@atoponce Ah yes, another case of false accusations.

Making a copy of source code will never be theft, as once you make the copy, there's 2 copies of source code.

Just prior to that time period, copyright law didn't even restrict source code and so it was shared freely, but around that time suddenly it was restricted by copyright.


Members of the MIT lab, rms and many others wrote the original versions of Emacs first - Gosling's implementation came much later, although it was the first version that used C and ran on Unix.

Gosling initially respected the spirit of community and shared his version with the community and in kind, members of the community assisted him in developing it, but he soon decided to attack the community by selling it to a company (Unipress) and forbidding previously welcomed sharing.

Although, Gosling at least allowed people who assisted with development to share their own version - one of those was a friend of rms who shared his version to rms as authorized.

rms on receiving a copy of the software, realized that Gosling Emacs lacked a real lisp implementation, so he started hacking on it, adding a real one, rewriting much of it on the way, making a much improved version that became GNU Emacs.

During the development process, pretty much all of it was rewritten in a very much improved fashion, making GNU Emacs far superior to Gosling Emacs.

Unipress eventually caught wind of the competitor and rather than improving their version, decided to attack GNU Emacs by complaining that it was infringing their copyrights (as Gosling had surrendered them) - in reality it didn't, but rms couldn't prove it, as his friend wasn't able to find the backup tape with the relevant email on it years later, so rms just removed the few remaining original sections (it took him a day).

There was no legal basis to sue him in the first place and no case remained once the code restricted with the alleged copyrights was removed.

People and businesses have maliciously tried to make rms homeless many times, but he isn't, although in the past he didn't waste money on "standard" housing, as it was far more efficient to sleep in his office, as he could just wake up, take a freedom-respecting shower, walk to the lab and resume hacking in short order.

https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html