Z:gnu-www-ja-stallman-kth--2fa56b-At this point, the company tha/en

At this point, the company that Gosling thinks he sold the program to challenged my friend's right to distribute it, and the message was on backup tapes, so he couldn't find it. And Gosling denied having given him permission. And then a strange thing happened. He was negotiating with this company, and it seemed that the company mainly was concerned with not having anything distributed that resembled what they were distributing. See, he was still distributing, and the company where he worked, which is Megatest, was still distributing the same thing he had given me, which really was an old version of Gosling Emacs with his changes, and so he was going to make an agreement with them where he would stop distributing that, and would switch to using GNU Emacs, and they would then acknowledge that he really had the permission after all, and then supposedly everyone would be happy. And this company was talking to me about wanting to distribute GNU Emacs, free of course, but also sell various sorts of supporting assistance, and they wanted to hire me to help do the work. So it's sort of strange that they then changed their mind and refused to sign that agreement, and put up a message on the network saying that I wasn't allowed to distribute the program. They didn't actually say that they would do anything, they just said that it wasn't clear whether they might ever someday do something. And this was enough to scare people so that no one would use it any more, which is a sad thing.