On Mon, Oct 1, 2018 at 2:32 PM Cuvtixo D <cuvt...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I'm glad this is being cleared up a bit here. Yes, I should have made the > civil/criminal distinction. Yes, it's too expensive to be practical for > commercial companies. But still, at least in my fantasies, Stallman would > have done a big fundraiser to bring such a case to court, since he seems to > be attached to principals rather than personal enrichment.
He is indeed. I don't know details, but I suspect his personal finances place him *well* below the poverty level. I think I mentioned elsewhere that Stallman reminds me of a monk in the middle ages, living in a cave somewhere and supporting himself through alms donated by the pious so he can devote his full time and effort to his conception of who God is and and what his God wants us to do. I don't see Stallman as being *capable* of the sort of effort you mention. Among other things, I'm pretty sure he has Asperger syndrome, and communication with other *people* is what Aspergers impacts. Give him a terminal and let him talk to a computer, and things are fine. Talking to other *people* may be another matter. > My ex worked for the remnants of Symbolics. Ironically, when someone was > interested in buying and making the company an educational non-profit, one > new employee took it upon himself to propose Macsyma, among their other > software, be open sourced, to the "benefactor." This undermined the CEO's > pitch, though I have no clear idea what else made the negotiation fail, > except the Harvard math department got the money instead(!). But I got hooked > on linux and, at least the theory of, Open Source. Ah, the Lisp Machines vs Symbolics days. That was another formative period for Stallman, as his notion that code should be shared had him reverse engineering Symbolics developments and contributing them to Lisp Machnes. The market for dedicated hardware running Lisp was transitory, and evaporated as higher capacity general purpose machines that could run Lisp acceptably appeared. (A beneficiary of the was Gnu Emacs, which is essentially a Lisp interpreter implementing a Lisp flavor based on Maclisp. Most of Emacs is written in the dialect of Lisp it implements, and if you are fluent in Lisp you can get it to do all manner of things. I knew folks who used Emacs as their shell on Unix systems, because Emacs could communicate via pipes with the underlying system, and you could have a terminal session in an Emacs buffer will all Emacs editing features available. Emacs could also play games, and got extended to a full IDE with access to source repositories, compilers, and debuggers. Developers never had to leave Emacs when developing code. I know some folks who still use Emacs that way. I have no idea what went on with the effort to make Symbolics into an educational non-profit. But note that "non profits" does not mean you can't make money. You almost certainly have to to remain a going concerns. What non-profit status does is place restrictions on what you can *do* with the money you make. (In particular, it can't be returned to shareholders as dividends.) _______ Dennis https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519 _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
