Comment by fsck--off | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fsck--off | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The Wikipedia page on Lisp Machines isn't great. Read Dan Weinreb's "Rebuttal to Stallman’s Story About The Formation of Symbolics and LMI" [1]. Weinreb was a much more credible source than Stallman.

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....

Of all the problems Symbolics had, LMI and Stallman weren't two of the bigger ones. Specialized development workstations just lost to more general-purpose ones that could be built and sold in much larger quantities.

Rational started out making ADA development workstations; that didn't go too well either.

Stallman is a prolific programmer, but ask yourself, how is he was able to out-program entire teams of his former colleagues? Answer, because the code wasn't the hard part, figuring out what to do was the hard part, and copying it once that was done was easy. The lesson which still hasn't sunk into the "free" community today is, because a thing is cheap to reproduce, doesn't mean it was cheap to do. Stallman did a massive disservice to his friends and the entire computing community. We are still paying for his sabotage today.

The real answer is that he didn't.

Which was the act of sabotage?

He made their products commercially unviable. We could all be using Lisp machines now, the PC would never have happened, no DOS, no Windows, no x86, no Linux either for that matter. We would be 50 years ahead of where we are now.

This statement is ridiculous. Symbolics is dead for a number of reasons, but Stallman's Emacs isn't one of them. Stallman copied some of the features in Zmacs. Zmacs was one small part of a much larger operating system which, among other things, included industry leading animation software. There were many, many systems (including the hardware architecture itself) that Stallman could not, and did not copy. No company picked an alternative to Lisp Machines simply because it also had something that looked like Zmacs. Your statement is akin to saying that a modern tablet with a web browser makes desktops (which can run much more powerful tools) obsolete.

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).

If I remember the story correctly Stallman saw the new features of the Symbolics software, re-coded them and handed them to Lisp Machines Inc.

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.

Lisp machines (much like the Xerox Star series) were high-end workstations that ran a proprietary OS and didn't compete with PCs. One could build a case Unix workstations killed Lisp machines, but to imagine Emacs held back them until PCs stole the market is quite a stretch.

> Stallman did a massive disservice to his friends and the entire computing community. We are still paying for his sabotage today.

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.

Not quite. I'm generalising over all sorts of IP. See the Dan Bricklin post from earlier today.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com