[betteringred]

I think it's interesting how he never explicitly says that he forked Gosling Emacs (I think that's what he did, but if not please correct me!).

"Therefore, when I wrote my second implementation of Emacs, I followed the same kind of design...Now, this [GNU Emacs] was not the first Emacs that was written in C and ran on Unix. The first was written by James Gosling, ... I discovered that Gosling's Emacs did not have a real Lisp. It had a programming language that was known as ‘mocklisp’, which looks syntactically like Lisp, but didn't have the data structures of Lisp... I concluded I couldn't use it [it here means mocklisp, but can be confused to mean Gosling Emacs] and had to replace it all, the first step of which was to write an actual Lisp interpreter. I gradually adapted every part of the editor based on real Lisp data structures, rather than ad hoc data structures, making the data structures of the internals of the editor exposable and manipulable by the user's Lisp programs...This second Emacs program was ‘free software’ in the modern sense of the term"

Perhaps I'm reading too much into it.

[hga]

Yes, he did. At that time or a bit later I worked for UniPress; the owners knew that taking any action about that beyond a polite request would untimely be harmful. But it was seriously reckless of RMS to put his GNU effort in jeopardy.

[DonHopkins]

Mike (the friend at UniPress who RMS mentioned) and I were wandering around an SF convention and ran into RMS. Mike said, "Richard, I heard a rumor about your house being burnt down. Is that true?" Richard immediately shot back "Yes, but where you work, I'd have thought you'd have heard about it in advance!"

We all had a good laugh. RMS is a funny guy and quick of his feet!

[Crito]

Sounds like he Ship of Theseus'd it.