The AI Lab hackers had free will and were not forced to go anywhere. Saying that these companies "raided" the AI Lab is, quite frankly, insulting. And Symbolics's practice of hiring the hackers full time was actually done entirely for ethical reasons. Other spinoff AI Lab companies were taking advantage of AI Lab resources, and Symbolics wanted to be sure that they didn't do that.
The MIT Lisp Machine code was owned and copyrighted by MIT. When MIT licensed the code to LMI and Symbolics, they wanted to be sure that the code would not be given away for free to other companies, including companies that they had also licensed code to. Stallman essentially wanted Symbolics to give their code for free to their competitor, LMI, which would have been illegal according the licensing agreement (that MIT wrote) and would have resulted in Symbolics being shut down.
By the way, the comment thread on that blog ends up being about the origin of Emacs and is quite fascinating. Stallman isn't technically the creator of Emacs (Guy Steele and David Moon are), although he did so much to improve it that he is generally given credit for it.
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20110719154038/http://danweinreb....
Rational started out making ADA development workstations; that didn't go too well either.
I don't think I understand your argument here. Are you saying that free software in general hurts hackers because it provides free alternative implementations of their ideas that the original author has no control over? If so, why is it a bad thing? As patio11 would surely confirm, you can successfully compete with free and open source software.
Symbolics got used to selling hardware for tens of thousands of dollars and could not fully adjust when competitors were eventually able to sell machines for much less. The company also had a couple of bad CEOs, and suffered large financial losses because of a series of bad real estate deals. Efforts to port their software to other platforms were largely unsuccessful.
Lisp Machines were always a niche market because they were expensive, top-of-the-line machines. The target market never really overlapped with Windows. Cheap workstations that could have multiple users eventually became almost as capable as Lisp Machines and thus displaced them.
If you want to credit Stallman with sabotage then mention Elisp, because Elisp is the worst Lisp still in use (Zmacs ran ZetaLisp).
So I guess your thesis is that by allowing LMI to maintain feature parity, that fragmented the market meaning neither company could survive? (We're ignoring the Xerox and Texas Instruments lisp machines obviously)
But this is ignoring the point that while this was happening the Mac and the PC were already in the market at a tenth of the price of any of the lisp machines and were selling by the bucket load. Essentially the PC revolution was already well underway before Stallman even started his hacking.
Lisp machines failed because they were selling high end limited use hardware running software that was good for a narrow range of highly specialised uses, but far too resource heavy to be economically viable for most users. The VAX for example was a far better machine for nearly every real world task except at running a single niche programming language.
If you really think single programmer stopped a $70,000 single user machine from derailing the PC revolution and kick-starting whole new world of computing heaven then you and I have a very different definition of "cheap" and without cheap computing we wouldn't be 50 years ahead, we'd be 40 years behind.
Thus it was not LMI or Symbolics who raided some innocent lab, it was a new stage in a government directed and financed technology development program, primarily for the military.