[ Thanks to Glyn
Moody for this link. ]
“Symbolics probably doesn’t mean much to you, but it
should. It was the main reason that Richard Stallman started the
GNU project.“You can read the full story in Rebel Code – or, if by some
mischance, you don’t have the book to hand, in this speech by RMS.
But to summarise an extremely complex tale, at first, Stallman
fought Symbolics directly by matching their (proprietary) code with
his own, which he gave to a rival; but later he realised that this
was not really a sensible way of helping people to use and share
software freely:”