"I think asking other people to accept the price was,
if not unique, highly unusual at that time," he says.
The GNU Emacs License made its debut when Stallman
finally released GNU Emacs in 1985. Following the
release, Stallman welcomed input from the general
hacker community on how to improve the license's
language. One hacker to take up the offer was future
software activist John Gilmore, then working as a
consultant to Sun Microsystems. As part of his
consulting work, Gilmore had ported Emacs over to
SunOS, the company's in-house version of Unix. In the
process of doing so, Gilmore had published the changes
as per the demands of the GNU Emacs License. Instead of
viewing the license as a liability, Gilmore saw it as
clear and concise expression of the hacker ethos. "Up
until then, most licenses were very informal," Gilmore recalls.
As an example of this informality, Gilmore cites a
copyright notice for trn, a Unix utility. Written by
Larry Wall, future creator of the Perl programming
language, patch made it simple for Unix programmers to
insert source-code fixes-" patches" in hacker
jargon-into any large program.
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