The rest of the
Emacs effort would be devoted to retaining the
program's Tinker Toy-style extensibility.
Stallman now faced another conundrum: if users made
changes but didn't communicate those changes back to
the rest of the community, the Tower of Babel effect
would simply emerge in other places. Falling back on
the hacker doctrine of sharing innovation, Stallman
embedded a statement within the source code that set
the terms of use. Users were free to modify and
redistribute the code on the condition that they gave
back all the extensions they made. Stallman dubbed it
the " Emacs Commune." Just as TECO had become more than
a simple editor, Emacs had become more than a simple
software program. To Stallman, it was a social
contract. In an early memo documenting the project,
Stallman spelled out the contract terms. "EMACS," he
wrote, "was distributed on a basis of communal sharing,
which means that all improvements must be given back to
me to be incorporated and distributed."See Stallman (1979): #SEC34.
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