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Williams, Sam

"Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software"

Recognizing the utility
of this feature, Wall put the following copyright
notice in the program's accompanying README file:
Copyright (c) 1985, Larry Wall You may copy the trn kit
in whole or in part as long as you don't try to make
money off it, or pretend that you wrote it.See Trn Kit README.
http://www.za.debian.org/doc/trn/trn-readme
Such statements, while reflective of the hacker ethic,
also reflected the difficulty of translating the loose,
informal nature of that ethic into the rigid, legal
language of copyright. In writing the GNU Emacs
License, Stallman had done more than close up the
escape hatch that permitted proprietary offshoots. He
had expressed the hacker ethic in a manner
understandable to both lawyer and hacker alike.
It wasn't long, Gilmore says, before other hackers
began discussing ways to "port" the GNU Emacs License
over to their own programs. Prompted by a conversation
on Usenet, Gilmore sent an email to Stallman in
November, 1986, suggesting modification: You should
probably remove "EMACS" from the license and replace it
with "SOFTWARE" or something.


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