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Williams, Sam

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

The fork had given birth to a
parallel version, Lucid Emacs, and hard feelings all around.Jamie Zawinski, a
former Lucid programmer who would go
on to head the Mozilla development team, has a web site
that documents the Lucid/GNU Emacs fork, titled, "The
Lemacs/FSFmacs Schism." http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html
Murdock says Debian was mounting work on a similar fork
in glibc source code that motivated Stallman to insist
on adding the GNU prefix when Debian rolled out its
software distribution. "The fork has since converged.
Still, at the time, there was a concern that if the
Linux community saw itself as a different thing as the
GNU community, it might be a force for disunity."
Stallman seconds Murdock's recollection. In fact, he
says there were nascent forks appearing in relation to
every major GNU component. At first, Stallman says he
considered the forks to be a product of sour grapes. In
contrast to the fast and informal dynamics of the
Linux-kernel team, GNU source-code maintainers tended
to be slower and more circumspect in making changes
that might affect a program's long-term viability.


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