# Gosling Emacs - Distribution

Taken from Wikipedia entry last edited on 1 March 2026, at 12:50 (UTC).
=> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gosling_Emacs&oldid=1341102938 Gosling Emacs (web link)

Since Gosling had permitted its unrestricted redistribution, Richard Stallman* used some Gosling Emacs code in the initial version of GNU Emacs†‡§ Among other things, he rewrote part of the Gosling code headed by the skull-and-crossbones comment and made it "...shorter, faster, clearer and more extensible."‖

In 1983 UniPress began selling Gosling Emacs on Unix¶ for $395 and on VMS# for $2,500, marketing it as "EMACS–multi-window text editor (Gosling version)".Δ

=> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman * Richard Stallman (web link)
=> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Emacs † Gnu Emacs (web link)
=> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs#cite_note-8 ‡ Cite_Note-8 (web link)
=> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs#cite_note-9 § Cite_Note-9 (web link)
=> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs#cite_note-rms-slashdot-7 ‖ Cite_Note-RMS-Slashdot-7 (web link)
=> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix ¶ Unix (web link)
=> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVMS # VMS (web link)
=> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs#cite_note-byte198312-10 Δ Cite_Note-Byte198312-10 (web link)

Controversially, UniPress asked Stallman to stop distributing his version of Emacs for Unix.*  UniPress never took legal action against Stallman or his nascent Free Software Foundation,†[citation needed] believing "hobbyists and academics could never produce an Emacs that could compete" with their product.[citation needed] All Gosling Emacs code was removed from GNU Emacs by version 16.56 (July 1985),‡ with the possible exception of a few particularly involved sections of the display code.[citation needed] The latest versions of GNU Emacs (since August 2004) do not feature the skull-and-crossbones warning.[citation needed]

=> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs#cite_note-faif7-11 * Cite_Note-Faif7-11 (web link)
=> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation † Free Software Foundation (web link)
=> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs#cite_note-12 ‡ Cite_Note-12 (web link)

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=> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_Creative_Commons_Attribution-ShareAlike_4.0_International_License

Updated 2026-06-17