richard M. Stallman's lecture at
Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan (Royal Institute of Technology) in
Stocholm,
Sweden. October 30,
1986
Copyright (C) 1987
Richard M. Stallman and
Bjørn Remseth.