On Friday 25 February 2005 06:16, Rick Kelly wrote:
> Dieter said:
> >}    Back some time ago at the MIT
> >}    software labs, Richard was trying to print to some ding doing
> >}    printer and couldn't. There was a software bug which stood
> >}    between him and his printout. Richard wanted to solve the problem
> >}    by getting the source code and fixing it. He couldn't, the source
> >}    code was not available and more important, could not be made
> >}    available because the company who sold MIT the printer would not
> >}    hand over the code. The code was locked up behind legal doors and
> >}    Stallman was not going to be able to solve this problem. Thus the
> >}    beginning of the free software movement which has evolved into
> >}    what we know today.

Though it may have contributed in some way, the Dover incident long predates 
the beginning of the GNU Project.

> The other story that I heard was that Unisoft took the source code to
> emacs, which was in the public domain at the time, made some changes and
> sold it for a fairly high price. RMS couldn't do anything about it, and
> wanted some means to protect his software while still allowing others to
> port it to new and different systems.

That's Unipress, and the situation wasn't quite that simple -- in fact, it's 
reversed from what you say.  Stallman used much of Gosling Emacs as the basis 
for the first version of GNU Emacs, thinking he had Gosling's permission.  
However, Gosling had sold his rights to Unipress, and they threatened to sue 
for copyright infringement.  A lot of code was rewritten, and GNU Emacs 16 
was allegedly clean of Gosling code.