refusing to send lab members the latest version of
Emacs until they rejected the security system on the
lab's computers. The move did little to improve
Stallman's growing reputation as an extremist, but it
got the point across: commune members were expected to
speak up for basic hacker values.
"A lot of people were angry with me, saying I was
trying to hold them hostage or blackmail them, which in
a sense I was," Stallman would later tell author Steven
Levy. "I was engaging in violence against them because
I thought they were engaging in violence to everyone at large."
Over time, Emacs became a sales tool for the hacker
ethic. The flexibility Stallman and built into the
software not only encouraged collaboration, it demanded
it. Users who didn't keep abreast of the latest
developments in Emacs evolution or didn't contribute
their contributions back to Stallman ran the risk of
missing out on the latest breakthroughs. And the
breakthroughs were many. Twenty years later, users had
modified Emacs for so many different uses-using it as a
spreadsheet, calculator, database, and web browser-that
later Emacs developers adopted an overflowing sink to
represent its versatile functionality.
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