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. 

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. 

This seems plausible, I actually used Unisoft emacs, and I may still have a
Unisoft poster around here somewhere that extolls the virtues of emacs as a
programmers editor.
-- 
Rick Kelly	rmk@rmkhome.com
		http://www.rmkhome.com/
		http://rkba.rmkhome.com/